Aesthetics: April 2006 Archive Page

In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books will ever appeal again to young scholars. But it was through the laborious handling of concrete books that I learned how to survey material, weigh evidence, and spot innovative categorizations or nuggets of brilliant insight. Many times, the biggest surprises revealed themselves off-topic on neighboring shelves. --Camille Paglia --Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother (Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics)

Paglia is always stimulating, if not always comprehensible. (This is actually one of her more accessible essays.)

As founder of the tech meet-and-greet dorkbot events, and the annual robot talent show ArtBots, Repetto has organized exhibits and meetings that have made it easier for geeks everywhere to learn about new, cool tech projects in their communities. --The Geek Mind Behind Dorkbot (Wired)

The gathering was the monthly meeting of "Dorkbot," a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world.

[...]

Repetto has finished a project called "foal table." The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that transformed into a horse. Repetto watched videos of foals being born and carefully calibrated a mechanical table to make it walk in the awkward, stumbling manner of newborn horses.

"What it's supposed to do is ridiculous because it's a table and there is no reason for it to be walking," Repetto said.

The idea is therefore perfectly Dorkbot -- a name that Repetto says is meant to appeal to people who like to stand back and experience awe in technology and creativity. --'Dorkbot' Meetings Develop Cult Following

Reading this article made me go "Ahhh!" Now that's taking control of technology.

Video game studies? Yes, please. And I don't just mean in gaming schools. Critical perspectives have been developing as well. Metafilter is already wise to ludology,but what about its mother discipline, ergotics? Don't forget narrative and storytelling. Of course, if cultural studies, or education is your thing, that's covered too.

Other programs focus on application and aesthetics.

Perhaps MeFites are catching on? --The seedy academic underbelly of video games (Metafilter)

You can like a poem before you understand it, and be moved by it, and in fact, that is a sign that you're starting to understand it, that you're reading the poem in a good way. Being moved by a poem -- laughing or feeling sad or full of longing -- or being excited by it, or feeling (maybe you don't know why) the "rightness" of the poem is a serious part of reading and liking poetry. You may find what you read to be beautiful, or be reminded of places and times, or find in it another way to look at things. All this can help you to understand the poem because it brings it closer to you, makes it a part of your experience. And the better you understand a good poem, the more you'll like it. --Kenneth Koch --Reading Poetry -- from Sleeping on the Wing (Random House)

I came across this passage out of context on another website, and recognized it as being from the introduction of a collection of poems I've taught from before.

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. --Tadhg Kelly --''Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun.'' (Particle Blog)

Via Grand Text Auto.

I liked this author's argument that in video games, "fun" is a means, not an end. Still, this passive-verb-heavy passage prompted me to post a bit about the intentional fallacy:

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

Fanny Pack

This is great if you're trying to create a singularity of pure geekness that will open up a portal to an alternate universe where they're still making episodes of Reboot. But if there are even two working neurons in the style portion of your brain, the same neurons that explained that Mr. T's haircut won't look as good on you, then you're going to want to pass on this one. On the other hand, if you've burned those neurons out through years of cosplay, more power to you. Just don't stand near me. --Lore Sjöberg -- Gotta Ditch the Fanny Pack, Dude (Wired)

Ditch the fanny pack?

Over my cold, dead, fanny.

Update: My sister just threatened me with this.

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence, and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration.

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

The researchers also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.

"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. --Charlotte Higgins --A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion (Guardian)

Not exactly a scientific study, but still interesting.

This list of Best Geek Novels Written in English certainly fits the stereotype of male literature, though I wonder how that list would change if you separated it into male geeks and female geeks.

He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. --Robert Frost --Birches (Bartleby)

When I was five my family moved from the world of sidewalks and fenced-in backyards to an underdeveloped area where, at night in the winter when all the leaves were down, you couldn't see the lights from any neighboring houses. We had a gravel driveway that led up from an unpaved, very bumpy road that had no official speed limit. The shoulders of the road were very high, so that the road really ran in a kind of a trough, and I could play in the woods and climb up the trees and watch the cars go zooming by, far beneath me.

I have no idea if it was a birch, but one tree in particular had long, smooth limbs that stretched out over the road.

I'm stunned as I think back on it, but I did sometimes climb out across the road and ride a tree limb down to the ground. There really weren't all that many cars on the road, but the shoulders were little cliffs, that loom in my memory two or three times my height. I picture them as 20 feet high, but I was shorter then, so maybe they were only about 12 feet.

I loved the freedom that this image suggests.

It was great to be a kid when I had that much space to move around in. My son doesn't have that kind of freedom. We do have a nice backyard and friends in the neighborhood. In a pro-videogames article, ""Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" Henry Jenkins writes,

My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard. He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some blocks away which we could go on outings a few times a week and where we could watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask "Where?"

But, he did have video games...

Not quite the same thing as dangling by a tree branch over the road, but serving much the same desire to explore and to take risks.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 7 -- Gleaming Translucent Chandeliers, Detail of Railing, Heavy Object Designing (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This week I finally managed to make my chandeliers look decent. Previously I had placed an invisible light-emitting entity inside a solid translucent block, but that unfortunately left the outside edges of the block looking very dark. So this time I created four thin transparent walls, and put the light inside all four walls. In addition, I placed extra light sources outside the chandelier, to create the glowing effect that I wanted.

The picture shows that I also added some chandeliers to the top level of the balcony. You can also see the woodgrain railings, though at this resolution the 45 degree angle join is only barely noticeable.

I actually spent much more time on the room I haven't shown yet. To give meaning to my new media meanderings, I'm trying to create a Half-Life 2 mod that implements Cloak of Darkness, a very simple scenario that's been implemented in dozens of different programming environments. That scenario is set in the lobby of an opera house, and features a bar (which I'm working on) and a cloakroom (that I haven't started yet).

While designing the bar, for the first time I've worked extensively with angled wall shapes -- complicated modular units that I duplicate and rotate in order to form a circle. The circle is divided up into 10 sections, so I created a large 36 degree wedge, then used it to cut out a kind of trough, and then placed my wall unit in the trough, and used the trough to cut the wall unit into a piece that has 36 degree edges. Since the world-building feature isn't designed to work with resolutions of smaller than one inch, the modules I'm creating are going to be a little off, but I'm not too worried.

These wall units are so complex that I should really be creating them in a 3D modeling tool, and importing them as models into the HL2 world. I'm actually being very wasteful of computing resources by constructing these modules out of blocky square brushes, and manipulating the corners of the blocks in order to approximate the shapes I want. But I'm not yet ready to tackle learning a 3D modeling program.

No pictures of that room yet. I need to spend some time creating the images that will make my wall units look better. Half-Life 2 comes with plenty of materials that represent cracking plaster, rubble, bricks, etc. It's also easy to find assorted high-tech panels and display readouts online, but nothing that depicts the precise decor I'm shooting for. So the models look pretty slapdash at the moment.

I'll show photos of the bar area when I've got something worth sharing.

Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

[...]

“You have to have a little bit of Dora the Explorer in your life,” he says. “But you can do what you can to mute its influence.” Okay. “And there’s no shame, when your kid’s watching a show, and you don’t like it, in telling him it sucks.” Yeah! There’s no—wait. What? “If you start telling him it sucks, maybe he might develop an aesthetic.” Sorry, son. No more Thomas the Tank Engine for you. Thomas sucks. Stop crying. Daddy’s helping you develop an aesthetic. Now Daddy’s going to go put on some thunder music. --Up With Grups -- The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who are Redefining Adulthood (New York Mag.com)

Despite the retro-cool Star Trek reference, this essay is so absolutely not me. From the plastic lawn furniture in my study basement, the dining room table that's been home to a race car playset since I put it together three Christmases ago, to the inflatable ball pit in my living room (occupying the space vacated by the Christmas tree) to the Hello Kitty dollhouse on the coffee table, I am so not a Grup.

When I play Neverwinter Nights or The Elder Scrolls, my character -- usually a battle mage or a paladin -- is always "DaddyMan."

The article describes a pop-cult manufacturers fantasy world in which the arrival of children doesn't change people's lifestyle, or, more importantly, their spending habits.

My favorite music at home is my son's Suzuki practice CD. I really dig those "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" variations. But then again, I never was much into popular music.

And fashion? Fashion, my aunt fanny pack.

The Bob Ross game will utilize the unique inputs that the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Revolution have that can truly immerse the players while they learn to paint like Bob Ross and can play the addictive and fun games that we have planned for the title. I believe that Bob Ross Inc's and AGFRAG Entertainment Group's similar beliefs in independence, creativity, and teaching others will benefit how the game is developed and how the players of all ages will be able to enjoy this game.

I want the community to share with us their favorite Bob Ross shows, painting techniques, and what they?d like to see in the NDS and Revolution games. We want to keep the brush going."
--Bob Ross Video Game (bobross.com)

Bob Ross... the happy little clouds... the gravity-defying 'do... the "addictive and fun" game!

This quote from the Bob Ross rotten.com biography made me burst out laughing: "While some folks distract themselves toting iPods of sh*tty music around like colostomy bags, others prefer to remain focused on a cardboard canvas with a modest fan brush."

--how to make 3D lemurs out of clay (Google)

According to my server log, someone came to my site after searching for "how to make 3D lemurs out of clay."

I was curious... and I used my finely honed Google searching skills to find "miniature lemur sculpture."

I'm not sure that I'm a better person for having done that research, but I doubt I'm any worse. Maybe it will help whoever was disappointed by my site.

Come back, lemur searcher! I can help you now!

Games today are many times more complex than games were even a few years ago. Recreating every three-dimensional point of a complex cave environment is going to take an artist several orders of magnitude more time than dropping a few rough dots on an Atari 2600's 196x160 screen and calling it a cave environment. Similarly, producing a full 5.1 surround sound track for a modern game requires sound engineers and advanced programming libraries. Triggering a few blips and bleeps is much easier.

But there are also some less obvious reasons for longer development cycles. In the old days, a programmer with a text editor and a few programs could create an entire game. However, to create all the complex content and code required for a modern game, programmers and artists need powerful tools such as 3-d modelers and advanced debuggers. Unfortunately, programmers and artists often have to use general purpose tools that are not at all well suited to game development. And when domain-specific tools do exist, such as in console game development, the tools are often unstable and immature due to the short life span of any particular console system. A multi-platform console world further complicates development by multiplying all of the issues of developing for a single platform by the number of platforms on which you intend to deliver your game. --Adam Geitgey --Where are the Good Open Source Games? (OS News)

Great suggestion, Evan.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 6 - Switchable Chandeliers, Automatic Sliding Doors, Railings, Carpet (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This was a tremendously productive weekend. After helping two fellow interactive fiction fans finish a proposal for next year's MLA, I tackled a few things I had been meaning to get to for a while.

The first picture shows the much more realistic chandeliers that I managed to create. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but it's good enough for the demo I'm working on now.

While I didn't bother trying to capture it in the screen grab, I've also added a button that turns the chandeliers on and off. The red carpet really ought to be running up the stairs, but I'm not sure I want to tackle that yet. Already, when I do a full compile of this game world, it's taking my little laptop 10 or so minutes. I'm not sure yet what the acronyms on the compile window means, but I fiddled with the settings so that I don't have to do that full compile every time, which saves a lot of time.


I'm particularly proud of the railings in this picture. I didn't take a screen grab, but I figured out how to edit the vertices so that the perfectly rectangular railing pieces join together at 45 degree angles.

The red door also slides open to reveal a room inside. I've got some ideas for that room, but I'm going to save them for now, and show them when the room is in really good shape.

Now that I can interact with the world in simple ways (turning on and off lights, opening doors), it's time to start working with NPCs. I'm thinking first of just telling an NPC to walk to spot B when the PC enters spot A, and then walk to spot C when the PC enters spot B, and so on, with the NPC eventually returning to spot A. Since FacePoser crashes my laptop when I run it at home, I don't know how much luck I'll have working with NPCs, but Half Life 2 comes with a range of pre-set emotions and gestures, so we'll see what I can accomplish.