Media: March 2004 Archive Page

"[T]he world's first consumer application of an electronic paper display module in Sony's new e-Book reader, Librié, [is] scheduled to go on sale in Japan in late April. This 'first ever' [...] display utilizes E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink technology which offers a truly paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint."

(See also E Ink's press release and BBC News.)

Commercial E-Paper Display

Via join-the-dots.

--Dominique (Interactive Face) (Alterfin)

A great link from The Goreletter. I wish the eyes would follow the mouse cursor.

--Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Real moveable type. Ever since I investigated the meaning of the name of the character "Shurdlu" in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, I've had a longing to learn how to use an old-fashioned printing press -- one that actually presses the paper. As much as I love the power of "push-button publishing for the masses," there is still something to be said about the care that must go into getting it right when one uses a real printing press.

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? --Richard Long --Back from San Antonio (2River)

A good point. Link found via Will R.

He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.

"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"

"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial." --Jon Ronson --Citizen Kubrick  (Guardian Unlimited)

An excellent essay on the archives of director Stanley Kubrik. The story unfolds bit by bit... very clever.

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.

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to "count" toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus "count") for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it's important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv. Steven Krause --Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites  (CCC Online)

As it happens, when I was printing out the final copy of my 4C's paper before I left the house (in the wee hours of the morning), I ran out of paper, and pulled the staple out of my printout of "Where Do I List This on My CV?" in order to use the blank sides of those pages.

Oddly enough, that's also my provisional answer to your question -- self-publishing isn't enough, and neither is any cutting-edge new media project. Publishing in traditional academic genres about new media activities does take time and energy away from those new media activities, but I don't think we really have any choice -- at least, not until we have succeeded in explaining to the reigning generation of scholars why what we do is valuable, and why doing it the traditional way is less valuable. We're not there yet.

Remediate The Alamo!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I had the pleasure this afternoon of playing hooky from the 4Cs, and accompanying two Canadians on a visit to The Alamo.

My wife and I had visited San Antonio (among other Texas cites) during our low-budget honeymoon (10 years ago this July), and I really wished I could have had the whole family with me -- the Riverwalk is so pleasant, and my son Peter (age 6) would enjoy the military history.

I had no idea that San Antonio is gearing up for the premiere of the new Alamo movie. Street barricades, tents, and movie set lighting were being set up in front of the Alamo. The movie title was etched into a big obelisk shaped like a silhouette of the building's distinctive front, and technicians tested the special effect -- flames shooting through the letters. TV crews were setting up, and photographers were prowling.

We circled the outside of the building, and caught the ending of a presentation delivered by Alamo employee Pete Huertas, who delivered a stirring oral rendition of the battle, told from the prospective of the American defenders who died in after sustaining a 12-day artillery barrage from Santa Anna. The most notable figures are Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, and the young Col. Travis -- the latter of whom is undisputably the favorite here in Texas.

After attending two days of conference papers delivered by experts in rhetoric and communication -- some of whom mumbled into their notes, apologized in every other sentence for how badly their presentation was going, cut themselves off in the middle of their presentation without even starting in on the conclusion, or went way over time (thus excluding the possibility of questions from the audience) -- seeing a good rhetorical performance was a welcome relief.

Don't get me wrong -- it wasn't every presentation that was bad. (For the bloggers who are reading this, don't worry, I wasn't thinking about your presentation... all the blog-related talks have been good, and most of the others as well.)

Huertas, standing outside, off to one side of the complex, gestured expansively towards the church building, where Davey Crockett's Tennessee volunteers planned to retreat after Santa Anna's forces entered the compound. He described Santa Anna's motions from the perspective of the Americans trapped in the fort, attempting to place us all back in history.

His presentation did not vilify Santa Anna and his Mexican forces, but it did glorify the Americans. He emphasized the desperate messages that Travis sent out to the regional and state authorities, pleading for reinforcements; and he emphasized the government's failure in coming to help. I explained to my Canadian companions the unique history of the Republic of Texas, formerly an independent nation, and still a fiercely independent culture, suspicious of the value of depending on the government rather than on independence and ingenuity.

Huertas told me he was a junior teacher for 23 years. He gave up on the state educational system because he said it was geared towards teaching students to pass tests, rather than expanding their minds.

When I mentioned the delicate cultural role of interpreting the historical events surrounding the siege of the Alamo, in an increasingly multicultural society that may not wish to hear the same messages in which the losing American forces are glorified and the winning Mexicans are pretty much faceless and nameless. (except for Santa Anna himself), Huertas responded that he wanted to "go ahead with what I know to be true, in spite of Hollywood."

At this point, Huertas' boss saw me taking notes, and Huertas told me that Alamo employees have been told not to talk to all the reporters who are here to cover the Hollywood premiere.

Later, in a museum setting in one of the side buildings, volunteer docent Max Knight gave a more objective description of the battle, carefully sourcing and qualifying all his claims about where the bodies of Travis, Bowie, and particularly Crockett were found. Bowie was ill upon his arrival at the Alamo, and quickly turned command over to the young Travis. Legendary accounts of Bowie's death have him whipping out his eponymous bowie knife (which, according to one exhibit, is credited with killing Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula) and defending himself to the death; but Knight drew our attention to the lenght of the Mexican bayonets and pikes, and asked whether we really thought a bowie knife would be much use. The Mexican accounts of Bowie's death had him shaking in fear beneath his blankets. Knight said that Bowie would indeed probably have been shivering from his sickness, and may have been able to fire the pistols Crockett gave him, but that's all we know for sure. (He dismissed the story supplied by a woman who claimed to have been a nurse tending to Crockett at the end of the battle.)

Knight noted that Disney's movie presents Crockett surviving the siege, not torching the powder kegs and dying in a heroic explosion, as in John Wayne's portrayal). Texans can be very possessive of the stories about their icons; and since Crockett is on record as giving a speech promising that he would defend The Alamo to the death, his survival (and subsequent execution) problematizes that legendary material.

The convention floor is closing now... more later.

Update, 27 March: Something I didn't notice when I was here before was a monument bearing a poem in traditional Chinese characters, donated in 1914 by Shiga Shigetaka, who saw parallels between the siege of the Alamo and the siege of Nagashino Castle in 1575.

--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...

"Every age tries to communicate the message of Jesus in the idiom of that time period and culture... There is a spiritual hunger in our culture, and [Gibson] is tapping into it and speaking to the culture in a way that it can hear. And I think the genre of our culture is violence." --Fran Leap, a colleague of mine here at Seton Hill University, interviewed in an article by Ann Rodgers --Gibson's 'Passion' remains a concern over portrayal of Jews (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

This insight really helps me to understand the function of the violence in the film. Gibson's success comes from his action film; he is using the grammar of a genre he understands in order to communicate his message. The message itself is radically orthodox, but his medium is radically subversive.

I've read concerns that Gibson's use of violence will once again desensitize society to violent images, but the youth culture that is not particularly attracted to traditional religious media has already been desensitized; and Gibson isn't interested in their attitude towards make-believe violence, he's interested in their attitude towards the core Christian message of the significance of the crucifixion and the value of meditating upon it.

(I blogged my own thoughts about The Passion of The Christ, and about waiting for the film to start).

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.

"It signals our intention to take Doctor Who into the 21st century, as well as retaining its core traditional values - to be surprising, edgy and eccentric." --Jane Tranter, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning, --[Christopher] Eccleston is new Doctor Who (BBC)

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.
   

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.

Well. Those Brits do have some different standards. I just can't see that happening here. At least not any newsroom I've worked in. You might find yourself all over Romenesko in the morning. I seem to remember a pretty big stink over the Post-Dispatch's disappearing Coke can and National Geographic's magical moving pyramids. It's not a long walk from there to Brian Walski. --Doctoring Photos in London (News Designer)

Uh... there really wasn't any good blurb to quote from this article, but it includes images of a severed limb that was edited out of European news photos, but which American news sources ran without change.

It's certainly not a pretty picture. I do think that cropping a picture is justifiable. The Guardian left the limb there, but changed its color to gray -- making it less noticeable. Since photo editors often used to "dodge" or "burn in" areas to affect their brightness, I think that's probably following the letter of the law, though completely changing blood-red flesh to gray is probably violating the spirit. Still, that's probably more defensible than removing it entirely and replacing it with a false background.

The Guardian apparently has this story, but is requiring registration now. Feh, I simply can't be bothered.

[T]he main thing that's hard to do in IF is build a story where there's a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they're all challenging, and there aren't very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you're writing a book, you can just sit down and write some lines of internal monologue for your protagonist, and it's not inherently different from writing a fight scene or dialogue or anything else. --Emily Short, interviewed by Bill Loguidice --Interactive Fiction and Feelies: An Interview with Emily Short  (Armchair Arcade)

A new poll suggests fears that "The Passion of the Christ" would trigger anti-Semitism were unwarranted.... A leader of Jews for Jesus considers "The Passion of the Christ" a Godsend for Jewish evangelism.... The Vatican said Pope John Paul II has met with Jim Caviezel, the actor who portrays Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ."... "60 Minutes" curmudgeon Andy Rooney's commentary about "The Passion of the Christ" has prompted a record number of angry letters and emails. --Short News Items and Archives on 'The Passion of Christ' (Click2Houston.com)

The Great Figure

I'm about to teach Death of a Salesman in my "Intro to LIterary Studies" class. It's part of a unit on literary criticism, so after we discuss such topics as "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" and the formal experimentalism called for in the stage directions, I'm hoping to ask my students to look at this play in a greater literary context. I'm going to start by introducting them to William Carlos Williams's "The Great Figure" and Charles Demuth's "The Figure 5 in Gold."

A unit on Williams and Demuth on the "Model School Library" doesn't preserve the spacing in Williams's original poem... it makes no sense at all as a few lines of prose.

By the way, I stumbled across a plucky little website that argues Munch's "The Scream" is no good.

Update: Fixed the broken URL. (Thanks, Mike.)

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.

On a platform before a crowd of curious onlookers, the scientists eagerly ripped open a box of CDs containing data from a newly released million-second-long exposure taken by two cameras onboard the Hubble telescope, and struggled to transfer the data to nearby computers as they answered a multitude of questions shouted out by reporters and middle-school students.

So began Science Live: The Race to Decode the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

--Michelle Delio --See Astrophysicists in Captivity  (Wired)

Odd... According to the museum website, this is "an unprecedented opportunity to watch competitive space science in action, as teams of astrophysicists from the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and Stony Brook University race to decode strange space objects revealed in a newly released Hubble Space Telescope image."

I wonder... if this is supposed to get kids interested in science, will they be bored when they realize that "real" science doesn't offer this kind of artificial adrenaline injection? What if a "Bill Nye the Literature Guy" dressed up in a funny costume and pretended to do literary research in front of a camera, with a modest budget for special effects and gallons of caffeine for the editors to use when they stitch the show together?

Oh, well... maybe that's what poetry slams are...

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.)

The first student chooses State University. Immediately, word spreads across campus, and high-fives are exchanged all around. "She's a fine young woman," exclaims a top university official. "And what stats! A 1520 on the SAT. A 4.0 GPA, including several advanced placement courses. She will boost the status of our chemistry department in a way that no one has for years!"

At the crosstown rival, they're stunned. "We did all we could to recruit her," says a professor, who asks not to be identified. "We flew her in on a private jet. Took her to the finest restaurants. You can't win 'em all."

Next to sign is another blue-chip prospect. Not just someone with the usual high GPA and SAT score. This one also has had six years of Arabic and an internship in the Middle East.

"We got him!" cries the chief recruiter for a top Ivy League school as soon as the student states his intentions.

[...]

On and on, the announcements come. Reporters scramble for quotes from family members. The sought-after students make brief remarks on how difficult their choices were.

Meanwhile, high school athletes go to after-school workouts as usual, dreaming, naively, that the public and media will one day place as much importance on throwing a football as on the skills that made these other students the center of attention. --Mike Revzin --If the limos were for high scores (SAT not football) (CS Monitor)

A student e-mailed me this link and suggested that I post it. Done.

The day is saved when the Enterprise arrives, along with its commander, Adm. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew (news)), and the doctor (Robert Picardo (news)) from the "Star Trek: Voyager" TV series. --Vegas 'Trek' attraction could revive franchise (Hollywood Reporter)

Urk! Since when did Janeway command the Enterprise? Her ship is the Voyager.

The technical details of this attraction are enough to freak your inner geek: "Kasanoff and Johnsen assert that it is the first "Star Trek" production to be shot digitally; the first all-digital motion picture to incorporate live action and animation within a 3-D cinema environment; the first multiple-angle 3-D cinema production with 3-D effects from the front, overhead and both right and left sides of the participant; the first time a Steadicam has ever been used in a digital 3-D production; and the first worldwide attraction to use 2K digital cinema projection, which produces the highest-resolution digital projection commercially available."

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.

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).

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
  
  • Good People, Good Memories
    
  • You are What You Blog
    
  • Gaming Reporters
    
  
  

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.

'The Passion' is the MediumJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I hadn't intended to write this today, but a student stopped me after class today to talk about the movie, and I just got an e-mail from a colleague asking my opinion, so I might as well write this down.

Yes, I had to look away during the torture scenes -- but no, not for the reason you probably suspect.

Portrayal of Jews

Because Gibson had 2 hours to fill, the Jews get much more screen time than they do in other movies on Christ. I've read complaints that Pontius Pilate and his wife were portrayed too sympathetically, but the wife's sympathy is scriptural, and in the movie, the Roman torturers were disgusting brutes. By contrast, the Jews were presented as sincere in their beliefs. Further, it's established that this is a clandestine meeting of only a portion of the Jewish leadership, and one priest who objects is forcibly ejected from the Temple.

I've seen plenty of movies or plays that depict members of the Catholic hierarchy, dressed up in their religious finery, twirl their moustaches or rub their hands greedily, while chuckling about how easy and fun it is to deceive the faithful. (See my blog entry on "Join the Clubbed"). It can't be a comfortable experience, if you're a devout member of any faith, to see actors pretending to be your religious leaders, imitating the beautiful ceremonies and icons that mean so much to you, while performing un-beautiful actions.

Still, I thought that the final scenes of the movie, where the Jews stumbled around the damaged temple, were calculated to show that the old order was irrelevant now. I can see that would be offensive to Jews, but is that, by itself, anti-Semitic? Hmm.

I think there are few artists who feel they are obligated to avoid offending people who won't feel comfortable with their message. The Romans were depicted as being just as confused, and with the exception of John (who silently and bravely accepts Jesus' gift of his mother), Jesus' disciples -- the first Christians -- are confused at this point, too. So, as a moviegoer I didn't feel invited to hate the Jews.

There's a scene where Jesus spots the foot of one of his torturers, and flashes back to the foot-washing scene at the Last Supper -- that's the model for how we are supposed to respond.

In the Catholic Good Friday service, the congregation and a small group of readers re-enacts the events leading up to the crucifixion. There's usually a handout or a missal that reads like a playscript. The congregation takes the part of "Crowd." That's how it's presented. Not "Crowd of Jews" or "chief priests and temple guards," but "Crowd." (Maybe it's "People." I forget.) We are the ones who, when given the chance to release Jesus, call out for Barabbas; we are the ones who answer Pilate with "Crucify him!" Since I am relying on my religious upbringing to help me interpret the movie, it's possible that people who don't have that upbringing will interpret the same movie differently. I never once got the idea, in any part of my Catholic upbringing, that the Jews were to blame; every year the dramatic reading underscores the theological message that Christ died for my sins. So I think we have to take Gibson seriously when he says he doesn't see the movie as promoting hatred.

Special Effects

The over-reliance on sound effects and make-up distracted me; I looked away during parts of the torture scene. As a Catholic, I am familiar with the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary and the Stations of the Cross -- so it wasn't as if I was surprised by the content of these scenes.

I have seen real people with black eyes and bruises; while I haven't seen gunshot victims, I have seen footage of gunshot victims on TV, so I think I know what a gunshot victim looks like. I have never seen anyone brutalized in the manner depicted in the movie, but it seems to me that with all those wounds there should have been more blood. The cat-o-nine tails is designed to bite into the victim's flesh and tear off pieces; in one shot there was a simulated tearing of skin, but since the movie isn't really going to gouge out the actor's skin, they had to instead build up the areas around the hole.

I looked away because I wanted to stop critiquing the make-up.

Form and Content: The Verdict

While the bungee-jump Jesus, the cartoony sound effects, and the over-reliance on makeup distracted me, critics who complain about such things as the shoulder dislocation and the other non-biblical elements are missing the point. The bit about the Roman soldier chastising his underlings because they drilled the hole in the wrong place, and the use of ropes to stretch Jesus, dates from at least the York Crucifixion of Christ. In that play, the introduction of the non-biblical ropes were doubtless an excuse to secure the actor to the cross so they could lift him and the cross up safely, but since everyone watching the movie would have been bracing themselves for the nailing, putting this extra bit in early was a good technique -- it's employed regularly in the horror film genre, and it works.

This is not a movie that one "enjoys," but I'm glad I saw it.

The bit with the snake in the Garden of Gethsemane is simply a visual enactment of the scriptural curse against the serpent in Genesis; likewise, the crow pecking out the bad thief's eye is a representation of the scriptural warning that, if your eye causes you to sin, it is better to pluck it out than for all of you to be damned. After having seen those lessons in motion picture format, I'm glad Jesus walked the earth in the days before cinema. The graphic representation of those lessons calls more attention to the medium than to the message, but I can see why they are there -- if the crucifixion scene didn't contain any new material, the sequence of events wound have been too predictable.

I think Gibson miscalculated at some points, but I disagree with people who see these moments as gratuitous. You may not agree with what he was trying to do, and you may not respond to being disturbed the way that Gibson intends you to respond.

I felt a huge emotional rush during the brief shot of Satan, howling in a bone-strewn wasteland, knowing that he has failed. Part of me wished for a Lord of the Rings style harrowing of hell; the vision of Jesus in heavenly armor, divinely kicking ass would have been a great antidote to watching all that suffering -- but the movie doesn't go there, because Gibson doesn't want to purge all those feelings, he wants you to take them with you out of the theater and into the world.

There simply isn't enough material in the Gospels for a 12 hour movie that won't draw on sources outside of the Bible. Think about it -- the Bible doesn't say precisely where people were standing, what they were wearing, what their facial expressions are, etc. Yes, some of the most important scenes are described in more detail, but artists have embellished and expanded upon the Bible before; writers of hymns rewrite Biblical passages to make them rhyme, for instance. So there's a long tradition of artists using non-Biblical material in order to adapt the message to a different medium. Protestants think of church as the means of bringing people to the Bible. Historically the Church has seen music, statues, stained glass, and drama as valid media for the transmission of Gospel truths and the salvation of souls. The R.C. tradition does hold, with mainstream and fundamentalist Protestatnts, that only the Bible is the inspired Word of God, but in the Catholic tradition, the purpose of the Bible is to bring people into the Church, which is where they can receive the sacraments -- rituals involving physical things such as bread, wine, water, oil, hands. These sacraments can be described in words, but take on their full meaning only when they take on physical form.

Gibson was trying to reach (one might even say, deeply disturb) an audience used to all kinds of images of carnage. He wanted to unsettle the audience in such a way that the final glimpse of the resurrection would leave people hungry for more.

Mainstream Christianity will benefit from an artistic vision of the meaning of religion that does not focus excessively on eschatology -- that is, the Rapture, the Apocalypse, end of the world, you name it. Now people have something else to talk about.

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.

For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is, improbably, an important news source.

A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" as a place where they regularly learned presidential campaign news.

--Young America's news source: Jon Stewart (CNN)

I blogged this Pew report on the NMJ@SHU site a while ago, but it's interesting to read CNN's response:

Random conversations with nine people, aged 19 to 26, waiting to see a taping of "The Daily Show" last week revealed two who admitted they learned much about the news from the program.

The word "random" downplays the obvious bias involved in interviewing people who like Jon Stewart enough to want to be in his studio audience. A good news editor would be on the lookout for things that might be easily misinterpreted.

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)