Technology: 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.

"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.

--Netstore USA (opengroup.com)

Buy my book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950... Priced at just $197.70! Outside of the US, that's $216.60, or about a dollar a page! Order now!

Sheesh! At that price, with the royalties I've earned so far, I could buy THREE WHOLE COPIES! Oh, wait, they already charged me for the advance copies I purchased, I guess I could buy just two more copies.

Thanks for the so-disturbing-you-just-have-to-laugh link, Rosemary. (It's much cheaper at Amazon, but if you ask your local university library to buy a copy, they'll be able to get it for less, and more people will get to read it.)

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.

--Technovelgy: Inventions from Science Fiction Novels and Books

There's no good blurb on this site, but it features news of technological advances that have been predicted in science-fiction. For instance, here's the listing of real inventions first mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Pretty cool.

Leadholder can be broadly defined as any durable instrument that is designed to hold and be refillable with consumable pieces of graphite so that the graphite can be conveniently used for drawing or writing. Within this definition there are subsets such as porte-crayons, mechanical pencils, and drafting leadholders. This website is primarily concerned with drafting leadholders, which are commonly called by draftsmen in the US as simply leadholders. (From "What is a Leadholder?") --The Drafting Pencil Museum (Leadholder.com)

Okay, maybe I'm not quite that geeky, but I still enjoyed the site.

A 40-plus-year-old A-list actor pondering whether or not to appear in a game? Heck, even Roger Moore would have been loathe to actively participate in what was once the perceived domain of momma's boys.

"Traditionally, Hollywood signed away rights without any expertise or any idea of the plot lines," said industry analyst P.J. McNealy.

Several factors helped change Hollywood's mind. Technology advanced exponentially, making it possible to accurately recreate the voice, looks and movements of real people. Another factor was the Sony PlayStation 2. Or to be more exact, 60 million PS2s, GameCubes and Xboxes sold in the United States alone.

As games became synonymous with mass entertainment, Hollywood got it. The movie executives who chanted "cross-branding" and "synergy" at power lunches got it. Game developers got it. Even the actors got it. Soon Electronic Arts was convincing not only Brosnan, but Bond regulars John Cleese ('Q') and Judi Dench ('M') as well as William Dafoe, Heidi Klum and Mya to join "Everything or Nothing." --Tom Loftus

--Stars seek more control over video games (M$ NBC)

Via Terra Nova, which features some thoughtful musings about digital rights and the creative freedom of game designers.

More than 150 Lego builders and collectors converged on Portland over the Presidents Day weekend for BrickFest PDX, a celebration of all things Lego. While plenty of individual work is on display, the big draw is the chance to interact with like-minded folks.... In one of the smaller conference rooms, a team of 10 guys, mostly young men and two preteens, attempt a speed record for assembling an Imperial Star Destroyer, a 3,000-piece Star Wars monstrosity that usually takes a single builder about a week of spare time to construct. The team wants to do it in less than an hour, but the record is 13 minutes more than that. --Marty Cortinas

--If You Come, They Will Build It  (Wired)

Sorry, the title just doesn't... click.

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.

With the media opera R.U.R., we want to appreciate the Czech author Karel Capek (Czechia's Goethe) and his importance for the European cultural expression. It is he who in R.U.R. used for the first time the expression robot, derivated of the Russian word "robota" = work. R.U.R. is a classic of science fiction literature and has nothing lost of its formative influence. The latest example is Stephen Spielberg's movie A.I. – Artificial Intelligence which has obviously taken scenes from Capek's play, however keeps quiet about it's source. Central Europe is the "cradle" of the robots and not USA, even if their movie industry want to make us believe that by thousands of pictures.
--R.U.R. OperaMedia Archiv Praque)

Just got this in an e-mail from the Media Archiv Praque, probably because I have a website devoted to the play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots).

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)

Ancient catapults were state-of-the-art weapons of unequalled power?but how powerful were the military engineers who created them?... The fearsome machines terrorized battlefields and sieges until the proliferation of gunpowder. Their power was impressive and terrifying. Roman catapults could hurl 60-pound (27-kilogram) boulders some 500 feet (150 meters). Archimedes' machines were said to have been able to throw stones three times as heavy. --Brian Handwerk --Catapult Makers: Rock Stars of Antiquity (National Geographic News)

When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. -- Russel Hunt --Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism  (St. Thomas University)

Found via the Plagiarism Resource Site.

[I recently received the following e-mail... --DGJ]

Dear Sir:

I am presently working on a science fair project for my school. I found your article, Instructions: How to Write for Busy, Grouchy People. I was hoping you could expand on that a little more for me.

I am in the 7th grade. My project this year is attempting to prove that 99% of people fail to read the following directions after being told and read to do so. I was wondering if you could help me document as to why people think they are above having to read instructions? Truly most of the people I have tested have come straight out and said instructions are for idiots, or fools with too much time. Needless to say these fools did not pass the simple task laid out before them.

One of my questions because of the failure rate of this test is: are people so transfixed or gullible to believe they can do anything without reading the how to's first?

I would like to thank you up front for any advice or help you can offer towards my Science fair project. I look forward to hearing your answers to questions and any other responses that may help my research.

Sincerely,

Heather
7th grade

Why people think they are above having to read instructionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I was so impressed with the professionalism of Heather's request that (after asking her permission, and after she checked with her parents) I'm posting her question along with my response.

Most of us probably remember more vividly the time we wasted reading instructions that don't help, than the time that we save by reading instructions that really do help. Think about it -- if you are late for an appointment and you are stuck in traffic, you will probably dwell on the miserable experience you are having (because there is nothing else to do). When things are going well, you are free to daydream -- and time flies when you're having fun. While there are some optimists who prefer to accentuate the positive, people who turn to instruction manuals are already having a problem of some sort, so they tend to be grouchy and stressed (and they probably associate those feelings of stress with the action of consulting instructions, making them even more reluctant to consult instructions in the future).

Even though I have taught hundreds of students in technical writing (the kind of professional writing that emphasizes instructions, manuals, and other documents that help people get work done), and I should probably know better, I myself usually try to avoid reading instructions, for all the usual reasons:

1. stopping to get help seems like it will take up more time than it will save
2. I'm too proud and stubborn to admit I don't know what I'm doing
3. I've already put so much time into this that I don't want to give up until I try just one more thing... and one more... and one more.

Researchers call this the "Paradox of the Active User." Even when timed experiments show that people usually save time when they read the instructions first, we tend to get anxious unless we are doing something. Reading instructions feels like doing nothing -- especially when the clock is ticking.

My wife, who is not fond of computers, can't for the life of her remember the three-step procedure that connects her to the Internet (turn on the computer, click the little telephone icon, and click the blue "e" icon). Rather than spend precious mental energy on these steps (or finding the piece of paper on which I wrote them), she prefers to ask me to carry out her online business. Likewise, I have no idea where she keeps stack of bills to be paid or the extra toothpaste. Our specialized behavior works for us, because we know we can rely on each other.

Women typically have more complex and more powerful social networks than men, which may explain why women are more likely to ask for help -- those who work harder on a daily basis maintaining their social networks (by talking on the phone, chatting online, or even passing notes in class) are more likely to be able to depend on that network being there the next time they need help.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect that our brains are hard-wired so that, if we don't feel the source of help will always be around whenever we need it, we prefer to solve problems on our own. Students who are trained to rely on step-by-step instructions can feel lost when they enter college (or the real world) and realize that few problems are as neatly laid out, and few answers are as clear or as universally accepted, as their middle-school or high school textbooks might have suggested. It's well-accepted that people remember things longer, understand them more fully, and feel a greater sense of satisfaction about the work they accomplish when they work things out by themselves. So perhaps generations of human experience has trained us that, in the long run, we really are better off when we solve problems on our own.

While it is annoying not to be able to set the VCR or fix a plumbing problem the right way the first time, truth be told, the consequences of our daily failures don't mount up to much in modern society. The average person is surrounded by a lot of very complex gadgets that consume a great deal of our time -- which is bothersome, but the inconvenience level is low enough that most of us aren't motivated to change our behavior.

Imagine, for a moment, that we lived in a bizarre world where large packs of robotic dogs would appear randomly and bite out all our car tires, unless we performed a special ceremonial dance that put the robot-dogs in a trance. Since a car with four chewed-out tires is a serious inconvenience, people would probably learn how to perform that dance pretty quickly.

Soldiers are trained to follow orders. Firefighters know their equipment inside and out. Lawyers choose their words very carefully and pay close attention to the fine print in contracts. When the stakes are high, people are much better at noticing details and following instructions.

We only really notice instructions, manuals, guidebooks or maps when we are already frustrated and angry. Too often, we'll find ourselves sifting through registration cards, tossing away advertisements for related products, scanning diagrams of doohickeys and whatsits, none of which seems relevant to solving the immediate problem: the gear thingy on our gizmo is stuck and we don't know why.

If, on the other hand, the manual is clearly written and well-organized, we can grab it off the shelf, find the info we need, and put it away again in half a minute -- so perhaps we are likely to forget how helpful the manual really was.

We cannot change human nature -- the fact remains that people are generally very impatient when it comes to following instructions or reading manuals. But equally at fault are the people who design objects that are too complex for their intended users. Some objects with complex functions simply have to be complex -- but there's plenty of needless complexity in our daily lives.

At the left is a picture I took in a game room in a hotel in Wisconsin. Elsewhere in the game room were vending machines that took money, and arcade games that took only tokens.

The picture shows a typical change machine. Well above eye level is a large decorative sign that reads "PURCHASE GAME TOKENS HERE." On the left front of the machine, someone has taped a piece of paper that reads "This machine gives out tokens, not quarters."

Sherlock Holmes would confidently conclude that the hotel guests regularly ignored the large wall-mounted sign, thus leading a hotel employee to print out and post a clarification right on the machine.

"Why do we get so many stupid customers who don't read signs?" the hotel worker was probably thinking. But posting yet another sign for the customer to read (or ignore) merely added to the problem.

Put yourself in the flip-flops of a poolside hotel guest with a caffeine craving. You spot the soda machine, near a familiar brown box with a huge label that reads "CHANGE." Why should you expect it do dispense anything but change? You approach the machine, fishing in your wallet or purse for bills, and you notice the official-looking sign with the green, yellow and red boxes. Some safety inspector probably figured it was a good idea to place this important sign at eye level, but it has nothing to do with change or tokens, so you ignore it. The little brown machine also includes signs and labels bearing additional instructions on how to insert bills, a safety warning, and the telephone number and address of the company that services the machine.

You've already identified a familiar machine, and you expect it to act in a familiar way. That's perfectly reasonable behavior, and not remotely idiotic or foolish. Most of the signs on and around this particular machine are not in the least helpful in getting you the change you want. So you ignore them.

Why didn't the hotel management simply cover over the word "CHANGE" and replace it with "TOKENS"? A smaller line of type underneath it could supply directions to the nearest change machine. I bet few people would have trouble following those instructions!

You can't change human nature. You can't expect people to read every word in the instruction manual and study every diagram before they do anything, because that's simply not the way people work in the real world. But you can change the way you write, in order to make the most of your reader's limited attention span.

For more about writing technical reports, see "Short Reports: How To Write Routine Technical Documents." For an excellent case study that describes how to offer criticism in a way that won't enrage your reader, see "Ask Tog: How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched."

[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.

;-) 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.

True or false? Technical writers?

A. Write about technology.
B. Translate specialized knowledge in a manner that is adapted to readers? needs, level of understanding, and background.
C. Present information that helps readers to solve a particular problem.
D. Persuade readers to see things, ideas, and events as the writers see them.
E. ?Set the agenda? and shape day-to-day reality by choosing what gets written and for whom. --Leah A. Zuidema --Technical Writing: An Overview (Michigan State University)

I've blogged a link to Google's HTML conversion of the original PDF version.

I found this document extremely interesting becuase it was produced by an educator for an audience of secondary school teachers. (Adding to the "fun" factor is the fact that I and a former colleague of mine at UWEC are cited.)