Cyberculture: March 2006 Archive Page

As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games. Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. --Will Wright --Dream Machines (Wired)

Fine example of a WW II Enigma cipher machine in a very good condition and a great history; full functional. Year of construction 1941 by Manufacturer Chiffriermaschinen Gesellschaft Heimsoeth and Rinke, Berlin. The Enigma machine is placed in an oak woodwork case. Three high-quality, all-metal, matched rotors and an Umkehrwalze ?B?. The rotors are continuous numbered; serial numbers has been removed. There are two spare rotors in an additional small wooden box. Plug board is lettered QWERTZU?, wheels numbered 1-26. 100% Original!!! No Copy!! --Enigma 3 Walzen Chiffriermaschine Chiper Weltkrieg 1941 (eBay)

Wanna buy an enigma machine?

Great photos of the German code machine.

Graham Nelson simulated one of these machines in his text adventure game Jigsaw, and as a result I feel like I've operated one of them.

Calling All Bloggers (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

Mike Edwards and Clancy Ratliffe led a very productive special interest group on weblogs.

The project I had agreed to work on last year, seeking NCTE support for proposing some sort of official statement about the professional and pedagogial value of weblogs, fizzled. The NCTE had its national meeting in Pittsburgh in November, but this meeting had a very narrow focus. When I proposed a panel or workshop on blogs, I was told that it was not a good fit with the intended focus of the November conference. The sudden death of SIG member, blogger, and former CCCC chair John Lovas left me without access to the professional contacts I had been counting on. (Yes, I could have sent an e-mail to any number of peole, but the chance to work with John was one reason I picked this task to follow up on. So it remains incomplete.)

I'm not going to blog much more about this, because we asked Mike to post his notes (which he projected on the overhead as he wrote them -- very efficient) to KairosNews. I'll add a link to it when it appears.

Six of us went out to dinner afterwards, and raised a glass to jocalo. The tag line of his archived website says it all:

John Lovas resides here. Actually, he's a virtual John, a web clone, a cyber presence. John's work is teaching. "Education should help you make a life and make a living," he's wont to say. This virtual residence will tell you more about how John makes a living than the life he has made, but you'll find hints of that too.

Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University, and together they presented what they learned about the nature of research with a teacher who came of age in the world of print tried to teach students who had come of age in the digital world, as they all did ethnograhic research on video games.


I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University.


Joshua Burnett, Kean University, "Differences Between Insider and Newcomer Mindsets in Composition and Literacy Studies."

Yet another reference to James Gee, as part of a lists of books assigned by Sally Chandler to students Burnett and Lopez. But the students did not read the scholarly expertise first, as their teacher had expected. Instead, they considered the gamers themselves the experts, rather than academics who wrote books about gamers, and they were more interested in knowledge gained through interaction. In digital spaces, "the answer" is in a constant state of revision.

Illustrated two different approaches to research mindsets -- automatic orienting features make our own mindsets invisible to us, so that we expect others to see the world as we do.

These mindsets are inherently gendered, raced and classed. They are generally structured by the spaces in which they are acquired.

The Internet Generation and the Print Generation. Internet Gen understands online space in ways that the print generation does not. The print generation cannot understand online spaces in the same way. The print generation was already fully socialized before they encountered the internet, so their encounters with digital technology are informed by the paper-based concepts.

Student encounters with print spaces are, likewise, encumbered with traces of their encounters with digital spaces.

Categories of mindset differences in the internet generation and the print generation – the presentation worked through the criteria of space, knowledge, and self. Too detailed to reproduce the whole chart here, but it was well organized.

There is too much information in the unlimited virtual space, which requires structures for organizing information to help users find and understand what they need. New technology amplifies its powers as it is appropriated and redefined by its users. And how is the location of knowledge affected by the digital age? Student researchers expected to study games by playing games, talking to gamers, visiting gaming sites, participating in gamers' forums, and using print texts at points of need.

Internet generation authors will continue to be frustrated by the reaction of their print generation recipients. [But what about the obligations of print-generation managers to communicate in ways that their internet-generation employees can understand? --DGJ]

Jacklyn Lopez, "A Report from the Digital Contact Zone: Contact Zone Arts and the Hybridization of Literacy Mindsets."

Lopez began with a quote from Mary Louis Pratt on writing in the contact zone.

Lopez and Burnett played games and took notes on their work, and coded their own experiences. The generational difference between the researchers and their instructor led to a disagreement about the "right" way to research games. Lopez and Burnett successfully challenged and modified the print orientation of their collaborative project, suggesting that the digital experience the researchers have confers a kind of authority that balanced the authority of the teacher's position.

Lopez and Burnett developed a kind bilingualism, since they had to to teach her what they learned about game playing. [Of course, when Sally makes a mistake, her character dies immediately; but when she teases her students about not doing the assigned reading, the consequences of their misconceptions aren't as fully and immediately dramatized. --DGJ]

(Shortly after I wrote the above note, Lopez herself noted that her teacher also had to translate what the students couldn't get on their own, and notes that after the research collaboration, the print-generation teacher had picked up internet-generation techniques, and vice versa.)

[Much of Lopez's presentation involved explaining excerpts from the notes that the researchers took. I'm fascinated by the display of a student critiquing her teacher's research methods, and defining her own differences between her style and that of her peer researcher. This kind of ethnographic research is not what I'm personally familiar with, but since it's gamers who are doing it themselves, I'm finding it fascinating to watch. When I see Mary Ann Buckles doing this, or Life on the Screen, or Jim Gee, I'm conscious of what the researchers are missing. –DGJ]

Sally Chandler, "What's Different about Digital Difference?: Communicating across Differences in Technological Mindsets

The focus is really on how changing mindsets demand a response from us in the composition classroom.

Print is: linear, static, permanent, mostly linguistic, complete
Digital is: multi-dimensional, dynamic, in-process, ephemeral, multimodal, interactive.

When we contrast face-to-face communication and print communication, we see that online discourse often has more of the features of face-to-face communication than face-to-face communication does.

Digital writers expect more interaction, while print writers see that expectation of collaboration and feedback as "wrong."

Chandler remixed Lessig and Selfe, covering the ground I've heard being covered in many of the presentations I've chosen to attend. [I particularly like how she's applying it to ethnographic research, in a context in which the research was done by experienced gamers. The CCCCs certainly got its money worth when it invited Lessig to speak last year. Woe to the rhet/comp speaker who was at 4Cs last year but didn't attend the Lessig talk! --DGJ]

Chandler noted that initially, all her students opposed Lessig's concept of CopyLeft, but at the same time they admitted that they themselves had downloaded illegal material. (After a discussion with the students, more came around to seeing the value of Copyleft.)

How is teaching across this digital difference the same as teaching across the traditional categories of race, class, and gender?

At this point, the comparison points us towards the need for a new discourse, in a way that race/class/gender discourse is not new. Internet generation mindset is in many ways a product of white male military-indstrual modes, but the uses of that mode often actively contests and rewrites the dominant discourse that generated it.

In theory, the younger generation has been raised in this new culture, which leads to the possibility for (r)evolution. Digital tech is going to continue to be important, it's not clear who's going to control those concepts of communication.


As part of a lively discussion that followed the presentations, I was trying to say the world "e-mail memo" and it came out "e-mo." That’s not worth blogging as a separate entry, but it’s worth a footnote here.

The History of the Future of Writing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

These are rough notes, typed as the presenters were speaking, and lightly edited back in my hotel room before being posted online.

Helen J. Burgess Washington State University. "Whatever Happened to My MOO?"

Administered Appalachia Moo, had fun building and coding, "absolutely no fun interacting with anybody in it." Likes coding objects.

Talking about how moos are disappearing. "I miss my moo, and I wish it would come back, but it won't."

For a while, it seemed as if Moos and VR were the next big thing. Lambda Moo, Diversity University. Usability problem, the geek problem, and the learning curve inherent in both teaching writing and teaching mooing. Blogs and wikis, in the post moo world, we're moving back towards text as narrative. "Even my mom has a blog. The question i want to ask today is, 'Whatever happened to my moo?'"

Made the intriguing argument that the motion away from moos and towards blogs is a conservative movement, a retreat from earlier attempts to consider writing as code. Blogs have become the medium of choice for journals, self-reflection.... sees blogs as a "conservative move." Said that "given that the mainstream media are pretty slow," blogs may look radical to MSM.

The truth is that "moos freaked us out." Asked to think of ourselves as objects as well as words. "We're no more or less important than any object in the moo." The move to blogs represents a retreat to familiar narrative, and expresses an anxiety about thinking of ourselves as coded objects. "We're moving back in time."

We still find narrative blogs so comforting because they don't force us to think in this manner.

"The retreat to the textual identity construction of the blog" is misleading. Blogs are composed of database objects, discreet chunks, that complicates this sense of blogs as narrative.

[In both cases, the fact that blogs have an easier learning curve means that more non-geeks access blogs than moos, so naturally the sense by which those blog authors think of their online writing will differ from the sense that smaller, more elite group of moo-ers had when they were coding their text. "Push-button publication for the masses," formerly the slogan for MovableType. --DGJ]

The blog objects can be tagged as a category and recategorized by editing a database.

The chunking and recategorization of the database-driven blog makes us relate to the blog as if it is object oriented -- though technically the databases are relational rather than object-oriented. Second Life -- in contrast, it is "true life action" animated. But the basics in Second Life are the same.

You can adjust your avatar according to sliders "so you can make your boobs go -- whoo!" – (gesturing out and in with hands… laughter).

"Looks suspiciously like The Sims Online." The Sims in Second Life are much more like MOOs than they are like games. There's no real point to them... the point is that you build. You can do anything you wanted.

For her, the interaction, building, describing and coding was more fun. "I've seen really bad implementations of writing classes inside Moos." MOOs viewed as the ancestors, not of writing environments, but coding and building environments. "And that's what happened to my moo."


Michael Day, "The History and Future of Machine Logic"

Day -- "I don't claim any originality for anything I'm going to say today." Two scenarios -- one's kind of doomsday, and one's kind of fun.

Doomsday. Most would agree writing has changed quite a bit, with students coming to us with a great deal of experience in digital media. As teachers of writing or composition, we're faced with the need to cover a lot of venues and territories, and the discipline of comp is struggling ot keep up.

Students are adept at social networking interfaces, video games, and informal e-mal. Referred to Kathy Yancey's past keynote, which emphasized the value of keeping up with student multimedia use.

Day referred to Youtube and Flickr and praised the mashups our students are producing.

Day referred to a number of automated processes for marking papers, with vendors claiming that the software does a good job of agreeing with the grades assigned by human assessors.

Software can be fooled by contentless writing that's gibberish but follows the semantic patterns expected by the software.

Day said the Texas Tech model is better, in that the human graders mark papers, though the computer makes that process smoothed. Day wonders what we're losing when students can no longer schmooze and sway their evaluators, since rhetoric is all about schmoozing and swaying.

Day paints a picture in which only the elite classes are marked by the instructors who actually teach the class. A second-tier would be a situation in which student writers are evaluated by Wal-Mart -- that is, humans who don't have personal relationships with the authors. A third tier will only be evaluated by machines.

But is it so bad to use computers to help us write?

It's not the technologies themselves, but the ways they are used to which we have to pay attention. Yes, they can be panoptic and oppressive, but what if we used it in the formative stages in their writing, not the final evaluative stage. Will ETS let us "play" with these tools?

What if the computer were "kind of a straight man, or a differently intelligenced entity" and what if the computer's role was to help us get beyond the limits of our own platitudes and reasoning, could force us out of the box, provide new word for us, new ways of saying.

What about the possibility that computers can help us find new mindsets? Help us create analogies, helping us break out of conventional writing and thinking.

Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator
Yong Poets "Just For Fun" Word Play

Echoed Lessig's consideration of your students as "The Remix Generation" and praised Lessig's talk from last year.

Computer software can help us make the stretch between the known and the unknown.

Voice recognition software and its role in the composition process... we've all had that moment when the student can say it, but can't write it out. "What if we deliberately programmed the computer to misunderstand" and transcribe something else, in order to force composers out of the box.

Introduced the concept of "Babbles" from RiverMOO -- a text game involving software that grabs a "markov chain" (? – sorry, I didn’t catch that) to construct automated orations. He amused the 20 or so in the audience with an emotive oral interpretation of this hilarious mashed-up drivel.

Like most people in the field, Day recommends that we pay attention to the ways computer evaluation can be oppressive, while being open to the ways that it can help us.


Laura Gurak, University of Minnesota, St. Paul. "Writing as Code, Code as Writing."

Began with a personal reflection on how she dropped out of school in her 20s, got an apprenticeship in the printing business, and worked in a small print shop where she learned the business just when computers were changing it.

Reflected on the time she realized she'd spend a lot of time typing. Notes that some people simply aren't meant to write. They may be wired differently, with an oral fluency that doesn't translate to writing.

Moved from a printing apprenticeship to software development.

We cannot figure out what happens under the hood in Word,. "You turn the thing on, and the Clippy comes up and asks, 'What do you want to do?' "

Suggests that for people whose primary genre is speech, it's a great thing to have the computer tell you what to do.

Of classical rhetoric -- most is dead, but ethos is still viable.

Template-driven literacy. "No technical writer really writes anything from scratch." In the real world, they will be expected to work on a huge database, writing in something called "controlled English" so it can be readily translated and localized.

Noted that the documentation for pacemakers was so expensive and wasteful because doctors in the operating room didn't want to spend time reading the instructions anyway -- they would open up the pacemaker and throw away the instructions, One solution was to put the documentation on CDs. Gurak comically mimed trying to boot up a computer while in the operating room. [I couldn’t resist, and called out: "Clippy says, 'What operation do you want to do today?' " Day chipped in with, "I can't do that, Dave." ]

Gurak says she hasn't done much on the aesthetics of code.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday. --Ben Domenech Resigns (post.blog)

That was quick.

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. --John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas --You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!: Why multiplayer games may be the best kind of job training. (Wired)

Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

This was a jam-packed, no-downtime, hardly-time-to-breathe presentation. I'm posting the notes that I took while the presenters were speaking, very lightedly edited afterwards in my hotel room. I hope whatever inadvertent remixing I did while taking these notes doesn't distort their intended message too much. In many ways, this panel felt like the continuation of, and one possible fulfillment of, the discussion raised by a panel from last year's Cs, "Writing Teachers Writing New Media."

Jim Porter addressed the crowed room by noting that plagiarism is, in many respects, a normal part of the writing process. Especially normal in the realm of digital writing. “Composing in the digital age is different.” The technical functions of copy/paste change everything. Remixing makes sense. “We do believe in the ethic of fair use.” The issue of plagiarism is more complex than it’s typically portrayed. Playing copyright police supports the business practices of corporations that have a vested interest in the status quo.


Catherine Latterell, Penn State U, “What is Remix Culture?”

Latterell showed clips and examples of remix culture. “My presentation is very consciously a collage and a sample of other people’s work.” Streetwear movement of customizing sneakers; the tuxedo T-shirt. The remix uses media in ways independent of the original designer’s intentions. The Tangelo and “Sprite Remix.” Pets: Labradoodles. (Labrador poodle.)

Quoted Emerson on Quotation and Originality. “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

A State of the Union remix that chops up Bush’s statements.

Pete Rojas, “Bootleg Culture.”

Office Space meets Super Friends (classic mash-up).

Sampling assumes or recognizes a shared network of meaning.

“Sampling plays games with memory.”

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation.

Sampling implies breakdown of boundaries – truth/meaning, author/audience.

MySpace: The Movie

Lessig: “Everyone in the life of producing and creating engages in this practice of remix.”


James Porter, Michigan State University, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use.”

Reiterated what has been said by people in our field before. “If you don’t like what I say, you can blame all the immoral influences in my life.”

Brian Martin, “Plagiarism: A misplaced emphasis.”

Mark Rose, “The author as proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett”

Lessig – “Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.”

“We are all pirates.” (“Image used without permission of Disney.”)

Criticizes the black and white view of plagiarism, which insists on some gray area, “context-dependent issues” where the answers is “it depends.”

“Be rhetorical about plagiarism.”

Copying without attribution and without permission is not always unethical.

Is it ethical to use somebody else’s design content for a web page, without attribution, if you plug in your own content?

Students – “well it depends on what course you’re doing it in.”

“We are all ‘plagiarists’ “ but in an ethical context.

Chris Dussold was fired for copying another professor’s teaching statement. University couldn’t make a sexual harassment charge stick, so they went after him for the boilerplate teaching. Have we ever plagiarized boilerplate syllabus text without acknowledging the source. Ever use an existing PowerPoint template? Cut and paste bibliography entries? Reuse paragraphs from your own presentations?

Much of our professional work involves reusing templates and boilerplate without attribution. A laboratory director who did little of the actual work may have his name appended to a list of authors.

Plagiarism not reduced to unattributed copying. The real issue is “taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own, in situations where it matters.”

Got a big laugh noting that “like you” he goes to Wikipedia for a definition of a term – in this case, “plagiarism.”

Teach not so much “what is plagiarism” but “how to you make the decision” of what’s right or allowable in which context.



Danielle Nichole DeVoss, Michigan State University. “Pastiche, Remix, the RIAA, and/in the Writing Classroom.”

IANAL

We are digitally literate technoretoricians. Not the hobby horse, but the bull in the china shop.

Our culture clings to an antiquated, romanticized notion of what writng is. Most, if not all writing takes place today in computer-mediated places. (Showed slides of people working together.)

The ability to compose documents with multiple media, to distribute, and to allow audiences to interact with that writing, changes many of the principles and practices of composition, which favors and privileges print-based notions.

(Included Leeroy Jenkins as an example of digital delivery.)

Offered 3 scenarios by “Amy Deel” a master’s student. If students translate and illustrate a piece of writing into a multimedia piece. Most students choose copyrighted material. Can you encourage them to publish their work? Can you publish it yourself in a conference presentation?

“When you’re downloading MP3s, you’re downloading Communism”

Copyright vs Copyleft.chart (attributed it to Jim.)

Puttign writing teachers on the grid almost squarely in the copyright domain.

Jack Valennti – “who’s just a rhetorical treat”

Mapped the values of composition instruction on top of the RIAA values of individual benefits.

Michael Day, once a student project goes public on the web, there is much more to consider. [I botched the 2nd half of the quote.]

Says it is “phenomenally difficult” to secure legitimate permission.


Johndon Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson U.

Begins with remixed movie trailer – Shining.

Plagiarism “as stealing” is about 12% of reported cases. Of more interest is cases where the concept of authorship fails to keep up with the creative processes. Defining “creativity” as the production of an original, unmixed text is a narrow view, idealizing the isolated genius. Take a problem-solving or problem-posing approach should push our students to use existing information to solve real problems. Composition hews pretty closely to those traditional views.

Shift the goal of writing from performance to action in context. Shift away from one extremely limited concept of reality, away from the hidden genius, away from writing as an isolated, de-contextualized process.

We tend to remain committed to that final artifact – original words, produced by the student. The ghost of the authorial genius remains between the lines, propping up what is becoming and increasingly unrealistic artifact in our digital age.

Thinking of composition instead of assemblage of parts, independent of what is original and what was existing. The distinction is “if not meaningless, at least secondary.”

Students recognize the hierarchical value of originality, causing students to hide their borrowed fragments. Focusing on problem-solving values assemblages.

Web design and design patterns – available from numerous sources. (Autocomplete, breadcrumbs, tabs.)

In theory, a web designer could create a new site only from assembling assisting material.

Ethical concerns. “Stop encouraging students to produce original texts all the time. Tell them to work, at least occasionally” on collages. We don’t want students to claim that they wrote something that they didn’t actually write. Honesty about authorship is honesty framed within a binary arrangement between original text and borrowed text… asking students to be “honest” about what they wrote and what they borrowed is simply a tool that helps us preserve the value of the original writing.

Creativity moves to the assemblage. Citation is no longer a way of making subordinate elements in text, but rather a way to reward students for their new skills, to situate texts in preexisting, but new contexts. Their goal should be to filter and remix existing texts in order to solve problems. Students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowing. Encouraging writing instructors to recognize the value of this compositional skill.

Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

As is always the case with a conference blogging exercise, these are my rough notes, typed as the speakers were talking, and lightly edited in my hotel room at the end of the day.

Matthew S. S. Johnson, Indiana University, Bloomington: “Communities in Playspace: Writing and Democracy in Online Communities.”

(I arrived a bit late… I’m going to ask Johnson to send me a copy of his paper so I can do it justice. He says that in the part I missed, he mostly went over composition theory, which is sort of presumed to be a priori knowledge at this conference, though there is only so much of the literary theory in which I was trained that translates into the world of rhetcomp. Thus, I wouldn't mind seeing what Johnson sees is important for laying the groundwork for the use of video game culture in the writing classroom. But since I heard him speak last night and went to dinner with him afterwards, I think I can piece it together reasonably well.)

Johnson was discussing the unique design model of Seed. Developers aren’t stopping their work once the game is released. They will continue to develop the game based on the decisions made by the players. The more players choose a certain mode of interaction (in this game, which has no single conclusion), the more likely the developers will go in that direction.

Johnson also noted the fact that the developers of “Oblivion” courted and encouraged fans to give suggestions for where the previous incarnations of The Elder Scrolls fell short.

Many developers are providing web kits that permit players to make fan sites easily. Gaming corporations do this to garner interest in the games, and even maintain some sense of control over those websites. But the consumers produce fan fiction and other related texts that enhance and build upon the gaming experience. That mass of fan-produced writing does influence the designers as they create the next iteration of the product.

Programmers stand by waiting to see what players will do, and the player actions (in the game and in the writing they do about the game) forms a feedback loop.

Gaming communities create openings that are potential merger points for compositions.


Erin Smith, Michigan Technological University. “Semiotic Domains Reloaded: Literacy and Localization in Video Games.”

An excerpt from a longer work in a publcation edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Havisher, with chapters co-written by scholars and gamers. Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language and Learning presents literacy as a social practice. We need different literacies to function in different semiotic domains. Video games, for Gee, are marked with certain characteristics, shaped by the internal and external design grammar. Within the game world, learners test their cognitive models. Video games provide an environment that can foster active learning.

The game industry provides an extraordinary example of Jameson’s claims about global communication forces. Exemplifies the logic, strategies, and contradictions of a force striving to balance global reach and local appeal. To what extent can we lay claim to cultural information in the world of the game, without considering broader contexts. Sony coined “global localism” rather than forcing local cultures to adapt to global culture. Can range from making sure you have the local slang right, to completely re-writing the narrative. Microsoft has a “geopolitical product strategy team” that pays attention to cultural factors that affect the way their products might be received.

Game developers design game from the outside, with localization in mind. Plot lines that would require too much revision to be localized in other cultures, may be scrapped, or only released locally.

Gee: cultural models are images, storylines, or metaphor that we recognize as “normal.” They remain invisible to us unless we are challenged. For instance, most military games penalize players for killing civilians, but in a game whose name I didn’t catch, settlers are considered combatants, and may be shot without penalty.

Quoted a scholar (the name sounded like “EE woo BOO key”) who notes that Japanese electronic products don’t carry a “cultural odor” that leads consumers to associate those products with Japaneseness. Schoolchildren perceive Japan as “cool” because it created Pokemon, but Japanese computer games and other characters don’t look Japanese. There’s a term for the non-Japaneseness of these characters. (Smith didn’t spell it, so I won’t even try to reproduce it here.)

Referred to a student, Eve, who wrote to the author of David Freedman, Creating Emotions in Games, to challenge his reading of Final Fantasy X. “You stray so far from the reality of the game that it makes me wonder whether you were playing it blindfolded with earplugs.” Eve has a “culturally aware” position, quotes from details in the gameplay in order to defend her critique of Freedman.

Differences in the Japanese voice acting and the American voice acting. The original team’s work on the Japanese game “could have been blown to hell” by a bad translation or a radically different voice interpretation.

If we’re going to start bringing games into the classroom, contextualize them, and it will serve our literacy goals more fully if we do.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked about the idea that the Japanese are using their electronic products to represent themselves culturally as westernized, that therefore their products do have a “cultural odor.”


Alice Robinson, University of Wisconsin Madison. “Videogame Design as a Writing Process.”

Works with Jim Gee. Robinson’s goal is to determine designer intent. Do designers intend the active critical learning results that researchers note when they study gamers?

Gunther Kress, “Design shapes the future through production.” Design is a cognitively higher activity than critique, which looks backward at a text.

As a linguist, Gee looks at rule systems. The “internal design grammar” is a “complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways.” You have to go beyond the internal design grammar if you ever want to get good at the game, and reach for the external design grammar. Players become readers of the IRD, but also a writer, since nothing happens unless you do something first. Players are demanding a lot more from game designers, demanding more from their interactive experiences with games as texts. Genre molding, mixing genres is part of the future of games.

Robinson repeated the designer/player, writer/reader, teacher/student slide that was a central part of her SIG presentation last night. Her research focus separates designers from marketers, artists, sound engineers, etc.

Quotes from one designer shows he is thinking very clearly about what people say, in a social environment, about the games they played. I think the audience responded meaningfully when Robinson invited us to imagine what our own authorship process would be like if we thought first and foremost about what our readers will say to each other. Paraphrasing the designer’s goal, Robinson said, “I want students [probably Robinson’s Freudian slip for “players” … speaking energetically from notes, she actually made this substitution several times] to have memories about playing my games, and I design my game to create those memories.”

The designer is not creating individual activities, but rather the environment. Killing a dragon is an isolated task, much like doing a worksheet. The task itself is part of a larger problem-solving effort. Designers want players to outsmart them.

[I like how Robinson moves back and forth between the designer/player relationship and the teacher/student relationship. I wonder if “problem solver” makes sense.]

If the end statement is “I can’t believe you can set everything on fire!” that means something different from putting a flamethrower in the game. In curriculum design, starting with “I want students to write a research paper” is akin to putting a flamethrower in a game.

In response to my question about the function of pedagogy in game design, she admitted that she is focusing on “the most progressive designers,” whose games are instantiations of the new literacy studies theories.


During the Q & A, Cynthia Selfe expressed concern that English teachers are “going to muck it up.” She thought about that phrase, and came up with instead the delightfully oxymoronic notion that we will "muck it up" because we, as English teachers, “tidy up” the genres that we pull into the classroom. She encouraged us to think about this genre as the students’ space, and encouraged us to respect this genre and learn from the students.

Johnson noted that he’s very careful about writing about the gaming communities that he doesn’t participate in, so that he doesn’t “take the data” that belongs to the game world.

Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish? (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Lila Harper, Central Washington University, Ellensburg. “What Can We Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses?”

Is often asked, “Why in the world are you reading so many of these theses?” For the past 3-4 years, she has read, copy-edited and checked the references of every completed MA thesis. Not normally on the grad committee, nor directing student research. With the help of a half-time assistant, she checks theses for correctness. About 50-60 theses a year. Also teaches in composition, has cross-disciplinary experience.

Initially assumed that plagiarism would not be a problem. Found a student’s thesis that included an unexplained acronym, and when searching to see whether it should be spelled out, she found the student had plagiarized several pages from someone else’s website. While communicating expectations about plagiarism is very important for foreign students, she finds problems across cultures. Graduate students often fail to clarify indirect or secondary citations. (Some faculty argued that there is no need to differentiate between direct and indirect citations.) Some students assume that one only needs quotation marks when the student quotes the entire sentence. She notes that some of this confusion is tied to the kind of style manual the student refers to. Plagiarism at the MA level is particularly troubling, since students are no longer considered outsiders who are being asked to write in the discourse mode of the insiders. By completing an master’s thesis, the student is demonstrating membership in that scholarly community.

She focuses not on the theft of knowledge, but on the value of transparency and accuracy that is threatened when full citations are considered a last-minute formality. Poor citations damage reproducibility. She noted that faculty members in the humanities often assume that handbooks from other disciplines do a good job teaching the rules surrounding citation. She found that style manuals were prescriptive (direct, emphatic guidance – thou shalt do this, focused towards researchers), permissive (which emphasizes options; Chicago Style Manual is much more optional that MLA – these are focused towards editors, describing general practices in particular journals); descriptive (in the sciences, where students are given different examples and presumably left to their own devices).

She showed examples from the MLA Style Book and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, in which Hacker was more strict than the MLA. While she had to cut considerably from a longer article, she concluded with a list of practical guidelines. Her final statement was the suggestion that introductory textbooks use the citation style that students will be expected to demonstrate.


Joel Bloch, The Ohio State University, “Blogging about Plagiarism: Dealing with the Problems of Generation 1.5 Students in an Academic Classroom.”

Bloch began by referring to his earlier work, in which he argued for the abolishment of the criminal metaphor for plagiarism, and instead suggests a games metaphor, in which there are rules that have consequences, and the rules must be discovered through active efforts. He focuses on immigrants who came to America during their school years. He described a course that is “all plagiarism, all the time.” He describes the plight of ESL students strangled by the 5-paragraph essay they were forced to write in high school. The metaphor “we stand on the shoulder of giants” reminds us that literacy is important in learning new information. The organizational patterns of academic writing force student to make abstractions. Vernacular literature achieves cohesiveness with “and,” but academic literacies require writers to show a wider variety of connections, and to make those connections more explicit. A writing sample showed a combination of “and” and more complex linkages (I didn’t catch the technical term he used to describe those connections).

I was fascinated by his discussion of how the military leadership of Somali positioned a literacy program as a weapon against foreign influences, but I’m not typing much because I’m still waiting for the “blogging” part of the talk. I’m not quite sure what to make of his references to the movie Girl, Interrupted, which seemed unnecessary. (Of course, maybe I missed something, since I'm multitasking, listening and writing at the same time. I'm not just taking notes, I'm composing complete sentences and correcting typos, so perhaps I missed something because my attention is divided.)

He uses blogging as a way to give students the opportunity to develop their ideas in the classic process-oriented classroom, but also a way they can express themselves using the vernacular. He also has students cite each other (a strategy I also use for informal class discussions). He asked students to blog about their personal lives, with the understanding that whatever they write can be read by anyone. He compared the work ethic and family importance of the blogs his generation 1.5 students write, the social blogs written by students who attend his daughter’s “wealthy” private school. [But those girls are not writing for academic credit. Certainly the generation 1.5 students have a cultural perspective that may distance themselves from the boys/friends/pop culture topics one expects to find in an adolescent girls’ weblog community, but I’m sure that when those girls become college women writing for their professors, they will change the topics they write about for class.]

Students either worked so closely with primary texts that they plagiarized, or they moved so far away from them so quickly that they barely mentioned them. (He also asks students to blog responses to an article before contributing a more formal reflection.)

Indicated that building a whole course around plagiarism was designed to let students write from a position of expertise. Presented an example in which a West African student drifted away from the text completely, contrasted with Asian students who stuck very closely to the text.

“By using blogs as a form of continuous online discussion,” it was hoped students would use them “any way they wished.” The study focused on a single student, so he was cautious about conclusions.


Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. “Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms for Scholarly Publishing.”

Palmquist says the scholarly publishing crisis is “overblown.” In fact, there is so much demand for scholarly works, there isn’t enough capacity to meet it. [There was a bit of a buzz in the audience at that, but we resolved to save our questions until he’s finished. He says there are more books being published now than ever before, but of course they’re expensive, small runs.]

Noted that a small press can be put out of business if it misjudges the market for the book. “Academic publishing is essentially a barter system. We do the work, they take the risks… it works out pretty well.”

Notes that the acquisitions editors may only have MAs, which calls the system into question. A really successful book has 3000 copies. Printing and distribution technologies require 9-14 months, so books are already out of date when they hit the shelves.

Sympathy for junior colleagues in the humanities, where books are so central to the faculty evaluation process.

Argues for adopting a digital publishing model that enhances, rather than replaces, the traditional model. No change at the initial analysis (is the idea good), but drop the market analysis, replacing it instead with a faculty analysis. If it’s a good book that only 400 people would be interested in, a digital publication model can do a better job. Instead of in-house publishers doing all the editing of a book, shift that responsibility to the editors of series. Shift the copyediting to faculty, in collaboration with students. Cut down the publication time to as little as a month. “I’ve actually done it in a week.”

Estimated 10-20 thousand people see a very successful book.

He proposes a model of publishing a free digital web version, and also a print-on-demand version. Example – wac.collegestate.edu “Writing Selves and Writing Societies.” A PDF of the entire book downloaded 21,000 times. 67,000 visits to the site, 31,000 unique individuals.

“Legitimacy should be a reflection of the strength of the editorial review board.” Says there’s a fundamental flaw in the system if commercial viability is such an important part of the publications winnowing process.

Benefits of a distributed, collaborative publication mode.

1. Reduces distributed costs.
   
2. Authors retain copyright.
   
3. Supports publication of work that would not be commercially viable.
   
4. Ensures scholarly merit is the most important factor.
   
5. Reduces amount of time to get work out there.
   
6. Increases access to published work.
   
7. Ensures that the work is easily accessible for longer periods of time.

Mike Edwards (sitting next to me as I type) asked the speakers whether they had any concerns about people blogging their presentations. Harper said she hadn’t had much experience with conference bogging. Bloch said he blogged last year, so he’d be hypocritical if he complained. Palimquist said it depends on what the bloggers are writing. [I joked, “Oh, I’m slamming you completely!” and he said “Then I’ll come after your website!”]

Another audience member noted that the elite quality of opera is what gives it its cultural cache. Palimquist noted that Stuart Moluthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s earlier promises that everyone will be a publisher is a bit misleading, since “I don’t have time” to be my own publisher.

Palimquist ended with an invitation to anyone who has an idea for a good book to send it to him.

1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

I arrived early at this session and spent some time reconnecting with Matt Barton, whom I know from previous conferences. Barton is working on a book on graphic adventure games, and gave me some suggestions on what I might do with my interactive fiction work. I really enjoy his work on Armchair Arcade.

Another early arrival was Matthew S. S. Johnson, a dyed-in-the-wool narratologist. I told him that Jesper Juul, whose dissertation slammed interactive fiction and the mythology surrounding it, has moderated his position in his new book, Half Real, which works towards integrating narratology and ludology.

The three of us discussed our hopes that the CCCC video gaming community, which is just beginning to form, will last.

The first speaker, Alice Robinson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke on, “What Videogame Designers Can Teach Writing Instructors.” She works under James Gee. She began with some statistics from a recent Pew study demonstrating how pervasive computer games are in mainstream popular culture. Since students are often casually gaming in one window while they are doing homework in another window, Robinson discussed the relationship between what happens in the brain when one plays a game, and what happens in the brain when one writes a composition. Finishing a four-hour session with Civ IV involves reviewing the charts and data that the game displays as part of the end-of-game debriefing. She touched on the “embodied cognition” aspect of video games, which I presume refers to the fact that people learn in many ways, and that the direct manipulation of the simulated environment ties into our hard-wired system that lets us learn through interaction with the real world. Robinson noted that good games have a “design grammar,” and compared the “designer/player” relationship to the “teacher/student” and “reader/writer” relationship. All the theory that identifies positive ways that the teacher/student and reader/writer dichotomy can interact with each other and enrich our understanding of texts, the designer/player relationship is perhaps even more suited to helping us understand the many positive ways that that barrier is transgressed (I’m using my own words here – she is going very quickly through the introductory material.) Her research involves interviewing professional game designers. She spoke positively about the connections between creating a world and teaching; notes that designers are interested in the metaskills their players develop. [But when I attended the Serious Games summit, it was very clear that the “fun vs. pedagogy” debate was alive and kicking, with the designers feeling pushed around by the authority that serious games projects gives to the curriculum designer.] that writers often fail many times, and games can help motivate us to try again.

Mark Mullen, from The George Washington University, presented “Designs on the Future: Student-Authored Game Design Documents in the First-Year Writing Class” looked at student-authored design documents (including help files). He taught a course called, “I’m Game: Exploring the Art, Science and Economics of Electronic Games,” as part of a first-year writing and research course, and spoke of it as a pre-disciplinary critical thinking course. (A little later he spoke of it as a technical writing course, and contrasted it to the literary analysis one finds in most other writing courses.) One of the two sections of this course was entirely female, the other was with two exceptions all male. While about 45% of women acknowledge playing games, women wouldn’t consider Solitaire or Freecell as “games,” when the dominant cultural paradigm for “computer games” involves combat and killing. The students also developed the criteria they used to evaluate their own assignments. All the students played American MaGee’s Alice, a nightmare version of Alice in Wonderland. Students developed a group contract, a design treatment, a “pitch meeting,” prep of the final draft, and the students scored each other’s proposals based on the criteria they had set up. AR2076 – a “horrifically violent” first-person shooter proposed by three women. Players had to recover each of the 10 original amendments in the Bill of Rights, and each level was themed on each of the original amendments. Bringing George Washington back from the dead to spew wooden teeth, etc. In writing classes, we only ask students to do simulation activities… asking them to create a design document pushed them beyond that paradigm. “Some of the best writing I’ve seen freshmen produce, bar none.”

Matthew S. S. Johnson, of Indiana University Bloomington: “Revisiting Rivalry: Computer Game Competition as an Invention Strategy.” (Matthew, do you have a home page?) The competitive spirit of gamers can encourage and inspire in online environments. Johnson noted that in the last 20 years, rhetoricians have lauded motions away from competition and “victor and vanquished,” towards a more nurturing model. But in MMORPGs, the competition is not the point – the point is personal improvement; such a game never “ends,” so nobody is ever a “loser.” All those who keep playing keep improving. Competition is seen as negative because of the victor/vanquished dichotomy; Johnson notes that there is joy, forgiveness, strength, action, and nobility in computer games. Competitive elements in MORGs are in the background, motivating characters, while players write to each other in forums, blogs, walkthroughs, guides, etc. The gamer community includes a way for players to give feedback to modders, whether feedback to aid in revision, or a review intended for other potential players. Mod contributors compete with other modders, but they also benefit. Collaboration is not opposed to competition; can serve as a valuable incentive to discuss and write.

Matthew Barton turned the discussion over to the audience of about 10. “Why are you here?”

The first comment from the audience was from a 1st year comp teacher at Fresno State Calif; he says that video games are legitimate texts that have been “completely ignored, almost to the point of humiliation, by academia,” and praised CCCC for scheduling such a session.

Another audience member said he was interested in methodology. “We want to teach them to look at things critically,” and was using for methods to integrate games rather than just show video clips. [I should look up Kurt Squire’s dissertation, on games in education.]

I piped up to invite attendees to look up “New Games Journalism,” and recommended “Bow, Nigger.” (Obviously, there's offensive language on the other end of that link.)

Samantha Blackmon Somebody sitting near Samantha Blackmon mentioned her research on Second Life, and strongly recommended the wikis being written by gamers.

Another speaker says she has used games in intermediate comp classes. She says some students say they don’t really play games. [Chatter from the audience: I’m not a gamer, but… I’m not a writer, but… I’m not a feminist, but…] Her focus is on rhetorical representations of otherness in video games. (Race, gender, and sexual orientation.) Robinson asked this speaker to comment on what to do when the public expects all research on games to focus on the media effects, particularly on children. “Try to move them away from, ‘This is evil, and it must die.’” [Mullen’s ornery response: “Why are you so afraid of your children?”]

While everyone hadn’t yet had the chance to speak, Barton noted the time was nearly up, so we shifted briefly into strategizing mode, as group members ponder the challenges we will face from colleagues who don’t see videogames as legitimate.

When the event broke up, those of us who hadn't made other plans met up with Charlie Lowe and Bradley Bleck, and went out to get some Chicago pizza. (I could've used a third slice, but Brad looked very, very hungry.)

The dress code at CCCCs varies. Matthew S. S. Johnson looks like The Man (though the pastel tie and the ponytail work against that image). Matthew Barton said the shirt he didn't bring was even geekier:

load "*",8,1

I'm proud to say I'm geek enough to recognize that as a Commodore 64 command. (Back then, we didn't need no steenkin' icons.)

Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

The wireless internet access at the Palmer House Hilton charges an hourly rate, so I’ll batch-post my notes to my blog when I get back to my hotel. As is always the case with live blogging (or near-live blogging), these will be rough notes that I took during the speaker’s presentations. These notes will be colored by my own subjective opinions of what is blogworthy.

Looking through the program for this year’s 4Cs in Chicago, I’m annoyed to see that Clancy Ratliff’s talk on “Coalition-Building on Weblogs” and Stephen Krause’s talk on “Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections” are scheduled at the same time.

But I won’t be going to either of them, because instead I’m going to “Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies.”

Not only have these three sessions been scheduled at the same time, they’re listed one after the other in the program.

But wait – that’s not all. At the same time there’s a “Computer Connection” session on “Usability and Remediation,” and the same session also includes, “Leeroy Jenkins! Gaming and Visual Argumentation.”

Leeroy Jenkins is a character in a machinima video taken from within the MMO World of Warcraft. The video shows an over-eager gamer completely ruin the meticulous plans that his guild formulates while he was not paying attention. It’s pretty clear to me that the whole thing was staged, but it’s still hysterical.

Here in the lobby of the Hilton, people are gathering in small groups, looking through the conference program. We’re managing our resources, planning our strategy, and networking.

But I don’t want to have to plan. I don’t want to have to choose. At least, not at 3:15 on Thursday, when, in order to bring home all the treasure I really want, I’d have to run around checking out four different sessions at the same time, waving my PDA stylus and threatening everyone with my digital camera, firing off questions, perhaps screaming like Leeroy Jenkins himself.

Oh, well. At least I have chicken.

They're meant to educate people by simulating real-world events and are often created with the best of intentions. Problem is, education, science and health care aren't exactly the stuff of exciting entertainment, let alone video games. --Daniel Terdiman --What's wrong with serious games? (C|Net News.com)

Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with the word "entertanment," since that carries the idea that the entertainer is doing the work, and the entertained just sits there. Sitting in front of a TV may require mental work to connect the dots in the plot and understadnd the jokes, but a game that involved doing nothing but watching a plot unfold would be boring. I'm not implying that Terdiman doesn' t know what a game is. It's just the choice of the word "entertaining" grates on me.

Oh newfanglenesse! Y have learned the privitees of the manye abbreviaciouns ywritten on the internette. OMG: "oh mine ++DOMINUS++". ROFL: "rollinge on the floore laughinge". IRL: "in reale lyfe." WTF: "whatte the swyve?"

Beinge somethinge of an innovator myselfe, Y presente to yow, churles and gentils alle, the followynge abbreviaciouns. May they serven yow welle in your internette communicacioun:

GP: gentil person

WC: woole customes

XC: Exchequer

BATJG: biggere arsehole thanne john gowere

BSL!: by seinte loy!

OTPBRB: Offe to parliamente, be ryghte back

SNAPFU - BYXCA: supposedely nyce annuitie paymente fuckede uppe by the XC againe

KRBMA: Kynge Richarde II buggynge me againe

AOMSHJDOTBD: anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death

EISBYMIWATCHDNSTHD: eftsoon I shall be ycleped mad if worke atte the customes house doth not settle the helle downe --abbreviaciouns (Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog)

Protagonist --> click --> a regional Canadian airline
Protagonist = pilot
Setting --> click --> some African herd animal
Setting = a savannah
Problem --> click --> some antidepressant drug
Problem = need to acquire medicine
Antagonist --> click --> some historical doctor
Antagonist = a doctor who won't dispense the medicine (nice synch on that one)

Now adapt the above to a Fantasy setting. The protagonist is a dragon rider. He's been sent afield to acquire some healing herbs for his dying king. He seeks out a Druid on the savannah who is reluctant to part with the herbs. He must talk the Druid into trading the herbs, or fight him and take them. --[Using Wikipedia to Conquer Writer's Block] (PartiallyClips)

Use Wikipedia's's "random article" link to generate story ideas.

The 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards will devote a portion of the ceremony to honoring a group of individuals whose efforts stand out in the advancement of the interactive entertainment industry. The ceremony, which is produced and hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and presented by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), will take place on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.

Will Crowther and Don Woods, creators of the text-based game Adventure, will receive the First Penguin award for leading the path to unchartered grounds by creating the first text-based Role Playing Game (RPG). --6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

There never has been a better time to get into Web journalism. We are making money, we are hiring, and we are actively searching for new, innovative ideas. After ten years, there are no veterans in this field. This is your chance to be among the first. --Anthony Moor --Go to the Web, young journalist! (Online Journalism Review)

Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong.

"They kept referring to the games, 'Play the game,' and since I had been working on a project called "Animalympics," the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games," the director said. "Then I thought, 'Well, our warrior should be in a gladiatorial game setting.' From there the whole thing started to snowball." It seems only fitting, then, that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created. --David Konow --Tron's World: The Dawn Of Tron  (Tom's Hardware Guide)

Pong was certainly an early video game, but it was not "the first video game ever created." Tennis for Two was made in 1958, some 14 years before Pong.

Singer says he plans to use the late Marlon Brando in the new film. Brando, who played Superman's father, Jor-El, in the 1978 Superman and died in 2004, will return in the same role.

Singer says he found stock footage of Brando shot by director Richard Donner in 1978, which will provide Brando's voice. Special-effects crews will digitally re-create Brando's image, Singer says. --'Superman' torch is passed (Yahoo!)

Stella! I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse! This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination. The horror! The horror! I coulda been a contender!

Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story.

But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you find your man vs. machine story relying on a human-edited source or from an algorithm? --Ryan Singel --Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War (Wired)

The opening to this article is more creative than the body, but it's still a useful overview.

Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week's post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I've added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran into some file-name snags. Nothing major -- I just didn't feel like doing a lot of renaming manually. (There's got to be a way to batch process this kind of thing.)

Since this past week was Spring Break, my wife scheduled a lot of family activities. I still got to the office three days during the week, but much of that time was taken up with writing a letter of recommendation for one student, helping a different student apply for funds, and working on a new website for one of the campus units. I enjoy doing that stuff -- it's the kind of thing that gets squeezed out of a typical day during a typical week. I wouldn't exaclty say I enjoyed looking over 10 folders from applicants who don't meet our SAT admissions requrements, but it is important work that I take seriously; we actually have 20 folders to look at by Tuesday, but I wanted to get a head start on the stack. In addition, the pending release of an update to the interactive fiction programming language Inform has gotten me to pay more than the usual amount of attention to the world of contemporary text-adventure gaming.

So I haven't fired up Hammer (the Half-Life 2 world-building tool) for several days.

I have laid the groundwork for some future accomplishments. I had to leave my work computer on overnight, but it finally downloaded Steam. I confess I didn't get much modding done, since I took the opportunity to replay the beginning of Half-Life 2, marvelling at the graphics (which look great on the screen of my tiny Dell 700m laptop, but which look even better on my more powerful work computer). But theoretically, now I can test out the FacePoser (which crashes when I try it at home).

I also asked my university for the funds to buy a few copies of XSI, a powerful 3D model tool. For the purposes I have in mind, each student won't need an individual copy. In a note I wrote to my dean, I likened XSI to a kiln, and noted that when I did a ceramics project in the third grade, I didn't need my own kiln. I molded my clay and gave it to my teacher to bake. Later, I put on the glaze, and she baked it again. Okay, that metaphor sort of messes up the whole Steam/Hammer/Forge thing that Valve Software has going, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I also let our networking folks know about my desire to teach with Steam this fall. I'll need to find out what computer lab I'm going to have to use, so I can book it now.

Also in the "planning ahead" category, I've got to put together a syllabus for a games programming course that a nearby college has asked me to teach online.

From my server logs, I've noticed that my modding diary is starting to attract hits from search engines. I can't imagine that I'd be of much help right now, but I plan to keep chronicling my progress, so that people who are even greener newbies than I am might learn a thing or two, and people who've been so kind to post helpful online tutorials can bask in the link love I shall bestow upon them.

Next on my modding to-do list: Probably working a little more on the lighting, adding a working light switch and some exterior light fixtures. Maybe some grass, too. I'd also like to figure out how to get bright sunlight to come down from the sky -- right now the only light comes from artificial sources I've placed around my model.

I don't know that I'll get to it in the coming week, but I'm eager to figure out how to get my NPCs to respond to my actions. I'd also like to record some original dialog and get an in-game NPC to speak it.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 3 -- Trees, Wall Sconces, Ceiling Fixtures (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here.

>Talk elf

"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty years ago the Dwarf Lord Al'ham'bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the ..."

> Click Accept

"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven ..."

> Click Accept

"OK, fine. Bring me six kobold tails."

> Shout "Where are the Kobolds?" --Lore Sjöberg --WOW: the Text Adventure (Wired)

Apparently, World of Warcraft is getting too texty.

In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade 'Just Fun' in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. --Daniel P. Hower --Classic Arcade Sounds: Hear for Yourself (CoinOpVideoGames.com)

Visuals, schmizuals! We don't need no steenkin visuals! Thanks to Mike Sichok for pointing out this little piece of heaven. Mike writes,

I love that you can also hear adjacent games in the background.. such as if you pick "Zaxxon," you can also hear "Berzerk" and "Frogger" being played nearby. I forgot how ear shattering loud games were back then.. I remember a ton of bass, such as in "Tron," and "Asteroids," but geez. Hardcore.... kill the lights, turn on the blacklights, and turn this up.. I am in vintage bliss.

The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition "Ballet mécanique" by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC--in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art.

Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) under the direction of Eric Singer, this will be the culmination of eight years of work bringing Antheil's almost-forgotten work-for xylophones, bass drums, electric bells, siren, airplane propellors, and 16 player pianos-back to life. And it will be LOUD.

Featuring computer-driven player pianos by Gulbransen, and software from Mark of the Unicorn running on a Macintosh G5 computer, the installation will reside on the Mezzanine of the Gallery through March 29, playing a ten-minute version of the Ballet mécanique at 1:00 pm every day, and additionally at 4:00 pm Monday-Friday.
The grand opening of the Ballet mécanique installation will take place at 1:00 pm on Sunday, March 12. JUST ANNOUNCED is a special PRESS EVENT at 4:00 pm on Saturday, March 11, when the piece will be previewed to CBS News, PBS, and other news organizations. The public IS INVITED!

More information about the Ballet mécanique can be found at http://antheil.org. LEMUR's website is http://lemurbots.org. The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue. Admission is always FREE. Their website is http://www.nga.gov.

In other exciting news, BAD BOY MADE GOOD, the documentary film by Paul Lehrman and Ron Frank about George Antheil and the Ballet mécanique, will have its broadcast premiere on WETA-TV Channel 26, Washington's PBS station, on Sunday, April 9th at 3:00 pm. Dates for other broadcasts will be announced soon.Bad Boy Made Good (http://antheil.org)

I just got this e-mail. I wish I could see this! Someone in the DC area, please go to this and let me know what it's like!

If you think steam punk is cool, it looks wimpy next to Ballet Mechaniqe, which was punked out on steam long before steam punk became retro.

My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I've made some good progress.

Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I'd been going crazy because I had turned off "helpers," which means that I couldn't see the blue sphere that all the tutorials mentioned was supposed to mark the site of the hinge.

Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy urban dystopia, so the image files that depict stock materials (wood panels, plaster ceilings, brick walls) all look pitted and rough. While I don't want to spend forever fiddling with images, I began to realize last week that the image files really aren't just window dressing. The availability of appropriate images really does affect what items I choose to work on.

I found a few texture packs that expand the number of materials available to Hammer (the 3D world tool I'm using), but I was having trouble following a tutorial to load just one custom texture. The comments at the end of the tutorial indicate that I'm not the only one suffering from similar problems. After several hours and several tries, I finally figured out where the custom textures should go, and how to find them within the 3D editor when I wanted to use them. (Those textures came in an "rar" archive. While I already had a tool that was supposed to deal with "rar" files, when I decompressed the file the target folder was always empty. So I had to upgrade to the 30-day trial version of Power Archiver. When that runs out, I'll have to take a look at open-source archiving tools.

With that under my belt, I downloaded a pack of hundreds of new textures, including the tile floor, panel walls, and wood beam that you can see in the image. In this model, I added a ceiling, though now the lights are just emanating from nowhere. I'll have to create some light fixtures.

The tree visible outside the window comes with Half-Life 2, and I guessed correctly that it was possible to change its "skin" to add a few leaves. Not many. I'll have to keep looking if I want to use some healthy trees.

I took the gun away from the NPC Alyx, so now she's a little less aggressive. I'm not sure how to adjust her behavior, but at least she fits in slightly better in the realistic office setting I'm trying to create.

The wood panel walls are actually too fancy for the generic office settings, but I do want to create a courtroom at some point, so I don't mind experimenting with this design scheme.

The next big "proof of concept" for me is to import models of ready-made furniture. The desk visible in the photo comes with the game. I've seen textures that I can apply to simple cubes in order to get bookcases, file cabinets, bulletin boards, and the like. While I love adventure games, with secret panels containing keys that unlock more secret panels, the mod I'm working will need few functioning props (other than doors). Still, I've seen ready-made models of computer desks, TV sets, kitchen appliances, and even a collection of SWAT vehicles (that might be very useful for the police station that I hope will be in the mod).

I had to hack the URL at Wadfather in order to get past the ridiculously complex navigational system. (The link goes directly to the "Real World" textures I'll need.)