Cyberculture: February 2004 Archive Page

The ability of players to interact with games has fundamentally changed them, Lowood said. Computer games, once seen as commercial products or a one-way communication between designer and player, are now seen as a much more open kind of medium that people can contribute to in other ways, he said. "So much of the content of a game is now generated by players. Games have become a platform that people can use creatively. As a medium, computer games offer many different opportunities for people to express themselves -- including artistic expression and political expression." -- Barbara Palmer --Computer games under sociological microscope in Cantor exhibit  (Stanford University)

I've followed Henry Lowood's work from afar -- his exhibit sounds fantastic. Wish I could see it.

Most non-arcade games that retain a rabid fan base years after they've become technically obsolote fall into one of two categories. They have a obsessively complex world that's been built up around them (Nethack, say, or tabletop roleplaying games), or they have a simple rule set with much greater depth in the gameplay and strategy than you'd expect on first glance (games like M.U.L.E., or the boardgames that many of my friends adore). Text adventure games don't really fit either of these categories, quite. As a classic piece of criticism and theory puts it, their goal is to avoid crimes against mimesis. They are telling a story (with puzzles, most likely), and it is the goal of the author to never once induce the player to think about the artifice and contraints of the system used to tell it.

A new type of game has sprung up in the past few years. Call it unfiction or alternative reality gaming -- the idea is that a narrative is strung together on the Internet (and possibly even to a limited extent in the physical world) which participants can unpack using exactly the same research tools and conspiracy-minded obsession over detail that they would for a real-life mystery.

-- Steve Cook --Interactive Fictions (Snarkout)

A usefully-linked summary of the history of interactive fiction, including the current IF revival.

BTW, the winners of the 2003 XYZZY Awards have been announced.

Games Galore

Two interesting Slashdot threads... one is "Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press", a response to the recent NY Times article on the upcoming Princeton conference, and another is discussion of Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century, a beautiful nine-part article on interactive fiction, featuring interviews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and IF Competition winners Dan Rapivinto & Star Foster.

Update: I just noticed that The Onion has a favorable review of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. (The link will expire soon.)

"Games are big, big objects," said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over." | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, "More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form," (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. "I am very nervous that I got it wrong," he said. --Michael Erard --The Ivy-Covered Console (New York Times)

I knew this article was coming because the author e-mailed me late Tuesday in order to ask whether I knew anything more about Mary Ann Buckles, who wrote her 1985 Ph.D. thesis on "Adventure." (I tried tracking her down a few years ago, and found someone who thought she might be a relative, but I didn't go further than that.)

This is an excellent article... the author notes that Espen Aarseth, whose book Cybertext is a seminal work in studying games as games (rather than as kinds of literature or film) is only 38. Erard really manages to capture the newness and multidisciplinarity of the field with the following description of next week's Princeton conference ("Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism"):

A lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two lecturers and six graduate students will present papers with titles like "Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600 Games" and "But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a 'Close-Playing' of Super Mario Brothers."

It's very exciting to be part of such a young field (though I count three professors on the videogame conference program, not two).

My job description, as a generalist at a small liberal arts school, rather than a specialist at a research institution, simply doesn't leave room for the kind of intense research that I was able to do as a grad student (oh, those 16-hour days in the library). My dean didn't actually burst out laughing when I mentioned a desire to get a course release so I could play more computer games, or funding to purchase a game console and some of the latest titles -- which would, of course, be part of the new media lab, and which I would let students check out, for academic use. ;)

I used to do a much better job keeping up with interactive fiction, but I find that this year I'm so busy that I'm waiting for the XYZZY Awards to be announced, so that I can catch up on the winners I haven't played yet. Fortunately I found CliFrotz, which lets me play Z-machine games on my new PDA, so I've been working on some of the multiply-nominated games already.

Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain....

"My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme... But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my wound. | I mean, at some level I knew she was working on me, but I wasn't thinking about it because I was inside that SnowWorld." -- patient Mike Robinson, in a story by Becky McCall --Real pain dulled in virtual worlds (BBC)

The researchers are also using a simulation of the events of 9/11/2001 to desensitize survivors of the attacks to the trauma they experiencded that day.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming. The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig. 2). This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer, and the effect of calcium intake on bone mass ( [Bushman & Huesmann (2001)]). As a society, we have taken massive and expensive steps to educate the public about these smaller medical effects, but almost none to deal with the larger violent video game effects. --Craig A. Anderson

Update: This link to the table of contents page lets me download PDFs. Your mileage may vary. --An update on the effects of playing violent video games  (Journal of Adolescence)

This is not your usual hand-wringing, scare-mongering article in a parenting magazine.

I hope to see the game-playing public and games researchers consider the implications of this report seriously, and not merely shrug it off as yet another example that, where gaming is concerned, "they" don't "get it".

Of course, those who argue that television shows, music, or books are positively correlated with increased violence (or what have you) risk being labeled a censor. The common refrain from the gaming community -- it's the parents' fault, not the games' fault -- is as much of a cop-out as the parent who prefers to blame games (or some other media, or a peer group).

Is it possible to have discussions of taste and ethics concerning videogames, without either moralizing recklessly, or being recklessly accused of moralizing?

Via TerraNova, where the discussion started out very good but at the moment looks like it has resulted in more of the same old same-old.

After a conversation with Mike Arnzen, I've been on the lookout for scholarly works that are critical of gaming and gaming culture. Here's a good one, according to Reality Panic: "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing".

Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often ignore or delete newsletters that have insufficient usability. --Jakob Nielsen --Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength (Alertbox)

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price. --Joel Achenbach

--Search For Tomorrow: We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?  (WashPost)

Of course, the archives of the Washington Post are part of the "dark net" -- most of the articles disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks.

Most of my students are working on their short midterm papers now, and a few have complained about the research exercises I have asked them to complete. I'm asking them to supply, in varying combinations, a sample thesis statement, quotations from their primary sources, a brief annotation of and quotations from secondary sources, a bibliography, and a revised thesis statement (showing how they have incorporated their research into their thesis statement). While students in my freshman comp class can expect me to read and comment on a complete rough draft, I can't supply that service to all my classes -- but the one- or two-page research & thesis exercise is still an excellent opportunity to provide feedback.

I have seen far too many student papers ruined by students who mistakenly trusted bad sources; some students first write an essay based on what they already believe, then they treat the research phase as if their goal is simply to "find quotes that support my opinion." Hint: if you've already written your opinion before you looked at outside sources, then you're not writing a research paper.

Writing is not easy.

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Translation:

"Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."

--Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese --Stuck Shift Key Poetry (Net Funny)

This interesting bit of geek poetry illustrates the orality of poetry. On the rare occasions when I get the chance to code, I tend to do it alone; and on the rare occasions when I do discuss programming, I sometimes have difficulty with the specialized vocabulary. This poem dates from about 1990, so I have no idea whether the transliteration still works with the current generation of programmers. How about it, Jess, Will, Rosemary, and any lurkers out there?

As for the poem itself, to read it aloud you have to pace yourself to follow the pattern set by the first line. The first line begins with two trochees (BAH buh), while the second line begins with a trochee and a single stressed beat -- that gives only three syllables to cover the space previously occupied by four. The phrases "bang splat" and "back-tick" match up, but where the first line has "tick tick" the second line asks you to say "dollar dollar," squeezing four syllables into the space previously occupied by two.

So this text, when read aloud, is really following an invisible musical notation. The first line reads as if it is six quarter notes and the final "hash" is a half note -- and that sets the pattern for the other lines. Line four is awkward because it starts with an unstressed syllable, but otherwise the pattern still fits. Still, "Vertical-bar" in the last line simply doesn't fit -- you either have to pronounce all three syllables of "Vertical" on one quarter-note and "bar" on the other, or spread out all the syllables equally, which makes a stress fall on "cal" (which should definitely be unstressed). At first I thought the acceleration in the final line was deliberate, since it leads to the "CRASH", but it's only the first foot that rushes -- the rest of the line falls back into the steady pattern.

Spotted in "Poegram" on MGK's "Digital Studies" course website.

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation "Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds" seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

"There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it," Juul said. But, he added: "I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood." --Nick Wadhams --Academics get serious about video games (Mercury News/AP)

It's not news that academics have been studying computer games, but it is news that the study of computer games is developing into a scholarly field of its own (rather than being situated within existing fields, such as literature, cinema, artificial intelligence, and so forth).

Besides Juul, this article also mentions Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins, and Gonzalo Frasca. It also mentions next month's Princeton conference on Form, Culture, and Videogame Criticism.

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. --Cory Doctorow --E-Books: Neither E Nor Books (Craphound)

[A]t least two transformations appear to distinguish the production of new-media news from the typical case of print and broadcast media: The news seems to be shaped by greater and more varied groups of actors, and this places a premium on the practices that coordinate productive activities across these groups.

This, in turn, seems to influence the content and form of online news in three ways. The news moves from being mostly journalist-centered, communicated as a monologue, and primarily local, to also being increasingly audience-centered, part of multiple conversations, and micro-local.

In the online environment, a greater variety of groups of actors appear to be involved in, and have a more direct impact on, the production process than what is typically accounted for in studies of print and broadcast newsrooms. These studies have tended to focus on the work of editors and reporters. Based on the analysis presented in the previous chapters, it is reasonable to speculate that at least four additional groups of players may be having a growing degree of agency in new-media news production. --Pablo J. Boczkowski --Redefining the News Online  (OJR)

The "news world" is an interesting concept. I can't help but think of virtual worlds...

Warning... if you are one of those whose eyes glaze over whenever a geek starts blathering about Star Trek, you might want to skip to next paragraph. Okay, are they gone now? Good. I always wondered why Star Trek: The Next Generation didn't feature the Holodeck as a communications medium... Picard is being honored at a ceremony back on Earth, at which he is holographically present... perhaps a witness to a crime is prohibited from leaving her homeworld... or perhaps a race of aliens use facial expressions so different from ours that we can't understand them without the holodeck's mediation (though that would require the creation of alien physiognomy more complex than forehead bumps and splotches). I believe I saw an episode of Deep Space 9 in which Dax turned the captain's image into an alien of some sort, but there it was presented as a clever trick (and of course was never again mentioned in any other episode when a similar deception would have helped).

We're taught not to believe everything we hear, but it's hard not to have intense emotional responses to complex multi-sensory stimuli -- even when, intellectually, we know that what we're seeing has been manipulated or even completely manufactured.

I'm thinking of this topic more than usual because the student paper which I advise has published its first online edition: Setonian Online.

Brian McCollum designed the site as part of an independent study. I'm sure he'll welcome constructive comments.

It's not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that's equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They're too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn't encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it. --Crawford Kilian --A Forecast from 1994: Net Propaganda (Writing for the Web)

A very interesting set of predictions, now 10 years old, about how the Internet might shape politics. Particularly noteable are the comments about dirty tricks: "e-mail bombings" and viruses.

[I]t seems the media (TV and newspapers) are just now picking up on the "Beyonce Knowles as Lois Lane" rumor from earlier this week, and even though the rumor has been shot down as being false, various TV news programs and newspapers are running with the story.

It also appears that Johnny Depp is not connected with the role of Lex Luthor as previously rumored, but that he is supposedly trying out for the role of Jor-El.

As always, take these as purely rumors. Nothing is official until Warner Bros. announces it... actually, believe nothing until you actually sit in the cinema and see it for yourself. :)

Media Rumors (www.supermanhomepage.com)

My former student Bobby Kuchenmeister sent me this item. The underground fan network has already deflated this as a rumor, but the mainstream media haven't noticed.

It's not unheard of for a PR campaign to "leak" something that is still under negotiation; when politicians do it, it's called a trial balloon. If the public response is too negative, the informal report can be disowned as premature.

Today being Groundhog Day in U.S. (and elsewhere?) reminds me how the movie Groundhog Day suggests a model for how interactive stories could work. However, rather than write up my own essay on the topic, I'll link to others who have already discussed this, found via Google... --Andrew Stern --Groundhog Day and IF (again) (Grand Text Auto)

;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.

Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.

And it's blooming everywhere -- in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It's changing the way we express ourselves. --Linton Weeks --iT was a dark+stormy Nite (Washington Post (will expire soon))

A good survey. Ultimately, it sides with the wistful "because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down," which is 1) an overstatement and 2) missing the point. We come into contact with lots of bad online writing, but those of us with weblogs can make it easier for everyone else to find the good writing. Bloggers are editors -- not in the sense that we fix other people's mistakes, but because a weblog archive is the table of contents of an anthology; a single richly-linked blog entry functions as a separate codex.

Weeks gives a good survey of writing culture online, but still applies old media criteria to it -- which is rather like admitting that a horseless carriage does a lot of things horses do, and a lot of things that horses can't do, but questioning them because you can't breed horseless carriages. Of course you can't -- because horseless carriages aren't horses.

A neuropsychiatrist is quoted as saying that, when you read online, "Your critical faculties are in abeyance." They needn't be. People can be trained to appreciate modern art, fine wines, and just about anything else that follows discernible principles of aesthetic and meaning.

I do find it very amusing that Jakob Nielsen is introduced as someone who teaches people how to write online. His specialty is usability in human-computer interfaces, and of course he's great in that realm. But only by trial and error have he and other usability specialists determined what kind of writing permits people to use technical documents most efficiently. Nielsen has no expertise in the use of writing to persuade, inspire, entertain, etc. He has never claimed that he has, of course -- it's this article that presents him as a writing expert.