Cyberculture: March 2004 Archive Page

Today, those never-ending online "massively multiplayer" games like "EverQuest" have matured into mainstream, vibrant attractions, drawing hundreds of thousands of paying customers - male and female.

But their growth appears almost stagnant compared to the popularity spike for multiplayer online shoot'em-ups and other mostly war-themed fare geared toward users of console systems, led by Sony Corp.'s Playstation2 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox. --Matt Slagle --Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumbleAP Wire)

Since it was initially packaged with every Mac shipped, it's likely the majority of buyers used it as a quicky Rolodex, if anything. But HyperCard's biggest win was a very low entry threshold for those who wanted to build their own 'stacks' - combinations of user interface, code, and persistent data. There were plenty of examples to suggest ideas, and all the code was open for tweaking. This did enable a burst of creativity by users, many of them educators and artists with no training in programming or database.

The proliferation of ideas created its own confusion. What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question. --Tim Oren --A Eulogy for HyperCard  (Due Diligence)

I'm looking at a dead pigeon laying on the sidewalk, headless, and I wonder: ?What am I doing here?? --David ThomasDo You Know the Way to San Jose (Buzzcut)

So begins David's coverage of the Game Developer's Conference, where the most interesting-sounding panel seems to be on "serious games".

I can't seem to figure out how to permalink to short story items that don't display the "more" link. For the page with the pigeon posting, the best I can do is send you to Buzzcut's home page.

[Grr... the Word file that has my abstract in it won't open on this public terminal on the convention floor. I'm retyping this from my lecture notes.]

When a curricular weblog program was made available to all students, faculty and staff at a small liberal arts university, the students, expected to blog as part of their course grade, initially expected to be told what to write about, how frequently to write, and how many words were required. While about a quarter of the students rarely if ever blogged more than the bare minimum, and therefore appreciated being told exactly what their blogging should be, other students quickly developed a sense of audience and ownership over their own blogging space; these students object to "forced blogging" assignments, reporting that their regular readers found those entries boring, or becuase the academic discourse they felt they had to adopt jarred with the tone offered by the rest of the site's content. The field of composition studies encourages students to invest themselves in and take ownership over their writing. How do issues of "investment" and "ownership" translate into their participation in a shared blogging environment? My presentation examines the tension between forced blogging and voluntary blogging. Blogging is a medium that developed to meet the needs of a specific kind of writer. As many of us who teach with weblogs have quickly recognized, not every student is that kind of writer. Incorporating blogging into our curricula requires us to address these questions.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University

Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic WeblogsCCCC 04)

Among those in the audience was Ann Raimes, whose "Keys for Writers" I've used for years. She's considering using blogs as an example of student writing in her next revision, and says she's been reading through SHU student blogs.

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

I wasn't able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and the Reading-Writing Relationship, is a tremendously valuable resource for the study of text adventure games as narratives. Sloane wasn't actually here -- she was arriving at the conference late, so Langstraat read Sloane's paper.

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place. --Classic Infocom Games via AOL Instant Messenger (Waxy)

A great link... thanks for the suggestion, Chris.

Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.

I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz's presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge.

--Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking  (The Dancing Sausage)

--Technorati's Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati)

What Technorati used to call its "Link Cosmos" appears to have been replaced by "Web Conversations." The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven't time to investigate that just now, but I thought I'd note it. At first glance, it looks like Technorati is trying to retool itself as a site for writers...

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It's6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the ?Furl it? button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student'spersonal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also ?Furls? that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It's7:00. --Will Richardson --Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School # (Weblogg-ed)

A good description of how one might use content-aggregating tools to link blogs in efficient and productive ways.

No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge.

Modern web developer	Washington Roebling's team
3 week / month release cycle	14 year release cycle
Electricity	Horses
Coffee, doughnuts and air conditioning	Water and the elements (think muggy NYC summers)
Carpal tunnel syndrome	The bends
Layoffs	27 Deaths

If nothing else, the Brooklyn bridge is a reminder of what difficult projects are truly like. Sitting at a desk all day arguing through bug triage meetings might be frustrating, but it'snothing compared to what these people had to go through.

--Programmers, designers and the Brooklyn Bridge (UI Web)

Via Tomalak.

This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins's concept of the "meme" and Reddy's critique of the "conduit" metaphor for communication.... The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. --Dennis G. Jerz --(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit' (BlogTalks)

If you're an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. --Henry Farrell --Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)

Beware: bloggers do love to blog about their blogs, so here goes...

1. What prompted you to start blogging?
   
   

   I had started developing a collection of online writing resources in 1996, and by early 1999 I was having trouble keeping them organized in several overlapping navigation schemes. I wanted a central location where I could post links to new or recently updated handouts, and in order to give people (presumably my own students and other instructors looking for online resources) a reason to bookmark that page I thought I would create what we would now call a filter (that is, a site with little personal commentary, the main purpose of which was to send readers off to interesting things to do elsewhere). The wayback machine archived how my protoblog looked in June, 1999.
   
   As a literature Ph.D. student teaching technical writing in a liberal arts school, I felt a desire to connect the worlds of technology and humanities. After a former colleague e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, I brazenly copied the form. On July 20, 1999, I posted something about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that I was writing that entry on the anniversary -- so I added the date. Throughout 1999, I kept the A & L Daily signature "[more]" link, though I remember being frustrated by it for some time before I started using meaningful words from the body of the blurb.
   
   At first I mostly featured links to writing centers and my own online handouts, but as I realized that my page was attracting more attention from the outside world than from my students, I created one column for humanities and one for technology, and just posted whatever I thought was interesting in either column. I started e-mailing the webmasters of resources I thought were valuable, telling them that they were my "link of the day". I had already been advocating the value of what I called annotated lists of links (I first drafted that handout in 1997), but I don't think I really convinced any of my students to get excited about the possibility.
   

   All this time, I was coding my blog by hand, without any sort of automated tools (well, I did use a WYSIWYG editor). I did later create some PERL tools to automate the process of shifting entries from the home page to the archives, and I later created a form that let me add to the database over the Web, though in order to publish I still had to drive to the office and hit a button that ran a script which copied files from my hard drive to the university server. Bleah.
   
   My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging.
   
   In 2001, I blogged 10 items that I later classified under a "weblog" category. It wasn't until fall, 2001, when two students chose weblogs as the subject of term projects that I seriously considered the form, and actually started blogging about it. Technical writing major Jan Carroll created what turned into a very popular blog devoted to September 11 poetry, and CS major Chris Warren, who had already been keeping a personal weblog and photoblog (and from whom I coincidentally just got an e-mail a little while ago), wrote a term project on identity in weblogs. Both students were having difficulty finding relevant scholarship, though I noticed early on that journalists seemed to be paying much closer attention to the phenomenon than my English composition and technical writing colleagues.
   
   

2. And what keeps you going?
   
   

   I went back on the job market, this time trumpeting my weblog and other new media experience, in order to see what would happen. I ended up as Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism.
   
   

3. Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship?
   
   Yes -- at first only indirectly. My first "annotated list of links" was a bibliography of websites devoted to interactive fiction (text adventure games); at one point I added print resources and the result was published in a journal. I had an article called "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" scheduled to appear in "Dichtung Digital" a few days after Google announced its purchase of Blogger, so I spent the weekend updating it... Although I ended up not being able to attend the conference, my paper "(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit'" from last year's BlogTalk is being published in the proceedings.
   
   
   
4. If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not?
   

   
   Not applicable to me.
   
   

5. Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?
   

   
   Fodder for my own blog... Seriously, I also I value them as ways to connect with distant people who travel to conferences more frequently than I can (what with my two small kids, "all-but-dissertation" wife and a heavy teaching load), and as ways to connect with my students. This term I'm using blogs in three of my four classes and also supervising the development of the online student paper, so I'm thinking quite a bit about pedagogical blogging. Our school is big on getting students to use PowerPoint, but I can't stand that medium, and instead require students to blog their oral presentations. They present by going up to the front of the room and clicking through the links in their blog entry. That usually makes the oral presentation go better, since students don't have to take notes on the content; it also makes the network of student blogs richer -- I've managed to create a culture where students discourage each other from saying "I'm putting this on my blog because my teacher told me to," and students are challenging each other to make their blog entries interesting for their regular readers. Of course, some students only blog when they have to, and others probably drop my class because the whole blogging thing is too freaky for them.
   

   On a personal level, other than videos for the kids, I watch almost no TV, preferring instead blogging, reading, or computer games.
   

Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public'simagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one'slife and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends? feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent. 

Here we report the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online... --Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability (MIT Media Laboratory)

Good voice acting can't save a bad game, but talented actors can imbue a game script with genuine emotional freight. Some of the best in-game voice work is not the long bits of dialogue in boring cut-scenes, but tiny, subtle bits of atmosphere. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft's quiet, voluptuous moans as she hurled herself off ledges were half of what made the character so erotically charged. In Super Mario 64, Charles Martinet?a longtime voice actor who has done dozens of Nintendo titles?does almost nothing but grunt, sigh, giggle, and gasp, yet he gives the tiny anime plumber a surprisingly human quality. --Clive Thompson --The Game's the Thing: Why are Hollywood actors starring on your PlayStation? (Slate)

The article actually focuses more on A-list actors who are starting to appear in videogames, but I found this section on non-verbal vocalizations interesting.

GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS...

GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS.

I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT WITH A VARIATION OF THE "NIGERIAN 419 SCAM".

I tell you, what with e-mail spam, pedophile-hunting viligantes, and the 419 scam, even the most far-out science fiction authors couldn't predict just how convoluted and endlessly strange the world would become, all thanks to the wonders of technology.

The group's volunteers pose as kids, and when an adult hits on them, they publish the person's picture, phone numbers and e-mail address on the site so the group's supporters can hound the person by phone and e-mail. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002, and many of its marks have lost their jobs and been scorned in their communities as a result of the exposure.

--They Wanted to Teach Him a Lesson  (Wired)

Some experts charge that the $1.4 billion antivirus industry is content with perpetuating a business model that is profitable for the companies, but onerous for the user. --Michelle Delio --Cashing In on Virus Infections  (Wired)

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. --Talk Your Way Out of Trouble  (Wired)

>Crowther's text-parser reborn? This particular game doesn't interest me very much, but the technology seems promising.

Nobody won. Nobody even came close.

But that didn't stop organizers of the DARPA Grand Challenge from declaring an unusual race across the Mojave Desert a spirited success. --Marsha Walton

--Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge (CNN)

We're safe, for a little while longer, from the robot rebellion that will inevitably overwhelm us.

The effects of music on performance on a computer-mediated problem-solving task were examined. Participants completed the task in anonymous dyads as they were exposed to either Classical music, Punk music, or No Music. Results indicate that those in the Classical music condition performed better on the problem solving-task than those in the Punk music or No Music conditions. However, those listening to the Classical music offered more off-task comments during the task than those listening to No Music. Implications for website designers are discussed. --Christine Phillips --Does Background Music Impact Computer  (Usability News)

Via the reborn Webword. (Welcome back, John.)

In the 20th Century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or ?newsmakers?; and the legions of public-relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions -- call it Big Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters exhibit some of the phenomenon's worst symptoms.

Big Media, in any event, treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it. (If we were television and you complained, we ignored you entirely unless the complaint arrived on a libel lawyer's letterhead.) Or you cancelled your subscription or stopped watching our shows. It was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.

Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp now. --Dan Gillmor --Making the News: Book Introduction (Draft)  (eJournal)

Gillmor has posted part of his forthcoming book, and is inviting comment. Today's a heavy grading & teaching day for me, and I've already got a backlog... maybe I'll come back to this later.

What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, "Will you do me the honor?" into the side of the machine.
Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson
--With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed  (Wired)

Found via Work in Progress, where Julie Young prays, "Let this never happen to me."

Miss Dyson, a student careers adviser, thought she was sending a private email to Alex Hewson, her boyfriend. By accidentally clicking on the "reply all" command, however, she distributed it to everyone on his original recipient list.

The message went to 30 friends of Mr Hewson, a PR executive with the firm Carat International. Many then forwarded it to their friends. --Roya Nikkhah --Red faces as email to boyfriend is seen by thousands (The Telegraph)

This story is a good example of how electronic text complicates the old categories of public and private communication.

I do think the headline suggests the content of the e-mail is a bit racier than that suggested by the quotations in the story.

Blips, bloops and beeps emit from the room that houses the exhibit, where a dozen video-arcade games from the late 1970s and '80s are lovingly arranged in chronological order, each lit with a single spotlight. Three free tokens, good for one game play each, are included with museum admission. Additional tokens may be purchased for 25 cents each.

Buy a bagful of those tokens, because these games are just as addictive as they were back in your misspent youth. --Michelle Delio --When Space Invaders Ruled Earth  (Wired)

From the online exhibit:

Back on store shelves, video-game companies are discovering what the music industry has known for a long time: the past can be mined for profit. The classics are being cloned, emulated, compiled, enhanced, and updated for a home market made up of children craving novelty and post-boomers binging on nostalgia. --Carl Goodman

The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren't able to attend the conference, if you're new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction.

Over the past few years, a very exciting movement in Europe (and particulary in Scandinavia) has been carving out a new field of game studies; it looks like the name "ludology" is going to stick (ludus being Latin for "game").

The mainstream press has covered this trend with bemusement ("Off to College to Study... Videogames?"), but the general thrust of the article is usually something along the lines that computer games are now too deeply embedded in our culture to ignore.

The ludologists reject the idea that games are primarily a kind of variable storytelling, a kind of interactive movie, a kind of educational role-playing, an occasion for pathology, etc. Instead, games are games -- objects in their own right, with an aesthetics, a rhetoric, a cultural history, and a discourse of their own (so far as it has been shaped right now).

I don't intend the following to be definitive, or limiting. I'm just doing my best to describe what I see, in a framework that my humanities colleagues and students will be able to understand.

Of course, I wouldn't say ludology necessarily denies that the storyline or cinematic elements of a game might be part of its value. A great story or great visuals is not enough to make a game successful; in fact, plenty of games with no narrative content, blocky graphics and horrid bleepy sound, and which seem to have no point, are nonetheless fun (at least, to the people who play them). In order to get at that core -- what makes a game worth playing -- a theory of computer games has to get really geeky, drawing on the mathematic principles of what might be called classical game theory , which basically atomizes games into abstract principles such as risk, payoff, strategy, objectives, agency, and equilibrium. Gonzalo Frasca boils all this down to one concept: rules. These are foreign concepts to narratologists (who want to think in terms of stories, or potential storeis), film theorists (who concentrate on the visual grammar that is used to represent the game state), psychologists and sociologists (who are concerned with what games do to us when we play them), though they are probably very familiar to business people (who want to know the secret formula for an addictive game, so they can make it just hard enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough that people don't think it's worth the money).

Whew.

While my literary background and my chosen subfield within games (interactive fiction) would seem to naturally predispose me towards narrative, I think my work with text games shows me just how poorly the vocabulary of fiction applies to other types of games (such as simulations or game-like social spaces, where the narrative content, such as it is, is mostly improvised by players interacting a shared virtual space).

Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. -- Anne Collier --Web News Brief 7 (Net Family News)

Tell your kids -- maybe it's not quite that simple.

It's interesting to see how the general public is constructing this field -- and of course this helps me see what to expect when I start publicizing my "Game Culture and Theory" course for next January.

While it's important to choose an academic field that you enjoy, I spend far more of my (limited) research time reading scholarly works and writing up my own research, than I spend playing games or watching others play games. And playing a game for fun is a different kind of activity than playing a game because you're about to write a paper about it. When you're about to give a talk on Adventure, you want to be sure you don't confuse the crystal bridge that appears when you wave the rod and the rickety wooden bridge that collapses when a bear crosses it. (I'm happy to say I caught that mistake before I delivered my paper, but only because I had the game with me on my PDA during the train ride...)

FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Close-upJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

Jordan Hall's presentation was the only one that relied heavily on cinema theory, though she showed an admirable awareness of the problems such an approach causes.

To take just one example, she suggests that the default method of playing the Lara Croft games -- from the perspective of a camera floating along behind the protagonist -- distances the (usually male) player from the character. The shot/reverse-shot cinematographic technique will show a close-up, then show what the character is looking at... While Tomb Raider permits the player to view the game world from Lara's eyes, Hall finds that, lacking the information a cinematographer would provide by inserting a close-up, rather than identifying with Lara, the player merely appropriates her gaze.

Considering that the person holding the controller has already appropriated Lara's whole body, ownership of her eyes is probably a minor point. Further, because the player has chosen to switch away from tracking mode and view the world from the PC's eyes, presumably to get a better look at some object in the game world, the close up - which is the director's way of announcing that a perspective shift is about to occur, is not necessary. While a director can use shot/reverse-shot to communicate emotion via the actor's facial expression, once again, that information is not necessary -- Tomb Raider is not successful because it conveys Lara Croft's emotions; it is successful because it is fun to play (although that's of course not the only reason). Hall is right to critique the nature of that "fun," as well as other cultural manifestations of the Lara Croft phenomenon, but really, if a game kept cutting away from action sequences to insert close-ups of the PC, I'd get pissed off pretty quick.

It's a videogame convention to play intense music in the proximity of a enemy, even before the PC or player has noticed it. That's a moviemaking technique that also communicates important information about the game world. How might a quick cut to Lara's face be useful during game play? Perhaps, when in a room with a pushable block or other hidden exit, Lara would stare suspiciously in that direction? I don't know... if you start giving your avatar that much individuality, what's the point of playing? I recall being disappointed that the magic wand cursor in King's Quest 7 sparkled whenever in the presence of a clickable region. As annoying as pixel-hunting clickfests could be, the sparkling wand took away even that small bit of exploratory fun.

I found Hall's clips from cut scenes illuminating; anonymous male characters gaze in wonder and fear at scenery or monsters; the shot/reverse-shot technique invites us to identify with their emotions and their plight, in a way that we do not empathize with Lara. Elsewhere, Hall notes, we see males gazing in wonder and admiration at Lara's abilities, but she also notes a lack of male characters during action sequences.

For a discussion of camera and agency in games, I'd say an adventure game like Syberia is worth a look. I finally finished the game after getting stuck on the "Blue Helena" puzzle... Syberia did make occasional use of close-ups of the PC, Kate Walker, which helped establish her growing fascination with the enigmatic inventor Hans Voralberg. As a game with pre-rendered backgrounds, it doesn't permit the shifting camera angles that Hall analyzes, but I did find the final cut scene emotionally effective -- right up to the point that I learned that it was, in fact, the final scene, and that was nothing more to do. When controlled by the cinematographic cut scene, the PC made a final decision that ended the game (and set up the sequel).

With the music swelling, Kate runs across several screens of gamespace, at one point knocking over a chair that was not a clickable object during the game. For some reason, I found that event significant -- the cut scene wasn't simply replacing the animation shown during the action sequences, it was taking over the world in which the action sequences took place. I found that a bit troublesome, just as a box that had not been a clickable object near an action climax suddenly conveniently contains a bomb when the plot requires one.

These actions break the "fourth wall," which can be effective when done well -- and I almost thought the bumped chair worked. It emphasized the PC's fictional presence in the virtual world, which was consistent with the designer's decision to take control away from me during the PC's climactic final choice.

Syberia which has (as far as I can tell) no timed puzzles, lots of dialogue, a haunting rich, string-heavy main theme, and gorgeous scenery. I usually played it late on my laptop, wearing headphones, in bed, after everyone else had fallen asleep. (Somehow it never felt right playing RPG or FPS games in that context). Still, the final cut scene forced the game to conclude in only that one way that sets up the sequel. Is that, in and of itself, bad? No, but it may be the reason why some reviewers felt cheated by the end. The designer's desire to tell a story trumped his desire to give us a satisfying gaming experience.

Form, Culture, and Video Game CriticismJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I see that Nick Montfort has already posted a quick overview at GrandTextAuto, so I won't try to cover everything and every talk equally -- instead, I'll focus on those talks about which I have the most to say (however naive some of my reaction may be). Most of the next couple of blog entries were at least drafted on my PDA during the train ride back -- quite a time saver. But I have an unusually early meeting Monday morning, and thus won't be able to blog until dawn (which is what I want to to do).

• The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief Introduction
• Is There a Ludologist in the House?
  
• Culture Cache
  
• FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Closeup...
  
• What IF? An Alternate History without "Adventure"?
  
• Metaconference Morsels
  
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Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Presenters have started to gather for Princeton's videogame conference. About eight of us met for some socialization last night. On the way home, I misread my map, managed to get myself taken to the wrong Red Roof Inn. This is all rather ironic, since part of my talk covers map-making in Will Crowther's "Colossal Cave Adventure."

I just shook hands briefly with Nick Montfort while on the way to make copies of my handouts. I'd better get back to the coffee and donuts... More later.

What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don't have enough evidence to put them into their own pages.

Thanks to people like Drudge, the internet is turning into a gigantic gossip laundering operation for cowardly print hacks. Heard a juicy rumour about a presidential candidate? Know it's probably total rubbish but want to print it anyway? No problem! Just leak it to Drudge, wait for him to print it and then run it in your own pages as an "internet rumour". Job done. --Paul Carr --Why Drudge is bad for online journalism  (Media Guardian)

Today's computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It's just like "Space, we've done that!" -- a few inches of exploration and some people think it's over.....Today's arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That's where we're stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. ("WYSIWYG" generally means "What You See is What You Get"-- meaning what you get *when you print it OUT*). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's software concepts. --Theodore Nelson --Way Out of the Box (Ted Nelson's EPrint Archive)

Link via The Great Lettuce Head.

Nelson writes "the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper," but as Nick Montfort reminds us in his "Continuous Paper," computer culture was well-established before screens replaced the rolls of paper streaming through print terminals and teletypes.

The document quoted above is an example of Nelson's version of a two-way web, part of the "transquotation" concept in his Xanadu. His ideas challenge too many people's notions of writing, ownership, and locality to catch on in the mainstream (at least for now). The freak-your-mind possibilities of this implementation of open-source text sound fantastic. I'm sure this has been debated in the RSS/XML/Whatever debates that often gets A-list bloggers riled up. I need to get a bigger job jar -- mine's overflowing as it is. But here's a light piece about Xanadu and transclusion.

It's a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. --Jakob Nielsen --Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox)

Note... he's specifically talking about research into design -- he's not saying qualititaive research is always better than quantitative research.

So why this terror of the new medium? I don't think it has much to do with the concern to protect the weak and feeble-minded potential murderers out there. This is all about money.

Television is one of the media which has the most to lose, as statistics show that games take time away not from people's reading , but from their "screen-time".... The coke-swilling, hamburger-gobbling habits that the swedish activist blame video games for, are according to this research created by television and commercials, and maintained by the sedentary lifestyle learned in front of the screen. --Torill Mortensen responds to the latest outbreak of the "videogames cause violence" meme. --Games, violence, money and the criteria of news (Thinking with My Fingers)

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation'sadult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

• 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
• 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
• 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
• 13% maintain their own Web sites.
• 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
• 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
• 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
• 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
• 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
• 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
• 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
• 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
• 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.

--Content Creation Online (Pew Internet Trust)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I'm not sure that permitting file-sharing should be in the same category as providing original content to the web, but it's still an impressive set of statistics.