Media: May 2006 Archive Page

With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers' bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library.

So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: "Every time I've seen you, you're out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You're all sitting around the table on your BlackBerries." Lohan matter-of-factly explained that she had "like 1,000" messages to answer.

Not long ago, prattling away on the phone was as much a teenage rite as hanging out at the mall. Flopped on the bed, you yakked into your pink or football-shaped receiver until your parents hollered at you to get off.

Now, Sidekicks and iBooks are as prized as Mom's Princess phone, and conversations, the oral kind, are as uncomfortable as braces. Which makes employers and communications experts anxious: This generation may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but will they be able to have a professional discussion? --Olivia Barker --Technology leaves teens speechless (USA Today)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can. --Julian Baggini --The Simpsons as philosophy (BBC)

I was particularly amused by this comment, appended to the story by a reader who differs with one of Baggini's major points:

Far from being "simple philosophical truths", his quips are "tempting excuses for inaction". So perhaps the Simpsons' main gift is to be vague enough to read whatever you like into it.

I haven't watched an episode in years. When I used to teach technical writing to students who were in the middle of technical courses where they were expected to absorb and internalize a huge amount of special jargon, and often thought that a technical writing assignment was their chance to impress me with how much technical jargon they could use.

I told them to write for Homer "Where's the ANY key?" Simpson.

Back in the 1980's, when I attended high school, reading someone's diary would have been the ultimate intrusion. But communication was rudimentary back then. There were no cellphones, or answering machines; there was no ''texting,'' no MP3's or JPEG's, no digital cameras or file-sharing software; there was no World Wide Web -- none of the private-ish, public-ish, superimmediate forums kids today take for granted. If this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy. The new forms of communication are madly contradictory: anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever (unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable environment, it's no wonder that distinctions between healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum.

[..]

The general degree of anonymity varies: some bloggers post their full names, others give quirky, quasi-revelatory handles. No wonder everyone is up till 5 a.m. tweaking their font size and Photoshopping a new icon. At heart, an online journal is like a hyperflexible adolescent body -- but better, because in real life, it takes money and physical effort to add a piercing, or to switch from zip-jacketed mod to Abercrombie prepster. A LiveJournal or Blurty offers a creative outlet with a hundred moving parts. And unlike a real journal, with a blog, your friends are all around, invisible voyeurs -- at least until they chime in with a comment. --Emily Nussbaum --My So-Called Blog (New York Times)

Intersting how the author contrasts the online diary with "a real journal." I think she meant something like "unlike a paper diary." The digital versions are real.

This article, from 2004, comes just before the big MySpace/Facebook surge.

Within blogosphere studies, there is considerable disagreement as to whether the blogger's contruction of identity is a form of role-playing or an authentic attempt at mimesis. Some theorists have adopted apparently extreme positions: Raynes-Goldie, embracing postmodernism, suggests that "in this informational chaos, the question of truth is not really a useful one," whereas McNeill notes that "though these readers do not know the diarist outside of the context of her text, they believe her textual representation is 'real,' the flesh made digital" (37). Presenting a more measured view of the subject, Kitzmann writes, "that diaries and autobiographies, both handwritten and electronic, are grounded to a significant extent on real, authentic individuals is a common enough assertion." He compares the fictionalization of blog entries to a violation of Philippe Lejeune's "autobiographical pact" (59), the contract of trust formed between the reader and the writer, the autobiographical pact is based on the reader's recognition that the name of the author, narrator, and protagonist are the same, and that these three seem to share a common identity. --Daniel Holbrook --Theorizing the Diary Weblog (PDF) (Our Bold Hero)

I'm planning to beef up my knowledge of the personal diary weblog as part of my preparation for teaching Writing for the Internet, and Holbrook's paper (which he submitted for his MA thesis at the University of Chicago) covers the area nicely.

Hollbrook also has posted a useful bibliography, with some cross-reference metadata.

The JRTC has been offering this sort of training since 1993. But in the past three years, with the US embroiled in its most complex conflict since the Vietnam War, Pentagon planners have dramatically improved the simulation. The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million. --Vince Beiser --Baghdad, USA (Wired)

This article describes a massive U.S. military role-playing operation. Not a computer game, but rather a meatspace training exercise.

I love the detail about the in-game media coverage. I wonder where they recruit the journalists to produce the three newspapers and the radio show?

Japan's top camera maker, Canon Inc., will stop developing new single-lens reflex film cameras as more people abandon film for digital, company officials said Thursday.

The Tokyo-based Canon's move followed a similar move by its closest Japanese rival, Nikon Corp., which announced earlier this year it would stop making seven of its nine film cameras and concentrate on digital models. --Canon to stop making single-lens camera (Yahoo!)

Part of me wants to say "That's a shame," but the part of me that actually bought two digital cameras for the student paper and one for myself says, "That's the way things are."

I learned how to shoot and develop black and white film for my school paper, and with various odd jobs I picked up writing press releases (and one semester, designing and painting billboards for the drama department), that skill kept me in pocket change during my undergraduate years.

For a while there, the film industry hung on there with a meme that went something like "digital photography is for information, film is for memories," but I note this change without any sense of personal loss.

Okay, as a kid I would always have a moment or two of sadness when I threw away a comfortable old pair of sneakers that I had outgrown. I am feeling that way now.


Meanwhile, can someone tell me where USB port is on this thing? (I found it while cleaning out a storage cabinet in student publications office.)

-- Bob Coyne and Richard Sproat
--WordsEye: An Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion System (PDF)AT&T Labs -- Research)

The text in the caption is what told the computer to assemble these objects in this order. Of course, someone had to tell the computer how to draw these objects, tag each object so that the computer knows where "in" an object is and where the "face" of an object is.

Via Grand Text Auto.

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game. --Clive Thompson --The Game Within the Game (Wired)

How interesting... a game that a Second Life subscriber created in order to give people something to do while visiting the virtual world has migrated into a Game Boy Advance product. "The virtual has taken on flesh, and now thousands of kids worldwide will replicate the Second Life libel -- their parents will accuse them of staring, in isolation, at the screen, just as they did with Tetris so many years ago. History doesn't just repeat itself, apparently: It remixes like a DJ."

Early on, the visionary geeks among us at these institutes of higher education realized that these computing machines were great for games, and a whole lot more fun than a slide rule.

These side projects took on a life of their own, and resulted in the popularity of games like "Adventure" and "Colossal Cave." --Tom Leuold --Games with no pictures? Yes, they really did exist (InsideBayArea.com)

Uh... "Adventure" and "Colossal Cave" are different names for the same game, which is also known as "Colossal Cave Adventure."

Of course, the Crowther/Woods collaboration that spread on the internet begat numerous modifications, so it's entirely possible that one game that presented itself as "Colossal Cave" and another that presented itself as "Adventure" opened so differently that they might be remembered as separate games.

For fun, here's a comic in which a T-Rex talks about text adventure games.

Youth and alienated populations are inclined to spend more time going through identity development processes because they are trying to "figure out who they are." Blogs and profiles are particularly supportive of this. Of course, blogs require having something to say while profiles let you write yourself into being via collage. People do grow out of ongoing identity production, but not for quite some time. (Hell, i still haven't.) Friendster tried to stop this, wanting people to be serious and fit into pre-defined checkboxes - to know who they are. MySpace let these groups run wild and these are the two populations who dominate MySpace - youth (14-24) and 20/30-somethings who participate actively in cultural development (from performance artists to clubgoers to sex divas to wannabee celebrities). These sites are ideal for these populations, even if they make no sense to parents and professionals.

[...]

What's at stake here is what is called "subcultural capital" by academics. It is the kind of capital that anyone can get, if you are cool enough to know that it exists and cool enough to participate. It is a counterpart to "cultural capital" which is more like hegemonic capital. That was probably a bit too obscure. Let me give an example. Opera attendance is a form of cultural capital - you are seen as having money and class and even if you think that elongated singing in foreign languages is boring, you attend because that's what cultured people do. You need the expensive clothes, the language, the body postures, the social connects and the manners to belong. Limitations are economic and social. Rave attendance is the opposite. Anyone can get in, in theory... There are certainly hodgepodged clothes, street language and dance moves, but most folks can blend in with just a little effort. Yet, the major limitation is knowing that the rave exists. "Being in the know" is more powerful than money. You can't buy your way into knowledge of a rave.

"Coolness" is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. --Danah Boyd --Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? (danah.org)

When you put it this way, it looks like MySpace is heading for some inevitable high point, after which it will no longer be cool to use. Of course, it may morph into something that is completely different and thus gives people still more reason to continue using it.

Another interesting quote, that (to me) illustrates one of the core problems: "Even if your kid has a perfectly PG profile, the idea that s/he can hang with R-rated ones is flipping people out, even when the R-rated ones are perfectly normal in the context in which their created."

PG means "Parental Guidance," but MySpace is thriving because it encourages teenagers to develop their own identities without parental guidance ("There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity. But these elements are not deemed so intense as to require that parents be strongly cautioned beyond the suggestion of parental guidance. There is no drug use content in a PG-rated film." -- MPAA), in what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a safe zone, where they can delete and reorganize and start over if they don't like the result, and where they can count and link to the evidence of their own growing cultural capital.

One of Boyd's points is a call to action: "Stop celebrating the crisis and get off your asses and engage. This panic is not just a funny side note. It is an industry wide problem concerning speech, property and responsibility."

As for the fad issue:

Part of being an American teen is figuring out who you are, how you fit into society and culture, how social relations work, etc. Part of this process involves sharing cultural objects, hanging out and trying out different self-performances to find the one that feels "right" (think Goffman "faces"). There are plenty of adults who are doing this as well, but it is central to youth culture. Youth will always do this, using whatever medium is available to them. MySpace is far more deeply situated in the cultural values and practices of its constituents than Friendster ever was. MySpace teens may jump ship, but they are not going to stop doing identity work, at least not for a few years.

But what interests me the most is the first few lines of the "Finally" section:

I began this as a blog post and it grew and grew and i want to put it out there even though i know that i'm missing factors. Still, i think that this should answer many of the questions that people have. MySpace is not the same as Friendster - it will not fade in the same way. Friendster was a fad; MySpace has become far more than that.

Notice the use of lowercase "i", and then a few sentences later, an academic semicolon. I'm not pointing this out as part of a grammar flame, I'm just noting this as Boyd's signal to her online audience that she is a serious scholar who is nevertheless firmly on the side of the MySpace teens. (A recent blog entry explained her frustration at being told not to use the term "MySpace whores" in the title of a talk.)

This fall, when I plan to introduce a new focus on social identity into my existing Writing for the Internet class (which I last revised in order to include blogging), part of my focus will be to get my students (especially those who are fresh out of high school) to recognize that the public identity they create can and often will lead to consequences in the real world.

My point isn't to stop them from celebrating the freedom the internet offers them, but rather to consider the full range of consequences. Yes, I want to encourage them to spread their wings and make new mistakes, but I'm also conscious of my responsibility to teach them that Google doesn't forget.

Reading Boyd's essay made me feel my age. This is not a bad thing... at 37 I'm still a young scholar, but the online landscape I've been studying for years is changing faster than I can master it. I'm realizing that each time I teach "Writing for the Internet" or "New Media Projects," the course will be practically brand new. On the one hand, that's a bit frightening, because it often takes more than one try to tweak a new unit until it works smoothly. On the other hand, since online culture is part of the content of the course, I won't be blindsided by new developments in the same way as I might be if I concentrated only on teaching American literature.

As I look back at the 2005-2006 academic year, I'm comfortable with the realization that Boyd and other up-and-coming new media scholars are providing a steady stream of insight that reminds me how my view of the internet is likely to differ from that of my students. Interesting things happen when both teachers and learners leave their comfort zones. I don't think I've ever been this excited about a new academic year.

This fall, I'll continue to advise the Setonian, while teaching

• a new freshman composition course (all punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, and process, without the build up to the end-of-term research paper that has dominated every freshman writing course I've taught in the last 8 years)
• Writing for the Internet (which will include social networking, personal identity, and the remix culture, as well as professional e-mail etiquette and website usability)
• New Media Projects (an upper level studio course in which students will create simple arcade games, interactive fiction, an animated essay [more on that when I figure out how to teach it, but Strongbad and the Jib Jab shorts come to mind], and a Half-Life 2 mod).

On another note, I'm also interested in this post, On Being a Press Expert . This could be useful to teach freshmen about the value of academic peer review, and specifically why it's important to go directly to sources written by academic experts, rather than rely on statements that they make off the top of their heads in response to a journalist's question.

"Students have told us that eMail is still valuable--mainly for storing and transmitting documents and for communication with adults," said Julie Evans, chief executive officer of the nonprofit group NetDay. "IM is more valuable to them because it is instant, and they can speak with multiple people at the same time. I believe that this highlights a greater sophistication in student tech use--and a trend for us to watch." --For students, eMail already is outdated  (eSchool News Online)

A few weeks ago, a student said to me in passing, "I only use e-mail to talk to my professors."

That made me start thinking.

Casual Game: The Game uses a special wireless-control wand covered with buttons. Using this control, your job is to scan through a large number of audio-visual "entertainment streams" to find the one you enjoy the most.

Once you've picked one, you can control the volume of the audio, the brightness of the screen and, for advanced casual gamers, the tint. --Lore Sjöberg --The Games Nobody Lines Up to Play (Wired)

This excerpt is from the best item in the story, though Mission: Marketplace is pretty good, too.

--Key & Compass - IF Games Index

This is an incredibly efficient, beautifully constructed index to interactive fiction games, with icons indicating platform, awards, and additional information.

I wish I could click on the award icon and be taken to a list of other games that shared the same award. Actually, clicking on any icon ought to filter out the results that don't share that quality -- for instance, if I only want to look at games that won the IF Art Show "Best of Show."

There are other sites that offer that sort of information, but because I know it's available, I missed it when I was briefly poking around this site.

First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict. --Daniel Enemark --It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood (CS Monitor)

--MySpace: The Movie (YouTube)

I just watched MySpace: The Movie. (Above link goes to the version on YouTube, which is more accessible, but the filmmaker's site is davidlehre.com.)

The cross-dressing gag is just juvenile, and the editing in that skit needed to be tighter. Overall, though, this little collection of skits is a good window into a pop culture online world that used to be inhabited only by geeks, but thrives beneath the radar of mainstream culture. All these little stories are parables about responsibility. I'm too muddle-headed with a fever to process this short film deeply, but I'd be happy to know what anyone else thinks.

I might assign this film in my Writing for the Internet class, along with student Karissa Kilgore's newspaper column.

For the 4Cs, I recently submitted a proposal that the weblog special interest group and the wiki special interest group be merged to form the "Emerging Social Software" group.

The city's 23-year-old mayor took down his profile on MySpace.com after his occupation ended up reading: "malebigalow."

Ryan Bingham said he didn't post that information -- an apparent reference to the 1999 movie "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" -- and he doesn't know who did. --Mayor pulls MySpace.com page after job shows up as 'malebigalow' (Boston.com | AP)

With the seconds ticking down to a studio discussion about a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles' record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication.

Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to drive Mr Kewney home. --Fare comment! (The Mail)

The video of the interview is hysterical.

In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist's zillion competing ideas?an internal, self-contradicting mob?and focus them into a coherent work.

Mind you, online collaborators are finding that freedoms are important too. The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, Darknet, on a wiki?a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one?and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section. Lasica suspects his book was too fully formed: People didn't want to mess with something that seemed finished. He thinks a better idea would be to post a much rougher draft of the book to make it seem more like clay that can be molded. --Clive Thompson --Art Mobs: Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting? (Slate)

While this article is a couple years old, I found it interesting due to all the time I spent yesterday waiting in line and sitting in a crowd (as part of SHU's graduation exercises).

It takes a lot of work to organize something like a graduation procession. As a faculty member, all I have to do is follow the person in front of me. As long as a few people know where we're going, it will work out. But if someone in that position of authority hesitates, or gives a bad cue, the confusion can multiply.

In any field, it's important to keep track of the underdogs -- the new developments and theories, the older hypotheses once thought exhausted of information. Doesn't matter if you're in writing, physics, psychology, or athletics, keeping a broad horizon pays off. That's what I'm doing here -- showing you the underdogs of gaming. You might find something you like. --Karl "Orikaeshigitae" Parakenings --Text Adventres (Cardinal Points)

Good to see some more mainstream attention given to contemporary interactive fiction. The obligatory "history of interactive fiction" section takes up much of the article, which is the same frustration I found when I was researching 1980s articles for my IF annotated bibliography, since I'm more interested in reading this particular author's unique take on IF than in reading yet another paraphrasing of the same backstory. (Don't these people know how to use hyperlinks?) Still, I'm happy I found this column. Via GTA.

This allows us to see the underlying problem of digital game studies: 'narratologists' and 'ludologists' alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement.

The reason for this is to be found in the history of game studies: once upon a time, videogames were only taken seriously by psychologists. They would lock up a 14-year-old to play Street Fighter II for 48 hours straight, submit him to a marathon of Rorschach ink blot tests, and then come out of the lab convinced of the detrimental effects of videogames (but without a second thought about the detrimental effects of their testing methods).

When game studies emerged from the primordial digital ooze in the mid-1990s, this kind of research was still prevalent. It is therefore understandable that 'serious' game researchers are loath to utter a bad word about their object of study. If they would proclaim a certain videogame 'bad', this might be taken to mean that all videogames are bad. So, to be on the safe side, game studies has reverted to a particularly bland variant of formalism and stuck to it. --Julian Kücklich --Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Herrigan: First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Dichtung Digital)

This 2004 review of First Person is... interesting. The narratology/ludology infighting has largely (thankfully) settled down, but I blogged it anyway because it usefully points out one of the major problems in new media studies. It takes time to get yourself published on paper. The extra time (and expense) doesn't help the value of your printed scholarship. It does, however, ensure that your work will be out of date sooner.

In my current job, I've felt that my online work is appropriately valued. My department chair lists his own blog on his annual report, and the other day he told me that some of his blog entries are going to be published in Croatian.

Millman, whose essay is called "Game Theory," sees "Lost's" structure attracting fans via familiarity: She thinks it works like an interactive video game. "The story line and the action develop on multiple levels. There are hidden clues that function like the Easter eggs in gaming," says Millman. "'Lost" is a big game, and the act of watching it forces you to play along." --Lost in 'Lost': Devoted 'Lost' fans try to decode hit TV show's symbolism (AZ Central.com)

I haven't watched more than a snippet of this show, but my wife sometimes watches it while I'm putting the kids to bed. Looks like good TV that respects the intelligence of the audience, and a good example of how the internet, literary analysis, and transmedial crossovers can add value to an experience. (I'm referring to the fake TV commercial, a real novel supposedly written by a character on the island, etc.)

-- Reinhold Grether --Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft)

Designed for courses "Theater and the Internet" & "The Digital Arena."

--Windows Noises by Colin Staples (Albino Blacksheep)

Cool Flash movie.

My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to construct narratives about the struggle to regain freedom in novels such as Gravity's Rainbow, Invitation to a Beheading, and VALIS. On a disciplinary level, heretical reading is an interpretative method I exert to foreground possibilities of freedom within postmodern fiction that intrude into the background of the poststructuralist definition of the world but ultimately transcend it. These four forms of freedom are freedom as presence and transcendence, as liberating knowledge, as a spirituality constituting self-awareness, and as choice conceived navigationally rather than hierarchically. Postmodern authors imply these possibilities consciously and metafictionally, but heretical reading is also my way of foregrounding and intensifying them. I amplify these possibilities through a process that includes the skeptical questioning encouraged by both postmodern novels and poststructuralism, but this process is not limited to the poststructuralist ambitions of critique, disclosure, and debunking. Instead, I critique inauthentic and unquestioned claims to freedom so that intimations of their genuine possibility can be experienced in greater intensity.

This way of reading is a choice that is invited and encouraged by the authors of postmodern novels but not demanded by them. In order to function as a method, heretical reading requires my intervention as a reader to bring these possibilities to the foreground and to navigationally choose them. Heretical reading refers to my way of navigating through these texts, taking a path that diverges from poststructuralism by connecting intimations of freedom which poststructuralist theorists leave unnoticed and unconnected. By linking these fragmentary and multi-linear intimations, a sequential process of seeking freedom can be revealed, in which each possibility of freedom constitutes a step whose attainment allows both characters and readers to move to the next step. I implement the full potential of heretical reading in technological pedagogy, by allowing the possibilities of freedom suggested by authors to generate a program of invention and interaction that authorizes multiple interpretative operations on the part of students.

A third chapter argues that heretical reading can be extended into the pedagogical use of hypertext, the electronic textual format of the World Wide Web, in order to advance the same goals of freedom as question and process sought by my readings of postmodern novels. Students compose hypertext essays that make a new interpretative choice by choosing a path through the text that has been closed off by a previous group of critics. This path consists of the linkages between ?sparks??passages that stand out with particular imaginative and intuitive significance against a background of indeterminacy. Students learn to justify their responses to these passages through textual evidence of their richness and significance, similar to the Russian formalist idea that ?defamiliarization? foregrounds certain elements of the text by making them strange. A fourth dissertation chapter describes a final pedagogical extension of heretical reading as a strategy for using theories of computer and video game design within the literature classroom, with emphasis on a type of text-based computer game called interactive fiction. This method transforms printed novels into interactive fictions in order to encourage freedom in the form of interaction with the text. The various interpretative operations performed on a text during classroom discussion change the ways the text is imagined and experienced, just as players of an interactive fiction direct the outcome of a story by typing input in response to prompts. The convictions underlying heretical reading function within the classroom as a set of rules, but these rules are designed to open up, not to constrain; to energetically orient, not to govern; to yield satisfactions at the expressive level, not to conclude. --Jeffrey Lamar Howard --Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy (University of Texas at Austin)

(Ephasis added.)

I haven't had the chance to read through it yet, but I plan to print up a copy and read it during the exams I'll be proctoring over the next few days. (The link goes to a big PDF, by the way.)

Looks very good. And it comes just in time for me to include it in my annual report. (Howard cites and engages nicely with my online definition of interactive fiction, and places it within a larger context in a manner that I found illuminating and instructive.)

Apart from the occasional reference as a postmodern, reader-response, or purely formal example, interactive fiction has existed in something of a theoretical vacuum, dismissed by the cybergurus as a nostalgic narrative throwback, and ignored by the literati as too geeky. Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages is a notable exception, though his focus on MIT and the cultural origins of Zork means much room is left for additional studies (like Howard's). Here, we see interactive fiction invoked, not as an extreme example, or as an object of nostalgic inquiry, or a "look-how-far-we-have-come" reference point, but rather as an integral part of a larger argument about new media development.

At least the cybergurus have memories of how cool IF seemed when they first encountered it; yet sadly, in the literary world IF is mostly encountered through transcripts published in literary works.

I'd love it if Howard published an electronic dissertation, with embedded links to live versions of all the IF works he mentioned (copyright laws permitting), but lacking that ideal text I'm still delighted at what seems (to my first glance) an excellent integration of contemporary IF community standards and culture, and mainstream literary theory. Yet it's the technological pedagogy that really interests me the most.

On another note, it was interesting to see, within the context of Howard's academic prose, passages I had written for my website -- reproduced along with the boldface keywords that I added for the convenience of online readers. Those bold words leap oddly off of Howard's academic pages, as if they were spoken shouted by a slightly drunk or at least rather obnoxious bar patron who's getting insecure because he's just starting to suspect you're baiting him. Not that I really think Howard was baiting me -- I'm just commenting on how it might look to someone who wonders why the heck this Jerz guy feels it is necessary to use bold keywords all the time.

I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that's a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I've been working on GET LAMP and occasionally doing some inquiries regarding the arcade stuff. --Jason Scott --Arcade: The Documentary (ASCII by Jason Scott)

I just ordered a copy of Scott's documentary BBS (or, to be more accurate, I submitted a budget request for it). I do hope he'll be able to get his fancy camera into Colossal Cave. Meanwhile, the arcade project sounds like another brilliant idea.

Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The Big Electromagnetic Pulse the PDFs will be wiped clean off my hard drive but I will still be able to barter my hard copy of Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life for food and bullets.

But my passion for paper is about more than preserving the sociological canon in a post-apocalyptic future. Using paper is embodied in a way that using digital resources are not. Paper has a corporeality that digital texts do not. For instance, have you ever tried to find a quote in a book and been unable to remember whether it was on the left or right hand side of the page? This just a trivial example of way in which paper's physicality is the origin of its utility.

And of course professors have bodies too. This is another way that scholarship is embodied -- we often do it while in libraries. Here our bodies are literally in a vast assemblage of paper with its own unique form of usability. And as scholars achieve total communion with the stacks, they find books based not just on catalog number, but on all of their senses. The fourth floor of the library I wrote my Ph.D. in sounded and smelled differently than the second did. How many of us -- even the lab scientists -- with Ph.D.'s will ever be able to forget the physical layout of the libraries where we wrote our dissertations? --Alex Golub --Passion for Paper (Inside Higher Ed)

We've developed a physical relationship to paper because we *need* that relationship in order to use it.

I used to spend a lot of time sorting and filing documents on my hard drive. Then I installed Google Desktop, and now, while I still file my in-progress documents meticulously, the flood of incoming e-mails and files just goes into a slush pile.

This term, I experimented with an all-paperless semester, having students submit all their assignments electronically (other than short in-class quizzes and the like). It did change the way I grade, because I can no longer signal "I don't follow you here" by squiggling a line under a phrase and adding a question mark.

But there are other benefits to the online-only classroom. No more lugging a shoulder bag stuffed with papers to my car every evening (and lugging them all back, mostly ungraded, the next morning). I no longer have students running after me, waving late copies of papers. No more "I asked my roommate to slip it under your office door shortly before the deadline, but I'm worried that he's unreliable, so I'm just sending you this e-mail to let you know I'll bring the printout when I get back from Spring Break in 10 days" excuses. If a student really has missed a deadline by 10 minutes, it's no big deal -- the date stamp is right there on their e-submission.

Even in the digital world, though, my media has physicality. I write a different way when I am scratching something out on my PDA. I find that I actually enjoy writing recommendation letters for students while I'm sitting with my son during his piano lesson. And I feel subversive and efficient when my daughter asks me to watch The Lion King for the 20th time, and I can sit there on the couch next to her critiquing student thesis statements.

I remember a rush of familiarity when watching an episode of The Simpsons some time ago, when -- in a flashback sequence -- Homer checked his LED watch. LEDs (light emitting diodes) burn so much power that your watch was dark until you pushed a button. I had remembered that, but I had forgotten that the way you viewed seconds was to hold the button down long enough for the display to switch. Seeing that brought back memories of my the Star Wars watch my parents bought me in 1977, and the choice I had of personalizing it by means of a tiny sticker of Darth Vader, Artoo and Threepio, and I think it was a logo with an X wing fighter. I also remember the exact location of the doorway where I tripped, fell, and scratched the surface of the watch. I had the same feeling then that I had years later when I was carrying my daughter through campus, and she fussed and fidgeted and knocked my gleaming burnished aluminum PDA out of my pocket, where it fell onto the sidewalk and got scratched up. (Not the display, thankfully, just the case.)

In the late 80s, I remember videotaping the startup sequence for whatever computer I was using at the time. Probably the Commodore 64. I think my reasoning was that if my *next* computer ever made me impatient during the bootup sequence, I could watch this videotape of my *previous* computer and be comforted that things were now much better than they used to be.

Of course, now computers do SO MUCH stuff during bootup that even though they're much more powerful, I doubt the bootup time is any faster. (That's why I like carrying around a PDA -- there's no lag time between whatever idea you had and your ability to start recording it.)

By the way, that video that I made of my old computer? It was on a Betamax tape. Oh, well.

Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages - you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well, if Inform is a cathedral, its explicit support for extensions is the equivalent of inviting the townsfolk in to set up their stalls.

[...]

I do want to make Inform accessible to a wider community. The manual says that it is for "computer programmers intrigued by writing, and writers intrigued by computer programming", but truthfully, I'd like to see IF tools - not just design systems, but also iTunes-like browsers and interpreters - which open up IF to that huge creative community of people who write blogs, and design their own websites, often startlingly well. IF will never be for everyone, but I would like it to be on the table as a viable form of artistic expression.--Graham Nelson --[Graham Nelson and Emily Short discuss Inform 7] (Society for the Promotion of Advengure Games)

Nelson is here referring to Eric Raymond's hymn to the open source movement, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I'd rather have the thousand words. -- Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fictionI'd rather have the thousand words (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Only the truly geeky will appreciate just what it means to find yourself in someone else's Usenet tagline. I happened upon a this list of taglines, compiled by Linus Akesson, because that collection includes my platitude along with more sensible quotations from Shakespeare, Socrates, the Bible, the TV show Frasier, and Guybrush Threepwood.

I blush to see my narratological bias so baldly professed. I was, of course, posting on a newsgroup devoted to interactive fiction (aka text adventure games), and thus perhaps the privileged position of text is to be expected. In my further defense, I was responding to a troll who asserted "there simply isn't an excuse to not use pictures in an IF game," and constrained the pro-narrative statement as follows:

I can think of a lot more things than I can render graphically. If I started thinking of stories that consisted only of things that I can render, then I'd tell a lot of stories about spheres and planes. If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I'd rather have the thousand words -- at least until such time as the Holodeck frees me from the burden of having to render everything I can think of.

In context, I was stating my own preference for using words rather than pictures as my tools of choice for storytelling. Someone trained in graphic design, who only dabbles in writing, would have a very different opinion. And of course, regardless of whether the primary medium is images or text, does a game need a story in order to be successful? "Tetris" is the canonical example. (We need to be able to relate to the game world in some way, but a complex story is only one way to relate.)

I have created a few short interactive fiction games, and one that I entered in the IF Competition did fairly well despite its flaws, and received some fairly good reviews. In order to gain a more visceral understanding of a different genre of games, a few months ago, I shelled out a few bucks to purchase a copy of The Games Factory, a point-and-click utility for designing console-style 2D action games. My version of the software is dated 1996, so it's hardly cutting edge. I had already created some animated GIFs of Rainbow Hector, so I got started right away. The documentation is less than impressive, which slowed down my progress considerably. After a few false starts, I began to make some progress.

When I first heard the term "level designer" as a profession within the games industry, I laughed. If someone else designs the characters, and someone else codes the behaviors, and someone else handles interface, how hard can it be to put all the pieces together? But the more I learned about side-scrollers, and the more I got to know my PC and his relationship with the game world, the more skilled I grew at identifying aesthetic and philosophical flaws in various parts of the world. Yes, that metal I-beam structure looks cool, but what's it doing out there in the wilderness? Yes, there needs to be a monster there in order to give the PC something to jump over, but why would the monster hang out there when there is no PC to menace? What does the monster want? And why are these monsters here in the wilderness in the first place?

While the library of pre-coded objects and behaviors is impressive, the code describing those behaviors is sealed in a black box, safely away from the fumbling efforts of amateur programmers. Which would be fine, if I knew absolutely no programming, but which is extremely frustrating when I want to find out why, whenever my PC jumps sideways, a single frame of the face-front view of my PC flickers on the screen just as he lands. I have also spent far too much time tweaking a routine that, when the PC accelerates in one direction over a certain distance, scrolls the screen ahead slightly faster, so that the player has more time to react to objects that scroll into view.

The more I think about it, the more I notice, and the more critical I become of my own work, and the more aware I am of the criteria by which to evaluate the far more polished and accomplished work produced by others.

I have also been toying with the Half-Life 2 developer's toolkit, which includes a CAD suite that permits even the marginally geeky to create new 3D spaces. It's a simple matter to change a bitmap, perhaps to give a character a Seton Hill University T-shirt. But if I wanted to create, say, a small creature with a round head, no body to speak of, and six legs that end in stubby paws, drawing the bitmaps would be easy, but defining the 3D body parts and articulating them as the creature stands, sits, jumps, falls over, fires a weapon, receives a blow to the head, etc., I would quickly be in over my head. Still, even if I limit myself to the existing character bodies (perhaps repainted with different bitmaps), I should be able to record my own dialogue trees, which will help propel a story set in a virtual space of my own design.

Game design toolkits come with ready-made objects with behaviors that can be turned on or off with a few clicks. For instance, The Games Factory lets me control the PC directly with the mouse, or steer it like a car, or make it run and jump on platforms like Mario. My PC can shoot objects that fly across the screen. When these projectiles reach the edge of the screen, I can destroy them, make them bounce, or make them spawn new objects. When objects overlap, I can make them destroy each other, add points, scroll the screen, play a sound, load a web page, or do a hundred other things. In the Deus Ex toolkit, I could drop a cat and a dog in a room together, and by default the cat will flee and the dog will pursue. The AI is simplistic, but because I didn't have to code it up from scratch, I can focus my energies on tweaking it.

My mind boggles at the possibilities...

I'll always love interactive fiction, but when I started examining it seriously, it was just an obscure branch of literary studies. I have no delusions about creating a "real" 3D game, but I do feel compelled to experience the issues game developers face and sample the creative processes in which they participate.

I haven't yet seen a tool that I could use out of the box in a course for non-programmers (as all my courses are likely to be). It would take time to develop good documentation and a set of tutorial games, but in the right learning environment, what I've seen so far could work.

When Scott Adams, creator of the first commercial computer game, spoke at a panel I organized at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire in May of 2001, he said,

You've got to have the tools in place that allow you to become more and more creative. People like Amanda here [an English major who created an IF game as a term project --DGJ], shouldn't have to be a programmer to put into the media her creative thoughts. Today you have to be. Five years? I don't think that will be the case.

With the recent release of Inform 7, we're a step closer.

P.S. I was also surprised to find that my son is also quoted in the same list of taglines, as part of an exchange I posted to Usenet around the same time:

While reading ordinary books to my son (who turns three next month), I frequently stop and ask him questions about the story... his favorite book of late is "101 Dalmations," and sometimes I ask him, "If you saw Cruella De Vil chasing after those puppies, what would you say?"
One time, he said, "I would tell her, 'You don't hit puppies because that's mean.' "
"And what would Cruella do?"
"She would get back in her car and drive away."
"And then what would the puppies do?"
"They would get into a helicopter and fly home."
"And what would you do?"
(pause)
"I wouldn't do anything because I'm not in the book."

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 -- Curvy Organic Object (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it's curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I've ever created.

I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.

Everything I've read on the internet suggests that Blender is a better program, but the interface for Blender is non-standard. That is, the interface doesn't work the same way every other Windows program works. After spending just a little time with Blender, I can certainly understand why Blender's interface works the way it does, but I'm conscious that I'll be teaching students who aren't computer experts. Do I want to force them to learn a completely new way of thinking about GUI, just to get them to understand some basic 3D design concepts? Probably not.

I'm still not sure whether I'll be able to import Anim8or objects into Hammer (Valve's tool for creating Half-Life 2 worls).

Anyway, learning how to create an object like this was interesting. Rather than assemble a comlex object by choosing primitive shapes and plunking them next to each other, you have to start with a simple shape (in my case, a hexagon), and extrude geometrical shapes from the polygons that make up the object.

It's an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses--if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It's a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite the best efforts of those who avoid it like the plague, MySpace is seeping into the online culture, have a greater influence as the days go by. --Mike Rubino --Crap Blog Junk Design Vomit: Some Thoughts on MySpace Design (Tranquility Lost)

One of my students subtly hints about his atttude towards MySpace.

Executives at DCC Comics have announced the debut of comic-book character Superrman, whose invulnerability to copyediting protects him from nefarious outside forces and intellectual-property lawsuits. "Thrill to the exploits of Superrman, the only child of a doomed plant! Gasp in awe at his Superr-Strength, X-Roy Vision, and his ability to leap mall buildings in a single bounce!" read a press release issued by DCC. "Superrman's only weakness? His vulnerability to Cryptonight -- and his star-crossed love for sassy, sexy, trouble-prone reporter Louis Lane!" The editors of Superrman say the comic book will be released alongside those of other popular DCC characters such as Wander Woman, the Flush, and Batdan. --Comic-Book Superrman Impervious To Copyediting (Onion)

This one's for you, Bobbby.

After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.

Given the historic domination of the home telephone by teenage girls, perhaps it is not surprising they are using the internet to communicate with friends for hours on end. Almost all children between 12 and 15 with the internet at home said they were "confident" surfing the web and did so on average for eight hours a week. But girls are more likely than boys to use the web as a communication tool. --Owen Gibson --More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it's the girl  (Guardian)

Hey, do you feel your TV is too big? Do you long to combine your television viewing experience with dopey chat-room talk about sex with robots? Is your knowledge of Star Trek so encyclopedic that the term "spoiler" means nothing to you? Then G4 TV has a show for you! --Lore Sjöberg --Trek 2.0, Boldly Going to Hell (Wired)

The background image on my laptop is a graphic of the original Enterprise bridge. But this... this?

When even Wired is mocking Star Trek fans, you know all hope is lost.

Watch the movie first!

Quoth is a dynamic interactive fiction system, in which authoring is done from a player's perspective, from within the running work. Quoth draws upon the concepts of pervasive anthropomorphisation, executable natural language, and revisionist narrative. The major use of Quoth so far has been for musical livecoding.

pervasive anthropomorphisation

In traditional interactive fiction, the player speaks to an ominiscient interpreter. There may be dialogue with "non-player characters", but it is mediated by the interpreter. In Quoth the player is always speaking directly to some item in the universe. The traditional omniscient interpreter is represented by the universe itself.

This allows for each item in the universe to have a different vocabulary, or even a different "interpreter" altogether. It also provides the player with more fluid interaction with each item. --Craig Latta --Quoth: a dynamic interactive fiction system (netjam.org)

Inform 7, or I7, is a dramatic departure from what has come before. IF languages such as Inform 6, TADS, and Hugo are procedural, C-like languages, familiar to most any modern computer programmer. I7 doesn't take that approach. Instead, its language is based on English.

I'll pause a moment to let that sink in.

Rather than using a small set of terse programming directives as Inform 6 did, Inform 7 uses a subset of English, in an effort to make interactive fiction programming more accessible to writers who lack a computer programming background. For instance, the following I7 code creates a three-room house:

The Living Room is a room. "This is your living room, as featured in a number of games written by first-time interactive fiction authors." East is the Kitchen. North is the Bedroom.

I7 also deviates from the standard object-oriented approach to IF, where objects in the game are mapped to objects in code, and the interaction between objects is contained as code associated with the objects. Instead, I7 uses a form of logical programming, where you define rules that explain how the game world works and how objects interact. For example,

Instead of taking the fire, say "It would burn you."

This sets up a rule that, when the player tries to take the fire, they can't; instead, they're told that the fire would burn them. And if you just found yourself thinking, "Well, of course; that's obvious," then you've identified one of the selling points of I7. --Introducing Inform 7 (Brass Lantern)

Such a major shift in the approach to IF programming is going to have repercussions.

While the syntax for I7 is based on English, you still have to think like a programmer in order to code in I7.

However, reading I7 code is much, much easier now. Those who already know how to read code -- and who have internalized coding processes so much that I7 seems like a straitjacket -- probably won't appreciate just how valuable that change is to the general public.

Scott Adams created the first commercial interactive fiction game, and by some accounts the first commercial gam