Media: May 2004 Archive Page

"They struck his head with a reed and spat on him." -- Mk 15:19

--The Crucifixion (in Lego) (The Brick Testament)

This site, by "Rev" Brendan Powell Smith, features Lego illustrations of Biblical passages -- including many that you don't often see in kiddie books, including the Dueteronomy passages on rape, bestiality, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, and "how long to hang somebody".

I'm fascinated by the scowling face of the rapist who pays the father of a violated virgin 50 shekels, and who then has to marry her. I didn't know there were scowling Lego minifugres.

I don't exactly recommend it for vacation bible school. VeggieTales it ain't.

Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and a wiki community. You can edit articles on Wikipedia right now! Learn how to contribute with the tutorial (or just play around in our sandbox). For more information, post comments at the Village Pump, read the Help directory and our policies, contact other Wikipedians, and keep track of what's going on. --Wikipedia: Community Portal (Wikipedia)

I've created or added to a handful of Wikipedia articles over the years (usability, interactive fiction, Elia Kazan, Rossum's Universal Robots), and I've also (briefly) had students work on articles for brief exercises.

One day I hit the the "random article" button and found myself reading a creepy but very informative article about snipers... then a few months later, when the Beltway Sniper was in the news, I felt very informed about the whole matter.

It looks like Wikipedia has recently added community and magazine-like features, in an apparent effort to compete with pay sites like the one for Encyclopedia Britannica.

Jerzies: Tastes Like Cardboard!

After I lamented that I couldn't design a box of cereal for myself, this is apparently Mike Arnzen's way of telling me I'm a flake.

Or maybe just that I stay crispy in milk. Thanks, Mike.

[It's a visual site with little text to quote.] --Don't Buy It: Get Media Smart (PBS Kids)

Found via watercoolergames, where the "make a cereal box" utility was featured. I couldn't get that to work on my computer, which is too bad, because I really wanted to make a Jerz's Literacy Weblog cereal box, and maybe a cereal box icon for each of my classes in the fall. I don't know why I decided to do that, but if the boxes are cool I can probably retrofit some pedagogical rationale to it. Or not. Er... what was this blog entry supposed to be about? Oh, yeah.

A well-designed site that doesn't overwhelm with text (as I probably would if I were trying to teach the same lesson). I would appreciate more links off-site to more in depth resources, but maybe that's stuff is somewhere on the site -- I didn't look through it in depth.

How can we ask our students to read great literature and then criminalize them when they respond, on occasion, with the angry bitterness of Hamlet?

Clearly, we're not dealing with the proverbial "isolated incidents" here. FEAR ITSELF is loose in America and it needs to be addressed, strongly, powerfully, by all of us who teach composition and encourage written expression. --John Lovas --[Criminalizing Writing] (Jocalo's Blog)

An important set of observations...

When in grad school, I used to have recurring dreams that I was reading and re-reading a page of some academic book. I guess my dreaming mind doesn't have a buffer large enough to store a whole page of text -- each time I re-read it, my dreaming mind re-wrote it, reflecting my developing understanding of whatever I thought the author was trying to say.

I'm having that experience now, after more about 10 days of blogging during the kids' naps, with no time in the office to sort through and organize my thoughts. I thought I had an appointment in the office last Monday, so I didn't bring my PDA charger home over the weekend, and the battery has been dead for over a week now. I even resorted to pulling out a reporter's notebook and jotting down lists and ideas the old-fashioned way, while my daughter was briefly engaged with The Wiggles or tearing the stuffing out of one of her dolls.

Anyway, knowing that a little darling may wake up at any moment, let me try to address this topic...

In high school, I worked off some stress during the last semester of my senior year by writing a serial short story in which various members of the drama club got "offed" in spectacular ways. I don't remember whether I did it before or after, but I also tried my hand at a comic strip.

Young Americans are growing up in a society that encourages them to express themselves. Thankfully we've ditched the Victorian tendency to think of children to be perfect little china dolls, but we're still not culturally equipped to deal with what happens when children express darkness and angst. Fairytales (in their pre-Disneyfied, somewhat gory, and often morally ambiguous states) served an important cultural function: they attracted the darker energies of children, in the context of bedtime stories where adults were fimly and lovingly in control.

That's no longer the case -- kids are developing huge social networks under the noses of their parents. I don't think this is, in itself, a bad thing, but it's certainly incumbent upon the parents to take as much interest in kids online activities as any other activity. For a growing segment of society, the distinction between online culture and offline culture is blurring.
The story of the teen who used a chatroom to arrange his own (attempted) murder would be an incredible case study, but the ethics of publishing all those private communications would be too complex for me to want to think about.

Well, I'm hearing toddler thumpings from next door, so my musings are going offline for now.

BTW, John, I do think you should write titles for your blog entries -- but the content is, as always, great.

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations. --How to become an obnoxious internet cam whore in five easy steps.  (Maddox)

Just in case this professor gig doesn't work out, thanks to Torill, I might have an alternative.

The pictures on the site are hilarious -- and the text is spot on.

The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" said one message. "Yes," came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder. --Helen Carter --Bizarre tale of boy who used internet to plot his own murder (Guardian)

There's a postmodernist seminar paper in this news story. Talk about "death of the author". Definitely a made-for-TV movie, since it confirms all the worst fears that the traditional media like to stoke regarding the Internet.

This detail stuck out to me:

Police were able to link all the fictional characters back to John because Ms Hogg's analysis discovered common features in the typing style, such as the misspelling of "maybe" as "mybye", of all the characters.

“When Zaphod first comes out of the temple and is approached by well wishers, the banana alien on the mole-horse needs to replace the multi-headed groupie.” You just don’t get notes like this every day. --Kerry Kirkpatrick --HHGG Interview with Myself  (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Official Blog])

Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years. --Carolyn Thompson --Spammer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison (AP/MyWay)

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Should you happen to find yourself captivated watching slender Lara bound lithely through Tomb Raider's dark, moist-looking caverns, you will do so without quite forgetting that Lara is, in a sense, you. Like the stranded Marine in Doom, the progenitor of first-person shooters, Lara awaits your input before she makes her decisions. Lara and Doom's Marine both look where you look, and their bodies intrude on the screen to stand in for yours. A primary difference is that the sole bodily presence of Doom's Marine is a hirsute arm, gripping a phallic, super-lethal weapon that bobs stiffly in time with his stealthy walk. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't rather be Lara. She is far more nuanced. Self-possessed in her hip-swaying walk but spry and potent when she leaps and scrambles, she has the build of a rock-climber and the carriage of an elegant socialite. --Mike Ward --Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi (Pop Matters)

As Mike Vitia notes in a recent comment, this pre-Jolie article is dated now, but it's well worth reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

I do find it limiting when I consider the set of assumptions that cinema experts bring to videogames. For example, Ward here waits until near the end to dicsuss the controls (keyboard in this case, when most dedicated players are probably using a hand-held controller).

The perception and use of an avatar - as the primary means of agency in online environments - might be expected to be shaped by the motivations for participating in the environment. In particular, goal-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as tools/pawns to achieve goals, thereby encouraging a preference for 3PP that objectifies and externalizes the avatar, whereas relationship-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as representations of themselves in a social environment, thereby encouraging identification and treating the avatar as the self through 1PP. This would also be supported by the age differences given that younger players tend to be more achievement-driven. In other words, I argue that more fundamental motivational differences are driving the gender and age differences. --Nick Yee --It's a Matter of Perspective (Terra Nova)

Interesting data... Male users were more likely to prefer third-person perspective, while female users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective. Older users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective, while younger users were more likely to prefer third-person.

How much of this is simply becasue it's much easier now to render 3-d worlds on the fly, and to rotate these worlds or make parts of it transparent, so that the player's perspective isn't blocked by walls or other obstacles? Thus, those of us who played graphic games in Ye Olde Days were playing on systems that forced designers to conserve resources whenever possible, and hiding the player (except for an animated shield or sword sweeping through the frame) freed up precious resources for the animation of opponents.

Of course, if it's true that the old gamers included a higher proportion of men, is it significant that new gamers are more likely to prefer the perspective more frequently favored by women? Does it matter whether the men are playing perhaps a half-naked elf babe, as opposed to a muscle-bound, attack-abosrbing brick who wasn't designed with aesthetics in mind?

I just noticed in the discussion at Terra Nova that women are actually more prevalent among the older gamers. Go figure.

I've been playing Morrowind in brief snatches... when I'm up close and in person with the bad guys, I find it disorienting when they slip around behind me or sidestep. I haven't thought of switching to 3PP for battle sequences, because I'm playing a mage and thus would prefer to shoot fireballs from a distance. Still, the occasional rat who scurries about my ankles is annoying enough that maybe 3PP would help.

It looks like the charts on the site were initially posted incorrectly; they've been corrected (according to Yee) but that makes some of the first comments confusing.

Since I started using computers, they've become almost a million times more powerful. Although big computers can be alienating, their evolution generally leads to a better user experience.... Although the bigger, newer mainframe had an actual CRT screen, it also had obscure commands and horrible usability. Worst of all, it was highly alienating because you had no idea what was going on. You'd issue commands, and some time later you might get the desired result. There was no feeling of mastery of the machine. You were basically a supplicant to a magic oracle functioning beyond the ken of humankind. --Jakob Nielsen --Thirty Years With Computers (Alertbox)

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which will be artistic contributions themselves. --Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short --Mystery House Taken Over (Turbulence)

This proposal is one of several that garnered $5000 from the 2004 Turbulene competition. Congrats!

Flames shot up around a 21-year-old college student whose cell phone rang while he was pumping gas.
--Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire (http://www.cbsnews.com)

I'm glad the guy wasn't hurt.

If we could rig up something similar in classrooms and theatres, I bet people would remember to shut off their ringers.

The graphic shows what looks like a female hand covered in flames behind a fancy flip-tip PDA phone that's hovering in the air. It's a right hand with a ring on it... and are those age spots? I wonder if viewers ask themselves questions about whether the graphic artist knew what brand the telephone was? Is this particular cell phone is recognizable enough that people may be put off from buying it, perhaps associating "big flip-up screen" with "will cause gasoline to explode"?

While I recognize that people like having images, I'm always suspicious and annoyed at the graphics that are created out of thin air to entertain TV viewers who will switch to other channels if there isn't enough eye candy. The fact that the stations have to put resources into the creation of fictionalized graphics in order to keep their market share, rather than hiring more reporters or fact-checkers, is one reason why it's so easy to produce polished TV that is shoddy journalism. (I don't mean that this particular story is shoddy journalism... it's the graphic that I'm talking about.)

What does one do with a blog? Here are links to some of my favorite recent postings that highlight part of what I do with my blog.

Teaching

• Plagiarism Roundup
  In honor of Mike Arnzen's unmasking of a plagiarist, here are a few recent blog entries on academic dishonesty.
• Circle Games and Cyberpunk
  In order to discuss some of the key concepts in the novel, I had to make sure that my "Intro to Literary Study" class (English majors, overwhelmingly freshmen) grasped some of the basics of network theory.

Language and Rhetoric

• Rant or Remark? Invective or Discussion?
  If it doesn't make your blood boil, then it's not doing its job. (An analysis of the Elizabeth Ito case.)
• Why people think they are above having to read instructions
  I am in the 7th grade. My project this year is attempting to prove that 99% of people fail to read the following directions after being told and read to do so.

Media

• Watch One Hour with Me... In the Lobby: Waiting for Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"
  What do the marketing droids think the audience that comes to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" will want to spend money on? What previews will I have to sit through?
• "The Passion" is the Medium
  Yes, I had to look away during the torture scenes -- but no, not for the reason you probably suspect.
• Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies
  While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted.

Personal

• 'The Meatball: Not A Funny Rhyme' says Peter Jerz, age 5-3/4; or, Child Traumatized by 'On Top of Spaghetti'
  "I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes... "For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?... And another thing... they should close the front door."
• Headless Heroes, Car-crash Residue, and Styrofoam Peanuts
  I ended up with a big trash bag on the highway outside St. Emma Monastery. What did I pick up?

Favorite Blog Entries: Journaling ModeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

A weblog is a great tool for jotting down thoughts as they come to you. I find my students tend to use their blogs as a repository for their own thoughts, and don't offer annotated links to offsite resources as frequently as I do. I've collected a set of my own blogs that follow the "journaling" model, so I'll be able to point them to it easily in the future.

--Playing with 'Web Album Generator'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've got a huge backlog of digital images that I've wanted to post online... I'm using Web Album Generator, which automates the navigation and the thumbnail.

Now making a collection of images is a lot less fiddly -- though I wish it offered some way to add a comment to the main page, or at least a way to link out to some other page besides Web Album Generator's home page. I can probably figure out a way to do that through the style sheet, but I wish there just a box to type in.

First, words have rules. The mansion of the Word Wizard has many rules. The game of Ad Verbum also has rules. Much of the problem-solving and puzzle-unpuzzling of the text is in recognizing the rules in play and using them to get out of sticky situations. In fact, the player (via text) and adventurer (via sound) are warned by a mysterious and booming, sonorous voice before entering a room, ?You may be very, very frustrated if you walk in there without reading the WARNING.? -Edmond Chang --Words Matter: Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum (ENGL 668k: Digital Studies)

A student paper submitted for Matt Kirschenbaum's class.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.

More simply, Wordpress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. --WordPress

Well, that's enough MT freakout for today. Still waiting to hear back form SixApart.

Here?s the dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one?s own. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according to the logic of print (whether the writing is on paper or not ? I am talking about the logic not the medium) is to force students to reject the communicative practices around them: IM, the Web, Film, TV, music, etc.
The other serious problem here is that the refusal to recognize the remix is also a refusal to recognize the nature of texts we often value and admire in English Studies (and the university in general). The Wasteland? Remixed. Shakespeare? So remixed. Las Meninas? Remixed Velasquez. Pick a Medieval text at random. It will be a remix. Newspaper stories? Always remixed (I remember my own newspaper experience at several publications? we would go through other papers looking for ideas). Literature reflects a Borges universe where every story is remixed and mixed. Spun around on a literate turntable and wondered over. --JRice --Remix etc. (Yellow Dog)

It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source. It's one thing to read Shakespeare, and then write a creative work that riffs on Shakespeare. It takes perhaps a bit more skill to read, say, The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice, or any of a number of standard revenge tragedies alongside Hamlet, and note what elements of a common story Shakespeare kept, and where his artistry made the common story into his own dramatic work. It's something else entirely to be shown a creative work, or a marketing pitch, or a political speech, and -- without an authority figure telling you what sources the author consulted -- independently seek out the influences that were remixed and remediated in order to produce the new result.

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

One problem with remix culture is that the products of remixing are meant almost exclusively for audiences that are familiar with the sources. I had a roommate who sometimes wrote poetry or short stories that quoted long passages from popular songs. Since I usually hadn't heard of those songs, they didn't have the emotonal effect my roommate wanted them to have, so they fell flat for me and I wasn't really able to get the full impact he wanted his creative writing to have. Since he was mostly writing for himself, he didn't need to cite and explain every cultural reference, but if he were giving a speech to a local city council meeting or writing a proposal for a scholarship, it would be his responsibility to make sure that his audience understood all his references. One way to do that is to identify the source of those references.

I don't know much about music, but I have heard on NPR references to composers who "quote" each other. You can't interrupt a symphony to identify the source of a certain passage, so I recognize that some media are better suited to the kinds of explicit citation that college composition courses require.

In the early 90s, Johnny Carson did a comedy bit about psyops campaign against American troops, where the troops were warned that back home, their wives were being seduced by movie stars like Homer Simpson. A serviceman overseas must have heard about or watched that show, but changed the name to "Bart Simpson," and passed the story on to a reporter. A legend was born.

I don't expect students to arrive at college knowing everything they need to know -- if they did, none of us would have jobs.

Remixing is one thing when it comes to the creation of cultural artifacts -- but when it comes to examining facts about the world, and making decisions that may affect people's livelihoods or even their lives, the culture of the remix is sloppy and dangerous.

I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice.

I'm such an important blogger that I don't have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link.

[W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren't really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they've already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first learning how to listen and read the professional and blog genres that interest them (interpretation on one level), then following the conversation closely enough to know how to contribute something (more interpretation), and then, when they are at their best, linking in richer, fuller posts that build social networks, yes, but that also discuss what they are linking to (interpretation again). I think Jorn Barger said that good links add value to the thing being linked to -- for interpretation, Kurt Spellmeyer sometimes says, is saying something the text has not already quite said. Not just quoting it or pointing to it, not just linking alone. --CCCC Waves and Ripples (Weblogs in Higher Education)

I missed this blog post when it was originally written, back in March...

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

• 100% of entering college freshman play games
• 65% call themselves regular game players
• 48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"
• 32% play during classes

With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them. --Education Arcade, day 1 (Water Cooler Games)

Glad to see Ian is braving "The Dangers of Academic Blogging" to give his ground's-eye view of what looks like an important conference. Perhaps Wired will have more later, but at the moment I'm not impressed by its coverage.

One panel featured Wagner James Au, James Paul Gee, Warren Spector, and Brenda Laurel. What a line-up! I'd also like to have heard what Royal Shakespeare member Tom Piper had to say about a collaboration with MIT.

He added that a difference exists between journalism and propaganda.

As he addressed some of the hard hits journalism has taken in the field of ethics, Carroll noted that anyone could be a journalist because, unlike other fields, journalism had no qualification tests, boards to censure misconduct or a universally accepted set of standards.

However, Carroll said a great depth of feeling remains on the importance of ethics that is centered around newspapers' sense of responsibilities to their readers.

"I've learned that these ethics are deeply believed in even though in some places they are not even written down," he said. When ethical guidelines are ignored, their proponents respond with 'tribal ferocity,'" he added. --Ayisha Yaha --Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics (Daily Emerald)

Caroll complains about what he calls "pseudo-journalism." All the more reason to emphasize critical thinking skills in education.

What's the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it?

Recently, I've decided the answer is yes, even if you're reduced to tears by a hellish game, it can be worth it to plug through. Why? For the same reason it's often worth struggling through many other pieces of art or entertainment that we consider "difficult." Anyone who's slogged through the experimental swamp of Ulysses knows that it seems like a pointless chore at first. But if you're patient, the literary payoff is powerful?er, so I've been told?perhaps all the more so because you've worked hard for it.

[...]

Each game offers a different flavor of achievement. The quick-hit delights of Mario Kart are similar to the joys of a detective novel or a romance paperback, while the intense, grinding slog of Ninja Gaiden creates a sort of exhausted exhilaration, like finally reaching the end of War and Peace. Neither one is better than the other, but too many people miss out on the latter merely because the barrier to entry is so high. -- Clive Thompson --Tough Love: Can a video game be too hard? (Slate)

A blog is a Web site with regularly updated chronological entries containing commentary, opinions, lies, rumors, half-truths and innuendos. More importantly, it's where you can express your opinions, make comments, spread rumors, tell lies, create fiction and bore the world with your thoughts on just about any subject.

[...]

In a lot of ways, reading a blog is like reading someone else's diary or, better yet, an old Larry King column. Free flow. No continuity. No boring segues or transitions. No holds barred. And in most cases, shallow. Shallow is good -- there's nothing wrong with shallow.

But there is one major difference. Even Larry King had to get his copy past an editor. And what an editor he must have been.

But bloggers do not face this roadblock. They can run their mouths forever and ever. There is no word or space limitation in the Blogosphere. But some bloggers have been hammered by fellow bloggers for their stupid blog posts and have subsequently and sadly developed severe blogophobia, or fear of blogs. --Angus Lind --Much ado about nothing: Web logs are everywhere and full of nothing  (Times-Picayune)

A member of the writing establishment, whose position in the world of print is threatened by the expansion of blogging, misses an important point about blogging. What Lind smirkingly calls "blogophobia" is the subsitute for the editors and gate-keepers, the absence of which he laments in the blogosphere. Thus, it's not just that anyone with a web page can be a writer, but anyone can also be an editor and critic. Some will be more informed than others, but it's not hard to read blogrolls to figure out who the most respected bloggers are in whatever niche that interests you.

While there are probably millions of teen angst blogs out there, and while few of them are probably good reads for an outside audience, nobody is forcing Lind or anyone else to read stuff that's boring. I have some sympathy for those who feel Google is swamped with commentary from crazed bloggers, but Google does offer a "News" search feature that restricts itself to news publications, and anyone who knows a tiny bit about searching can add "-blog -weblog" to a Google search.

I also think Lind does a disservice to his readers by presenting content from "The Dullest Blog in the World" in order to support his claim that blogs can be dull.

Via Doctor Daisy, who offers a rebuttal to Lind.

Sheet music began to have cars on the cover almost as soon as the automobile was invented. Some songs, like The Swagger Two-Step, didn’t have lyrics, and so the car on the front, along with the opulently dressed couple, seem to have been part of the illustrator’s attempt to make the tune symbolize wealth and class privilege.... Despite the fact that there were only about 8,000 cars in the United States at the time, the illustrator made the automobile more visually prominent than the trolley, perhaps to suggest that the song was modern and urbane. --Cars! Cars! Cars! (Smithsonian Institute)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore's claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.

Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001. --Moore accused of publicity stunt over Disney 'ban'  (Independent)

My guess is that Bush is so unpopular with so many people right now, Moore couldn't depend on the kind of ready-made controversy that helped make Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ a huge hit.

By vilifying Disney, Moore appears to tapping into the vague uneasiness that many people feel when confronted by anything that is universally and unfailingly cheerful (like the Olsen Twins, or 50s housewives, or the Michelin Man), and is using his media skills to promote the meme that he is being persecuted by a Disney-Bush alliance.

Since plenty of the very conservatives Moore despises are also unhappy with Disney (with its gay-friendly policies, its use of pagan and native religions [Hercules, Pocahontas], a history of distributing films decried as anti-Catholic [see the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights boycott of Disney]), Moore's choice of Disney as his persecutor just seems farcical...

A little digging for Disney dirt reveals an incident when ABC TV (owned by Disney) spiked a scathing 20/20 report on a book highly critical of Disney corporate culture: "There's sexual harassment, child labor violations, and how management allows Disney World to have twice the injury rate than the amusement park average - because handling the injury lawyers is cheaper than fixing the problem." ("Disney Spikes 20/20: Where's the Left?")

So there's plenty of evidence that Disney is corrupt... is that enough to justify Moore's spin on something he knew a year ago, but announced in time for news outlets (who love controversy) to pounce on, thereby generating lots of publicity for himself? Moore knows how to manipulate the media to his advantage, and it looks like this time at least a few journalists aren't so keen on being used by Moore. In the years since the civil rights movement became mainstream, it has been mostly conservatives who have been good at enraging the rank-and-file to hold protests and boycotts, some of them fueled by misunderstandings and misinformation, but few of them fueled by media hype (such as is the case with Moore, who knows how to give anti-establishment journalists a juicy story).

I've blogged before on the Bowling for Columbine Teacher's Guide. There has been some interest here in using Moore's materials as part of the Seminar in Thinking and Writing course, so I'm just sort of keeping on top of Moore's activities.

Update, 10 May: Disney responds to the NY Times editorial accusing Disney of "cowardice".

Because digital cameras have features like automatic focus, they have made it easy for anyone to take technically good photographs. "You no longer have to have someone standing in bright sunlight to get a good picture of them," Howe said.

Combine that with Internet connections that have made it easy to send pictures in seconds, and images of the war that previously might not have been seen have found an enormous international audience. --Digital Cameras Change Iraq War Perception (Newsday/AP)

After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever. Just as TiVo lets you watch TV more efficiently, RSS readers do the same by letting you scan your favorite blogs and news sites faster or letting you cast your net over a wider range of material. --J.D. Lasica --Surf's Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing (Online Journalism Review)

I'm only just starting to get into this habit, but I will probably try to use it to keep tabs on my student blogs next fall.

Somewhere, beneath the cover of an innocuous-looking retail operation, those with true Power have built a facility to imprison forces man was not meant to know . . . things we were never meant to comprehend. The Ark of the Covenant. The Crystal Skull. Alien spacecraft . . . and aliens. Documentation of conspiracies and cover-ups. And more. Are you ready for Warehouse 23?

• A plain box of unsharpened No. 2 pencils, without any visible brand name. Any electronic scoring machine for standardized tests will score any answer marked with one of these pencils as being correct.
• Seven identical (and apparently original) paintings of the Mona Lisa. In all of the pictures she is smiling happily, as if the artist has just made a really funny comment.
• An ordinary, audio compact disk, labeled "I cannot be played." If the disk is played in any CD player, it will produce audio vibrations, optical reflections, feedback noise, and so forth, that will destroy the equipment it was played on within a minute or so.

--Warehouse 23

Organic soup awaiting the lightning bolt? I'd classify it as a playful literary exercise, rather than either a game or a short story, but whatever you call it, it's a collection of decontextualized inventory items as flash fiction. Open another box. Mike Arnzen may wish to proceed directly to the dumpster.

So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which it handles language. And yet it continues to draw devoted practitioners and interactors. It is, in Montfort?s view, a still vibrant tradition.

Why does IF work despite these design difficulties? Perhaps the answer lies in its structure as a riddle. Riddles, unlike puzzles, are always verbal and are based on a conversational exchange. They are intrinsically interactive, and have a formal syntax, a variant of call-and-response structure. A riddle is a word-puzzle, framed as a conversation. --Janet Murray --Janet Murray responds to Nick Montfort (Electronic Book Review)

Murray notes that the interface innovations that made IF a breakaway success in the 70s (specifically, the fact that the user communicated with the program by typing words that followed a syntax that was at least recognizably a subset of English) is the source of its awkwardness today.

When I first started teaching IF, I noticed newbies tried to use MUD syntax to get around in the world. More recently, students who are used to text messaging each other have to unlearn their IM syntax (which is itself a simplified form of English, with creative spelling "rulz"). Thus, they are so used to communicating with each other via short textual bursts, and they are so used to assuming that the recipient of these messages will be able to deal with typos and irregularities of every sort, that the command-line interface appears much more stringent. Thus, it's an increased familiarity with the command line (as employed in purely social contexts) that distances them from the command line as used in IF.

The discussion also includes Brenda Laurel and a response by Nick Montfort. Part of Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Great reading! But I've got to get back to grading now...

While there might be a future for narrative and new forms of storytelling in this cornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, the largest potential seems to be in new types of games, forms that blend the social and the aesthetic in creative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a new generation of gamers grows up, the word ?game? will no longer be as tainted as it is today. Then euphemisms such as ?story-puzzles? and ?interactors? will no longer be necessary. Games will be games and gamers will be gamers. Storytelling, on the other hand, still seems eminently suited to sequential formats such as books, films and e-mails, and might not be in need of structural rejuvenation after all. If it ain?t broke, why fix it? --Espen Aarseth --Espen Aarseth Responds [to Murray's First Person essay] (Electronic Book Review)

Aarseth responds to an essay by Janet Murray in the Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Murray responds to Aarseth).

I wish this online collection hadn't appeared in the very week when I so desperately seek distractions to help me put off marking huge stacks of papers.

Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game StudiesJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In a comment attached to my blog entry on The Muse of the Videogame, Eyejinx makes an excellent point, an excerpt from which is below:

Unless and until those involved in game studies seriously work with the development process (and perhaps the developers themselves), any proposals for how to go about making games remain in the realm of theory.

In the meantime, as a nascent field of study, those involved in game studies should, perhaps, strive to identify where their work falls in the criticism/craft divide.

I'd agree that theorists often make impractical suggestions, but choosing a starting point that privileges production and development over theory is naturally going to find a theoretical piece lacking. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- academics do write mostly for each other, and specialists in any field tend to develop an elite language, partly out of necessity, but partly as a social signal. (And if you think I'm only talking about the ivory towers, don't forget the 1337 h4xx0r culture.)

Most people who aren't professional athletes have a favorite team; most people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag have some idea of who their favorite actors are, and can recognize and be moved by a good performance. On the other end of the scale, theorists may call for the production of certain texts that don't exist, but that would need to exist in order for them to fully explicate their theories... thus, in literature, we have a tradition of visionary authors writing traditional books about imaginary books (Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths," Stephenson and "The Diamond Age," even Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

People who study the history of the American Revolution aren't necessarily trying to write a how to manual for future revolutionaries... Likewise, if I were to write a paper examining the development of the cave setting in computer games, or the development of inventory-based puzzles, or the rise and fall of text adventures, I wouldn't feel any obligation whatsoever to tell my readers what to do in order to produce these games.

On another note, the best practitioners aren't automatically the best teachers, so I wouldn't be so hasty to elide the difference between teachers of the craft and practitioners of the craft. Obviously theorists need stuff about which to theorize, but their discourse does not necessarily need to be focused towards teaching other people how to create more of the kind of thing that they study... a theorist might instead focus entirely on the effect a particular work had on its surroundings, and if the article or book in question did a good job with that, I certainly wouldn't fault it for not overtly addressing ways to help game development companies make more money.

Plato wrestled with similar issues -- his "Ion" is a dialogue between Socrates and a "rhapsode," a sort of actor/orator/composer who insists that, because he tells good stories about generals, he'd make a better general than the professional soldiers. (We are meant to laugh at this overextension -- after all, since Plato isn't a professional rhapsode, so what does he know about what a rhapsode would say? At the same time I think it's meant to be satire at the expense of the contemporary military leadership.)

It's a simple truth nowadays that among the people whose lives are being affected by computer games include many who aren't computer programmers, who have never taken a course in computer programming, and who aren't very good at the kind of logical, iterative, procedural creativity that programming requires. Having said all that, I do introduce my students to Inform (the most popular language for creating text adventures), in order to get them to appreciate the effort that goes into creating, beta-testing, and perfecting a computer game.

While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted. These non-programmers and non-designers are the ones who hired me, the ones who sign up to take my classes, and the ones who decide whether to publish the articles I write or the books I propose, and they're an important part of the audience for all the game study scholarship that's coming out.

I was recently told by a theatre history specialist that, although my background is English lit, my book on American Drama from 1920-1950 was worth recommending as a theatre history text. Art history and art practitioners, mathematicians and math teachers, politicians and speech writers, creative writers and copy editors... The intellectual life is full of uneasy pairings.

It’s because of the existence of literary criticism as a profession that people can major in English literature (which amounts to reading novels, poems, and plays, and talking about and writing about them). It’s because of the existence of film criticism as a profession that people can major in film studies (which amounts to watching movies, and talking and writing about them). And because the students are lining up to take these courses, schools can fund “artist in residence” programs, where established authors or filmmakers can do their thing, free (for a while, at least) from the pressures of producing something that will make money. If literature and film programs limited their focus to doing nothing but producing the next generation of creative writers or filmmakers, these programs wouldn’t have nearly the cultural capital that they do; in the market economy, producers need consumers, and educated, critical consumers are probably better for the long-term health of a genre. (I’ll save the elitism/populism debate for another day!)

Sadly, commercial publishing threatens the very system it exists to support. When expensive commercially published materials cannot be bought, when university presses cannot afford to publish monographs for junior faculty, everyone suffers. Students and scientists cannot gain access to badly needed materials; scholars cannot get tenure for lack of that first published monograph. The modern university, modeled on the ideal of the Greek temple where thinkers and learners pursued knowledge so that society could reap its benefits, is losing ground to crass commercialism. At risk is the very culture of the academy. --Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System (Syllabus)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.