Media: June 2004 Archive Page

Most Americans claim they don't believe what they read in newspapers or see on TV -- only a third say news organizations generally get the facts straight -- yet their opinions continue to be influenced by the media. Multiply this curious effect by the dozens of cable TV news shows, the hundreds of newspapers and perhaps thousands of websites and millions of blogs dedicated to disseminating news, and it offers great bounty for any media columnist. --Adam L. Penenberg --New Media's Age of Anxiety (Wired)

The reason most pre-1940 musicals are unrevivable is that their books tend to be both slapdash in literary quality and fanciful to the point of absurdity. It was only in the late 30’s that the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart began to emphasize dramatic plausibility, most notably in Pal Joey (1940). And it was not until Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 to write Oklahoma! that the "book show," whose songs are integrated into a more or less realistic plot, became the norm. --Terry Teachout --Is the Musical Comedy Dead?  (Commentary Magazine)

I'd make a comment, but I can hear the pit orchestra is gearing up for a big dance number, so I'd better go.

Chunking | Forms | Frames | Fitts Law | Flash Usability | Guidelines & Principles | Link Rot | Liquid Design | PDF | ROI | Writing, Reading & Content | Articles & Related Links --Usability (The Net Place)

Great collection of links to practical online articles on each of the above subjects.

--No Train, No Gain

A great collection of short articles focusing on such topics as how to find an interesting story in a boring budget meeting, the basics of interviewing, and taking notes. For the first time this fall, students will be able to get credit for working for the student paper (of which I am the adviser). Blogging this so I can find it in the fall.

She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people's Web logs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her.

Then, three weeks ago, the "Plain Layne" Web log mysteriously disappeared from the Internet, sending her fans into a tizzy.

Now the person behind Layne has come forward and admitted that it was all an elaborate hoax. --Michael Bazeley --Net fans jolted by man's blog hoax (Twin Cities Pioneer Press)

I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey's palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. --Peter Norvig --A Man, a Plan, a Pointless(?) Program (Google Blog)

Norvig used the power of Google to assemble the world's longest palindrome (a text that makes the same words backwards and forwards, such as "Madam, I'm Adam.").

Okay, but Norvig's palindrome is pretty much a list of words, not a narrative. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the palindrome story written by Nick Montfort and William Gillespe is worth checking out, even if it's much shorter.

Retro video gaming has become something of a pop culture phenomenon lately, with video game music and themes featured in television commercials for Hummer and Saturn sport utility vehicles. A top 20 R&B hit, "Game Over (Flip)" by Lil' Flip features sound effects from "Pac-Man."

It's not just nostalgia that's fueling retro video interest, says O'Hara. He thinks the old games were simply more fun to play: "There's a phrase that's used a lot in marketing - 'easy to learn, hard to master' - that describes most classic video games." --Michael Felberbaum --Classic Video Games Make a Comeback (AP|MyWay)

The Queen has allowed herself to be the subject of the first royal hologram. --Queen's holograph 'makes me look lost in woods' (Telegraph)

Thanks for the offbeat suggestion, Rosemary.

blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That's because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it's spam or not.

It's a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether. --Amit Asaravala --Blind Get Earful of Spam Daily  (Wired)

Chappelle's harshest words were addressed to those audience members who worship entertainers and athletes.

"Stop listening to celebrities," he said. "They do what they do for money - that's all. I don't even know why you're listening to me. I've done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can't even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is."

Celebrity worship harms the object of affection as well, Chappelle said. "One day people love you more than they've ever loved anything in the world. And the next, you're in front of a courthouse dancing on top of a car." --Jim Carnes --Chappelle lets rude crowd have it  (Tribnet)

The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood. --Japanese boy writes apology in blood (CNN)

Now that's harsh. Looks like the Reuters reporter did some independent checking of a story that appeared on local news... if not for that line, I'd wonder whether this was one of those "too strange to fact-check" hoaxes that often one finds slipping past editorial filters.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

The U.S. Army, riding the success of its action video game America's Army, has set up a video-game studio with industry veterans to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects. --John Gaudiosi --Army Sets Up Video-Game Studio  (Wired)

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. --Christopher Hitchens --Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore (Slate)

Woah... Hitchens is known as one of the few to attack pop-culture saints such as Bob Hope and even Mother Teresa, so it can't be easy to dismiss his attack on Moore. He's not a conservative who's annoyed that Moore has trumped Rush Limbaugh-style politics-as-entertainment by using images (which speak directly to our emotions, as opposed to words, which at least sometimes engage our minds).

Hitchens, who has made a few documentaries himself, sounds a bit bitter in the following quote, but I think it's an important perspective to consider:

[A] documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them.

"There's a silence in the family," says a newsreader, "because they're glued to the box".

An arts producer tells me that sleeping habits have changed: "Now people stay up late to watch their favourite programmes".

Another explains how the main family room pre-TV would have seats facing inwards to ease conversation with family and friends or to face the altar, but now television households re-arrange their rooms to the fount of visual stimuli. --Susie Emmet --Bhutan gives TV cautious embrace (BBC)

A great quote from "the maroon-robed lama":

Change is not to be feared", he says calmly, "without choice you cannot choose the right path".

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Blogging is dead, long live blogging. I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force of a new era. --Alex Halavais participates in an e-mail interview by Mark Glaser
--Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication (Online Journalism Review)

Only getting around to blogging this now.

The genre of "e-mail questions to a bunch of people and compile their answers" certainly speeds up the process of getting the news out, but of course it only works when the people you interview want to talk about their subject.

Weblogs, Comments, and Law (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

IANAL ("I am not a lawyer"), but here are some links I found interesting.

While a newspaper has a responsibility to check the accuracy of letters to the editor, if person A were to start a cafe, and person B walked into the cafe and made statements that the court deemed libelous, it doesn't seem likely that person A should be held responsible.

If Person A rents a hall, calls a public town meeting and invites people to walk up to a microphone to say whatever they like, and Person B makes statements that a court deems libelous, would person A be legally responsible for any offense committed by person B?

Last year, in Wired, the article "Bloggers Gain Libel Protection" described a ruling involving the re-use, in electronic form, of information taken from elsewhere. Thus, if a blogger were to quote an excerpt from someplace else, and the author of that excerpt was charged with libel, then according to this ruling, the blogger would not be responsible. Let the reader beware -- the title of the Wired article mentions blogs, but the case actually centered around an e-mail.

I missed it when I blogged the original article, but Jack Balkin quickly put it into perspective:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

Balkin also notes that corrections, clarifications, and retractions are part of the weblog culture, in ways that traditional print journalism doesn't provide.

If that's so, when blogger A posts an inaccurate statement, visitors to blogger A's website can publish corrections -- by commenting on the post (and thus adding their text to the main text), or perhaps simply by sending an e-mail. The technology and practice of weblogs makes it easy for bloggers to correct their mistakes or give space to opposing views. This built-in series of checks and balances is part of what makes the online media so exciting, from a "power to the people" perspective.

We highlight U.S. prisoner abuse because the photos aren't too offensive to show. We downplay Saddam's abuse precisely because it's far worse ? so we can't use the photos. And that sets the stage for remarks like Sen. Ted Kennedy's claim that Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under "U.S. management." --Deborah Orin --Reporting for the Enemy (NY Post)

An extremely interesting argument. Two wrongs don't make a right, so if it's true that the US media are downplaying Saddam's tortures and hyping the US tortures, that doesn't make what the US did right. But it's still fascinating to consider, in terms of a media perspective, that the US torture was just outrageous enough to get coverage (after all, these photos don't document removing limbs or executions).

What If... There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther's Colossal Cave (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn't created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the brief discussion that followed, but then the next panel started, and the topic went onto the back burner.

Here is a possible alternative history of computer game design, based on the premise that Will Crowther never wrote his 1975 original.

For want of Adventure, the magic word XYZZY is lost. (Computer users around the world are forced to think of less-guessable passwords, and information technology is more secure.)

For want of Adventure, Zork was lost. (But now everyone uses a really cool spreadsheet called VisiCalc.)

For want of Zork, Roberta Williams does not create "The Mystery House."

For want of Adventure, Adventure International was lost.

For want of Adventure International, Ken Williams does not work briefly for Scott Adams.

For want of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra was lost. (A generation of youngsters don't bother nagging their parents to upgrade their video cards from CGA to SuperVGA; when an explosion at a factory in Japan cripples the world's supply of memory chips, about six people notice.)

For want of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry was lost.

For want of Leisure Suit Larry, Grand Theft Auto was lost.

For want of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Text Auto was lost. (The creators choose the name "Rogues' Gallery" instead, because it got more votes than "The Pong Throng" or "VisiCalc User Forum.")

For want of the text adventure genre, the entire field of computer science seems lifeless and boring to a significant number of young men and women who briefly consider it in the late 70s and early 80s. They drop out in droves. The ones who don't end up running computers at financial institutions, but are eventually put out of work by high-school dropouts using VisiCalc.

For want of the text adventure genre, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre is lost.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, scholars groping for a way to describe hypertext to their non-technical colleagues think harder and come up with a better metaphor, one which magically prevents the premature dismissal of hyperfiction, leading to its rapid acceptance into the literary canon.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a generation of youths watches more TV. Later, in college, these youths daydream during their hyperfiction survey courses, wondering how their life would have turned out if they had dropped out of high school like their stoner friends did.

Oh, and Dave Thomas has a scar, Nick Montfort has a beard, side-scrollers all scroll the opposite way, and all ships have funky spikes on their warp drive nacelles.

A bit more seriously, now...

I've read many anecdotes from programmers whose early experience with interactive fiction games turned them on to computers, so I do think that without text adventures, some of these people might not have considered careers in computing. While it's a meme that Adventure set the field of computer science back two weeks, I'd prefer to think that after everyone finished Zork, they went back to their jobs energized by what computers might be able to accomplish, and perhaps they shifted their expectations in such a way that might have affected the development of CS in positive ways.

Since the average computer user didn't have access to CRTs that displayed fancy graphics, and since a significant chunk of computing took place on printer terminals, I suppose that ASCII genres such as Rogue, and strategy games such as Wumpus and mainframe Trek would have attracted the attention of the amateur hackers and students who, after playing Adventure or Zork, tried their hand at creating their own amateur interactive fiction.

Hosting the wild speculation up to the next level...

Perhaps the players who lost countless hours playing interactive fiction would have instead spent more time getting their game fix at the arcade. If coin-op video arcade games developed a little faster, then perhaps users of personal computers wouldn't have been at all satisfied with the bleeps and blips that they saw on their home computers... maybe they would have been so disappointed by the offerings of home computer entertainment that they would have preferred dropping coins in the arcade, playing games that emulated familiar TV shows (however badly), to typing in lines of code from magazines in order to play games on their home computers. This might have delayed growth in the market for PC games, paving the way in the future for a direct transition of loyalty from the video arcade to the gaming platform.

While hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men, research firm Screen Digest found that "bored housewives" are fuelling the growth of other games offered on the net. --Net games lure 'bored housewives' (BBC)

It's not clear from the article whether the term "bored housewife" is used in the report, or whether it was just a joke made by report co-author Nick Gibson.

See a good reflection from Ian Bogost on Water Cooler Games:

This is a very dangerous kind of thing to say, and it suggests that even researchers who seek to expose the viability of online games don't take them seriously. As I have argued before here on WCG (1, 2, 3) the reasons women play casual games seem complex, deliberate, and worthy of both serious study and respect. Joking about "bored housewives" is a pretty dismissive and derogatory way of treating both the players and the market. What a foolish thing to do.

The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad." Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or the act. --Douglas Crockford --Now You're Really Playing with Power: The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Crockford.com)

A bizarre story. Quotable quote: "Nintendo is a jealous god."

Want to play a game that involves Monty the Mole? Commander Keen? David "Knight Rider" Hasselhoff? With RoN you can. The fact that anyone can freely contribute to the series means that its potential for growth is unrivaled. Indeed, at the time of writing this article, there have been over sixty RoN games. Even King's Quest could only manage eight... --Robert Lacey
--Deconstructing Reality  (Adventure Gamers)

Hmm... this is more about the communal construction of virtual reality than it is about the deconstruction of reality, but it's a good article nonetheless.

But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of "all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don't exist" -- or, less creatively, "in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway" -- it is usually a lousy narrative on its own merits and always awful as fanfic, because it is almost never telling a story which can sustain any kind of relationship, nevermind fruitful tension, with the source narrative. --Naomi Chana is not too impressed by with reports from Troy. --In Which Woes Are Unnumbered  (Baritaria)

I was very surprised to learn that the recent movie Troy edits out all the gods from the plot.

The National Crime Squad announced today that it is working with the FBI, the Canadian Mounties and the Australian Federal Police to set up what they call "patrols" on the internet.

Officers will actively monitor chat rooms used by children where they think paedophiles are likely to be.

A logo will come up in the corner of the screen to show that the police are present - the National Crime Squad quite liked the idea of a flashing blue light - and they may even join in the conversation. --Stuart Tendler

--Q&A: Cyber cops for children's chat rooms (Times Online)

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. --ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida)

Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note!

The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town of York give us much information on the nature of those productions, which took place annually on the feast of Corpus Christi from the late 14th century to the early 16th century. The scholarly debate over how the plays were performed has settled down in favor of what had been the traditional view -- that each short play, mounted on an individual stage-wagon, was pulled through the streets of York, stopping to perform for audiences that had gathered at predetermined "stations" along the route. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Staging of the York Corpus Christi Plays (PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator)

This article is getting musty, but I like trotting it out as the Feast of Corpus Christi nears.

I update the home page fairly regularly, considering I did the programming 10 years ago (during the summer before my wedding) and got the article published 7 years ago. (Egad, what a horrid background image I used...)

We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us -- with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests -- via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork.

What motivates such postings by that increasingly threatened species, the North American professor? How do those office doors reflect upon the professors or the disciplines in which they study and teach? --James Lang --Office Doors of the North American Professor  (Chronicle)

On my office door:

A printout of my home page (redesigned so it fits on one page).

A brand spanking new nameplate (everyone on the floor seems to have gotten one, which sends a nice unifying, inclusive message).

A small number of business cards, stuck by the corners in the windowpane and fanned out for the taking. They disappear at the rate of about one a month. (Every so often I rearrange them so it looks like one has just been removed, and then for some reason they disappear quickly after that... maybe because they fall out and get swept up... I don't know.)

To the side of my door:

Articles from The Onion: deconstructing a Mexican take-out menu, and "English Replaced to be New Syntax With." Maybe one more that I can't remember. (I'm blogging this from home.)

A feature from the local paper on Pittsburgh weblogs, forwarded to me by an administrator. (Two pages, with artsy pictures of computer keyboards and bloggers.)

Now, I'm really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn't made this move. It's a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason to shrink from third party development -- LeapFrog products get a full aisle of shelf space in Target and Wal-Mart. Rather, I think the good folks at LeapFrog just need an outside perspective on the matter. And why shouldn't that perspective be a public one? --Ian Bogost --The Truth about Third Party Development on the LeapFrog Leapster (Water Cooler Games)

I've exchanged a few comments with Ian, who asked me, "What kinds of games might change your mind about the value of the Leapster as a supervised computer activity?"

The Amazon reviews of Leapster praised the concept and quality of the software, but there were more than enough problems with durability to make me pass on the hardware. Since I'm not really comfortable (yet) with the idea of letting my son have unlimited access to his games, I'd rather buy 3 or 4 edu-games for the PC we already have than risk a Leapster.

My son is not that picky about graphics, so he's happily playing some old (mid 1990s) games, and he prefers the 1994 (or so) Star Wars X Wing vs Tie Fighter to the more recent X Wing Alliance... So the fact that I can share with him games that I enjoyed means something to me.

In terms of content, what would it take to get me to change my mind? I don't know... I'll know it when I see it. We don't get cable TV, so he doesn't know who Spongebob or Dora the Explorer are, so the branded content is actually a liability in my eyes.

Some educational games make a funny blooping noise when you make a mistake or get a wrong answer. My son enjoyed trying to knock Curious George unconscious so much that he never paid attention to the letter-recognition game, and besides, he already knew his alphabet. So he got stuck on a level -- by his own choice -- for several days.

I would love to have been able to tweak the level of encouragement the game provides.

I know my son prefers games that feature a plot with an opponent to overcome... For several years he has been enthralled by Lego Stunt Rally, which has completely captured his imagination (to the point that we have to limit his access to that game, or he will make car brake squealing noises for hours at a time, re-playing races in his mind).

Sometimes I'd like to see the "plot" suffer an extreme setback if the kid is careless...

Oh wait -- I just thought of a game that might make me buy Leapster.

My son needs some work with penmanship... I had, and still have, terrible handwriting, so I'm senstitive on this issue.

If there were a game where you played... I don't know... a construction foreman, and you traced out shapes on a blueprint, and then construction teams built the roads according to the layout you designed, and then you had to drive on the roads, wrecking your nice cars if the wobbly lines drawn on the blueprint were too far from the norm. A game like that might also include map reading, simulation, basic math, and abstract thinking. Oh, and of course there would need to be random citizens with fruit stands to be smashed.

Throw in a villain with a handlebar moustache and a cool car that can spew smoke screens and drop oil slicks, and I'd buy it.

Planes, ants, Chewbacca making the calculations for a jump to hyperspace -- anything that moves in a boundary would work. It's drawing on the touch screen that would make the difference. But it's that touch screen that seems to be the source of a lot of frustration from consumers.

Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, "We won't be reading any novels in this class. We don't be doing any reading, as a matter of fact. Instead, we're going to play videogames." Is this insane? --Matt Barton --Videogames in Composition & Rhetoric (KairosNews)

Er... yes.

While I agree that it's not necessary to read novels in order to learn freshman composition, students have to read essays if they are being asked to write essays.

I'd say about half of college students consider themselves "gamers," though many of those who don't say they used to play games. If there's a meaningful selection process, by which students can select a section with an emphasis that appeals to them, then a games-focused freshman comp course sounds wonderful.

In passing, Matt suggests that Quake could help students learn how to drive the Martian rover. The distance between Earth and Mars results in such a great time delay (about 20 minutes) that the skills one develops in a twitch game really wouldn't help much. Chess would probably be better (as it forces you to see multiple alternatives and plan ahead for them).

But, as Matt notes, the purpose of a rhet/comp course is not to train people for specific jobs. I think he's much closer to the target when he mentions political simulations and other ideological games. I also like his observation that there is a demand for slide presentation skills, but that we aren't doing a very good job teaching those skills.

While my school requires all students to demonstrate basic PowerPoint skills, I actively discourage slide shows in my classes, since I find them typically to be of such low quality and I haven't the time to teach how to use a slide presentation effectively. I'll be teaching a "Writing for the Internet" course this fall again... maybe that will be the right place to tackle this issue.

I felt one paragraph called for a more detailed response:

Perhaps videogames are the last tool available to modern compositionists that can actually inspire students to learn to write. Of course we could allow students to "play games" with the texts they produce, constructing choose your own adventures. I see things on a deeper level; teach programming (or at least a game making software tool) so that students may express themselves in the language of their generation.

The last tool? No, just the latest tool. And all that is playful is not games... that is, "playing games" with existing works of literature is completely different from what goes on when you interact with a computer game.

The narratological approach that Matt uses makes a great deal of sense in the particular branch of computer games that I study, namely interactive fiction. But I think it's probably too much, at this point, to ask the average student to learn a computer programming language and construct a game in a freshman comp course. At an engineering school? Sure! But at a liberal arts school? Sadly, no.

See also a recent blog conversation under "Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies." Both kinds of scholarship are important, and I did spend one day introducing my upper-level English students to IF programming, but these were juniors and seniors, whom I could assume had already mastered the basic reading and writing skills that a freshman comp course is supposed to give them. But "user mods" and the "remix culture" are certainly valid and important topics to address, in terms of the attitude of today's youth towards the dissemination of intellectual property, and the open source philosophy (of which Matt is a devoted supporter).

A college writing class is a good place to get students to think about their own creation of intellectual property. And having a freshman comp class create and peer review wiki articles may be a useful way to get them to think about the function (and limitations) of peer review.

If videogames have not yet risen to the elite status of famous novels, it is no fault of videogames, but rather money-hungry developers, narrow-minded players, and traditionalist literary critics unwilling to replace their pen with a joystick.

Don't forget the importance of the cult of the author as celebrity. Modern videogames may be inspired by brilliant designers, but they are products of huge committees of highly-specialized workers and outsourced labor -- including many people who have no narrative skills at all, and whose daily activities aren't in the slightest comparable to what a novelist does. The people who do this work have to feed their families, so naturally a huge commercial videogame project is going to follow the corporate model.

Matt's doing some important work getting people to talk about the issues. He's not yet at the fist-shaking, "Fools! I shall crush them all!" stage, which is probably good for society in general.

I agree with him whole-heartedly when he writes the following:

It is of utmost importance that we teach people to see a videogame with the same critical apparatus they bring to bear on poems, novels, screenplays, and films.

You bet. But replacing the reader with videogames? That's going too far.

It seems that what we really need is a reader, geared towards college freshmen, that covers videogames intelligently -- along with reality TV, "cool hunting," weblogs, text messaging, and other cultural practices that our students know well.

But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.

As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise.
--William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV (Haunted Ink)

What makes this album review especially blogworthy:

William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate.

Via MGK.

I didn't have quite as dramatic an experience, but I do from time to time look back at the page of literary quotes about the Twin Towers and urban technology that I collected the afternoon the towers fell.

Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez's comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art -- "sprites" in programming jargon -- along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game with a minimum of artistic effort. --Lore Sjöberg
--You, Too, Can Be a Comics Whiz  (Wired)

A history of videogames, just as a history of any software "type" or "genre," will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of "borrowers" and "derivers" hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes a decrease in the level of innovation one finds there, until finally, in 2004, gamers are confronted at the videogame store with hordes of cloned videogames and programmers are threatened at the courtroom by battalions of lawyers frantically protecting someone's "intellectual property." The protection that intellectual property law affords software developers is possible only by seizing the rights of the users of that software, even those who legitimately purchase it. As corporate lawyers, CEOs, and investors further entrench themselves in the software market, gamers and programmers will find themselves in the same dismal position as the ship in a game of Space Invaders. --Matt Barton
--The Videogame in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Armchair Arcade)

I left a few (unrelated) comments on Tetris, Galileo, and the open source philosophy on the Armchair Arcade site.

I doubt anyone could accuse me of literature. Online text games tend to have quite a different emphasis than a book. I am not trying to tell a story as much as I am trying to describe a location and an atmosphere. I try to make the descriptions detailed and interesting enough for people to believe they are actually there. I think this is one area the creators and I have tried hard to do well from early on, making the room descriptions very detailed. --David Bennett --Discworld MUD: Slinging Dirt with David Bennett (Armchair Arcade)

Bennett created a MUD based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.

Writers are supposed to be on TV to tell people what to read or to explain how to clean up television, period. When a writer is a regular on television, his or her writing craft has to suffer because you're in make-up when you should have been trying out sentences. Pretty soon, your writing starts to read like what you say on the tube, your writing reads as though it had been dictated. --Jay Cronley --There's a reason they're called 'writers' (ESPN)

I have no clue about the sports controversy being discussed here, but I found it fascinating to read a sporting perspective on a more general media issue.

A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism. --Mark Glaser --To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media (Online Journalism Review)

Another great suggestion from Rosemary.

THE world's newspapers enjoyed buoyant advertising sales in 2003 but overall reader numbers were in marginal decline, according to a report on the state of the industry delivered at the 57th annual World Newspaper Congress today. --Christine Pouget --Newspaper advertising up (Daily Telegraph)

An interesting detail buried in this story: "The distribution of free newspapers - not reflected in the overall figures - grew spectacularly in 2003, rising by 16 per cent."