Humanities: June 2006 Archive Page

Adorno once wrote "it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz". Based on what we previously described, it seems that it would definitively be barbaric to create videogames about Auschwitz. However, if we could find a kind of environment where actions are irreversible, some of the main obstacles for designing "serious" videogames would disappear. -- Gonzalo Frasca --Ephemeral games: Is it barbaric to design videogames after Auschwitz? (Ludology.org)

In this article from 2000, Frasca asks why it is that the only computer games to deal with the Holocaust are neo-Nazi propaganda games. (I haven't seen or played any such games, but the Anti-Defamation League has an article on hate games in general.) In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Ralph Koster dismisses the idea that plot and moral context does not affect gameplay. He imagines a game that is played entirely like Tetris, except that "You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber... they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well.... I do not want to play this game. Do you?"

Graham Nelson's 20th Century time-travel romp, Jigsaw (a game from the early years of the post-commercial interactive fiction renaissance), features a brief non-interactive narrative sequence in which the player is placed in the role of a Jewish child watching what appears (to the child) to be a parade. In an interview with XYZZY News, Nelson described the creation of Jigsaw: "I felt that overmuch social history would be undramatic. But the largest element I (mostly) omitted was genocide. The Holocaust was not fair, the victims had no winning line."

Certainly playing WWII military strategy games would have little entertainment value if the winner of the simulation was always the winner of the historical event being simulated. The same can be said of the instructional value of such a game.

According to a widely-distributed set of teaching guidelines from the U.S. Holocaust Museum:

Even when teachers take great care to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson, and even worse, they are left with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they now know what it was like during the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences.

I agree completely that asking school kids to role-play guards and concentration camp victims would be problematic. The guidelines I quoted above do recognize the value of simulations that focus on general concepts (like solidarity and altruism), rather than specific Holocaust scenarios. But how much can we really learn about the holocaust from reading a story or watching a movie? Any representation of the Holocaust is going to be simplified. The question is, what do you choose to simulate, and is it possible to move from that simulation to a discussion of what the real system (the one being simulated) is like?

We have more vivid, first-person Holocaust stories from people who survived than we have from those who died. Might that fact give a skewed impression about survival?

A few years ago, blogger and columnist James Lileks recalled the joys of shooting bad guys in the morally unambiguous, simplified world of the first-person shooter, but used it in order to frame a different, more subtle question:

In "Wolfenstein," every room you enter has Nazis. You never enter a room full of startled film editors piecing together an anti-Jew screed, family men who've been incrementally co-opted by three years of occupation. You never find that room.

And what would you do if you did?

Regarding poetry in the aftermath of Auschwitz, Adorno later had second thoughts, writing in Negative Dialectics "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living - especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living."

(I'm going to have to end this in progress and get back to it later...)

It's a few hours later...

On the same blog entry, Lileks says about realism in games: "I came up with a good definition of a 'realistic' war game: they ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That's it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man."

A little Googling brings me to an update, of sorts, as Frasca reflects on Remember the Children: Daniel's Story from the US Holocaust museum (a spatial narrative for children, in which the visitor walks through a series of representations of life under Nazi Germany). Of Martin Niemöller's famous "First they came for the Jews/and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew," Frasca writes, "Right there, you have the rules for a simulation that analyses how your everyday actions affect the system, the big picture. In such a complex system like the Holocaust, the key element for understanding is how minimal discrimination may allow the emergence of the ultimate horror. And that'swhere simulation can be an excellent rhetorical tool. Museums generally deal with the past, but just because we want to look forward."

Frasca has elsewhere invoked Augusto Boal's distinction between oppression and aggression, and the Theatre of the Oppressed (which is designed to simulate oppressive acts, and to invite the audience to interrupt, forcing the actors to improvise their way towards a collaborative solution). (Next on my reading list -- Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.)

A Jacksonville man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet. --Teenage Girls Rob Man they Met on MySpace (WOAI.com)

I'm uncomfortable with the hype that presents the internet as dangerous (as opposed to the predictablity and passivity of TV). Even this "man bites dog" story, which is newsworthy because it reverses the expected formula, still invokes and reinforces the understood worldview.

This semester, I presented my undergraduates with a challenging course. I expected them to participate in class and keep up with assignments. I told them straight out that if they were not to come prepared, stay home. I did not coddle them.

The best students thrived on the regimen. The lazy students of course hated it. Naturally, I just got whacked on evaluations this semester by my darling undergraduates. The lower scores are just enough to drop me into a lower "category" for raises.

I ran the numbers, and my decision to teach a rigorous course just cost me about $2,000 spread over my teaching career. That does not include the lost money from summer courses, which are based upon my full-time salary, which in turn in part is influenced by my teaching evaluations. If my evaluations really drop, the cost increases dramatically. The worst case scenario is that really bad evaluations in a given year can cost me as much as $7,000 over the course of my career. Students will impact my salary like this each year, every year.

Thus, I have a strong incentive to keep those numbers up however I possibly can. The obvious solution is to make my course so incredibly easy that even the laziest, whiniest undergraduate can't help but do well. I am tempted to flood them with wonderment for poor answers and shower them with praise for undeserved effort. I just cannot bring myself to do this -- I just can't I care too much about teaching quality -- and it will (literally) cost me. --Untenured --Evaluations are serious business (Chronicle Forums)

I'm certainly not blogging this because I think evaluations aren't important, but it is important to see how pandering to student approval can result in watering down the educational system.

Standardized tests like the SAT don't really measure a student's academic potential -- they instead measure a student's ability to complete standardized tests. The same goes for standardized teacher evaluations, which are very good at measuring what students think they've learned.

I have never bought doughnuts or shown a movie in order to get my students in a good mood before passing out evaluation forms, though I certainly avoid passing out the forms on days when they'll be affected (positively or negatively) by their most recent grades.

At Seton Hill, my division chair sits in on a class session once a semester, and the academic dean sits in on a session once a year. By doing so, they get a good sense of what the class dynamic is like, which provides context for the numbers.

Complete with the Bernie Mac perfect afro the redguardsman stared back at me in 1080i. His racial description?

The most naturally talented warriors in Tamriel, the dark-skinned, wiry-haired Redguards of Hammerfell seem born to battle, though their pride and fierce independence of spirit makes them more suitable as scouts or skirmishers, or as free-ranging heroes and adventurers, than as rank-and-file soldiers. In addition to their cultural affinities for many weapon and armor styles, Redguards are also physically blessed with hardy constitutions and quickness of foot.

Lisa looked at me and said "Oh my God!" The first thing that popped into my mind? "Run, Nigger, Run" (followed by a whole slew of other equally offensive stereotypical quips). I dropped the controller and jotted down some thoughts. Lisa told me to stop taking notes and just play the damned game for once. So I finished my character and tried to forget Jimmy the Greek, the middle passage, the history of African Americans as "scouts" (what gamers now call tanks ) in the military, and the sickness in the pit of my stomach that was either caused by too much coconut rum or just too much damned ignorance. --Jimmy the Greek Made Oblivion (Dr. B.'s blog)

Reflections on Keys for Writers (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm paging through Ann Raimes's Keys for Writers, which I used to use when I taught freshman comp at my previous job, and which I'm coming back to in the fall as Seton Hill offers a new "Basic Composition" course for the first time. (Our freshman writing offering used to be a two-semester course that included content on cultural identities.)

While we are charged with teaching students to compose in words, many students of this digital culture will be experts at composing with sound and images; their hairstyles, fashion accessories, piercings and tattoos may be carefully coordinated to project a "main idea." The placement of a tattoo -- where it can be easily covered up for job interviews, and easily revealed in more relaxed settings -- shows an awareness of audience. While I have no intention of turning Basic Composition into a new media course, I do feel much can be gained from working with the strengths that students bring into the classroom.

As part of her early advice to students, Raimes observes that a blank screen can be daunting; quite frankly, I think some students would be better served if they did contemplate that blank screen a little longer, before they started churning out words to fill it. That is, of course, the purpose of prewriting and brainstorming. But because young people who socialize on the internet are so used to composing their thoughts in short bursts, and getting immediate feedback from their peers, that they can use to develop their thoughts a little further, the composition classroom becomes a bottleneck if the instructor positions him or herself as the most important authority of feedback.

I hated discussion groups when I was in school, but as a teacher I've become to see how necessary they are. Today's students are far more peer-oriented than students of my generation were. Today's students learn in a hive environment, sharing notes and ideas and abilities on multiple levels. When I assign students to post comments on their peers' webogs, they will coordinate and collaborate that public feedback via private text messages. Rather than complain about work ethic and confiscating students' cell phones so they can't collaborate during class, I'd much rather embrace the new peer-to-peer environment and incorporate it into the writing process.

Raimes's "Key Points" (1a) ask students to do close readings, to question what they read, to "[i]nteract with a text by highlighting points," to keep a reading journal, and to critique their own writing. I am eager to ask students to develop that critical voice when they confront peer writing, and eventually their own writing. From a karaoke sing-along, to calling in to vote for or against a "reality show" contestant, our students will be familiar with multiple ways of interacting with cultural artifacts. Some will have written fanfic of Harry Potter or the role-playing they do in video games. Even listening to the director's audio commentary on a DVD is a form of metatextual criticism. In keeping with my desire to get students to think of the social networking they do as an important task (intrinsically valuable in its own sphere, and involving communication skills that are transferable to other communication contexts), I imagine I might ask students to write a list that compares an old TV show they might be familiar with (such as Gilligan's Island or a Warner Brothers cartoon) with a new show with a similar theme or genre (such as Survivor or the Simpsons). I might ask them to separate facts and observations, and come up with a main idea.

I'll have to work to ensure that the students don't feel like they're being asked to jump directly to argument -- I want them to explain the differences, not argue for one over the other. But if I back up too much, the class will be front-loaded with dry definitions and abstract concepts, so I should be clear with the goals of this media awareness paragraph.

Ah, well -- this is a work in progress. Got to log off...

When a young St. Paul boy got to pick the theme for his third birthday party, he didn't pick Nemo or the Wiggles or Dora the Explorer. He didn't even pick his favorite sports team.

Henry Schally picked "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer".

His mother, Jennifer Schally, designed party hats complete with pictures of the PBS news program's regular contributors. --3-Year-Old's Birthday Party Theme: 'NewsHour' (WCCO)

Yes! There is hope for the future! The world needs more Henry Schallys!

Here's the money quote: "Outside of 6 to 7 o'clock every weekday night, he's pretty normal," [the boy's father] Troy Schally clarified.

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" -Sam Andeson --A Prairie Home Conundrum: The mysterious appeal of Garrison Keillor. (Slate)

A great quote from later in the piece: "Without saying it outright, Keillor projects himself as a sage -- a kind of Wobegon Obi-Wan spreading the revolutionary creed of premodern simplicity."

"The number of term papers assigned over the years has decreased significantly," said Herman Clay, director of history and social sciences at Los Angeles Unified School District.

Instead, Los Angeles teachers are assigning more in-class written exams, oral reports with visual aids and PowerPoint presentations, said Clay, a former principal of Van Nuys High School.

It's unclear how many teachers nationwide are doing the same, but it's enough that some educators worry that kids are missing an important educational experience -- one that requires them to seek out facts and then assemble them into a cogent, sustainable argument.

In-class writing assignments are, by necessity, much shorter exercises that can be as brief as a couple of paragraphs and rarely more than a few pages.

"Kids these days have difficulty writing in depth about anything," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet use. "They are used to doing PowerPoint presentations, and the level of superficiality is great compared with term papers." --Terril Yue Jones --Teachers Adjust Lesson Plans as Web Fuels Plagiarism (LA Times (will expire))

In mid-May, the difference between the student summer and the professor summer seemed vast to me. One approaches the student summer the way Evel Knievel approaches a line of Ford Mustangs -- a burst of frenzied acceleration as one heads up the ramp of stress and procrastination, a brief moment of giddy release as one floats tantalizingly close to success in the course of an all-nighter or three, and then a crash-and-burn landing in which one turns in the finished product which earns one notoriety but isn't quite as successful as you had hoped it would be.

Entry into the professor summer is much more apocalyptic. You announce to your students that the end times are coming. Panic ensues as all and sundry suddenly realize -- despite your jeremiads to the contrary throughout the entire semester -- that they shall all be judged when the last days come. What follows is typically a period of intense activity as students undertake the scholarly equivalent of cashing in their lifetime savings and spending it on kerosene and canned goods (or, to keep the metaphor straight, jumping over a line of Ford Mustangs). Are there extra credit assignments available? Can papers due months ago still be turned in for credit? --Alex Golub --Summer Thoughts -- I (Inside Higher Ed)

DUBLIN -- Professor Hanlon O'Faolin, once called "mad" at the Royal Irish Academy for attempting to reanimate the traditional body of Celtic folktales with the power of elcectic multilingual puns, is readying his apoplectic Bloomsday Device for activation on June 16. "Yes! Yes, they laughed at me yes but now yes I will make them pay and yes!" O'Faolin wrote in a letters to the Irish Times, promising the destruction of Dublin on the same day portrayed in Joyce's Ulysses. "When the sun first strikes the Martello Tower, the first notes of 'The Rose of Castille' shall ring out, the streets shall run with rashers, kidneys, and sausages, and I shall forge in the smithy of Dublin's soul the uncreated conscience of my race!" Dublin police say they are working around the clock from profiles to create a portrait of the professor as a crazy man. --Mad Lit Professor Puts Finishing Touches On Bloomsday Device (The Onion (Satire))

That's the whole item, but it's a delightful one.

This image, modified from John Speed's map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York -- the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the "Corpus Christi Play".

Dozens of short plays, mounted on pageant wagons, began with a performance at the Trinity Priory (red dot, lower left) and moved through the city streets, stopping at pre-arranged performance locations known as stations (white dots). --PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator (jerz.setonhill.edu/(Re)Soundings 1997)

According to the liturgical calendar, tomorrow is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi (the body of Christ). During medieval times, it was an important feast, especially in England, where the colder climate didn't exactly encourage outdoor celebrations during Easter.

This site, the first version of which was published in the online journal (Re)Soundings in 1997, presents a Java simulation of one component of the outdoor celebrations that the medieval town of York, England used to present during the late middle ages.

I'm pleased to see that -- on my version of the Java Virual Machine, anyway -- the program still seems to run just fine.

I had originally written the simulation from scratch, for a PC, as a final project in a course on the York Corpus Christi Play. I ported it over to Java as part of a non-credit course I took on humanities computing. My first presentation at an academic conference and my first peer-reviewed publication both came from this project, so I have a special fondness for it.

The York Corpus Christi Play (also known as the York Cycle) is a series of short religious plays that were performed as part of a very complex outdoor festival in the late middle ages. They were wildly popular in England until the Protestant Reformation. Performed back-to-back, the cycle takes about 12 hours. Since these plays were performed at staggered intervals along numerous stations in York, the whole event from start to finish took about 19 hours.

There are lot of variables to consider when you try to estimate something that complex, which meant that

New media have always met with suspicion: As The Economist editorialized a while back, a "neophobic" tendency dates from antiquity, with Plato's argument in the "Phaedrus" that the relatively newfangled medium of writing corrupted the memory-building powers of oral culture. Of course sometimes the new is bad. Yet the critics of video games are not only conjuring up a threat where none exists; they're ignoring the positive moral lessons and cognitive benefits that many of today's sophisticated games offer. --Brian C. Anderson --The Brain Workout: In Praise of Video Games (Opinion Journal)

In general, we can slip up in a verbal conversation and get away with it. A colleague may be thinking, "Did she just say 'irregardless'?", but the words flow on, and our worst transgressions are carried away and with luck, forgotten.

That's not the case with written communications. When we commit a grammatical crime in emails, discussion posts, reports, memos, and other professional documents, there's no going back. We've just officially gone on record as being careless or clueless. And here's the worst thing. It's not necessary to be an editor or a language whiz or a spelling bee triathlete to spot such mistakes. --Jody Gilbert --10 flagrant grammar mistakes that make you look stupid (Tech Republic)

I'd call these copyediting errors rather than flagrant grammar mistakes, but that's quibbling.

Of course, I make mistakes, too. (My sister regularly alerts me to typos on this blog.) As an English teacher, I'm very conscious of the way that class makes its mark in our language. I'm personally interested in correct grammar because I not only love the English language but make my living off of teaching about it, so there's a heavy dose of self-interest surrounding my grammar vigilance.

While I did tell a group of English majors "The world's hamburgers need to be flipped" when they were frustrated by a lesson on the passive voice, threatening my students that their writing makes them look stupid is not really part of my pedagogical philosophy.

Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a "book cover" of sorts for her work, which is automatically displayed when the player begins the game. Thumbnail versions of this art could also be displayed in another application that has aroused considerable discussion in the community, even if it is a project still far from fruition: the creation of a sort of IF "I-Tunes" application that would allow the player to browse the Archive's immense database of games, and to open any one of them on her computer with just a couple of clicks. A meta-data standard for IF is under discussion which could make this dream a reality by providing a standard format for storing basic information -- copyright date, author name, brief description, etc. -- about every game to facilitate easy searching and browsing. These projects have a long way to go, but the community seems increasingly committed to shedding the retro-gaming label once and for all and embracing the future. I believe a larger audience for IF is out there, and I believe an improved presentation for the genre as a whole is the best way to reach it.

Some see IF as suffering something of a directional crisis in the last few years. The wild experimentation with form that marked the late nineties has now largely subsided. One could argue that we have a pretty good sense of what the genre is capable of now, at least unless and until we see some quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology, or until something else occurs that shifts the paradigm of IF development. This is does not mean that the exciting phase of IF's history is over, however. It may in fact be just beginning. Authors are now free to use the techniques that the experimentalists pioneered not as formal exercises but in the service of the stories they are attempting to tell. Some recent games, such as Jason Devlin's Vespers and Chris Klimas' Blue Chairs, have displayed just this ascendancy of substance over form that is the mark of a mature artform. There are many, many stories still to tell, and I believe that a substantial upswing in IF's popularity could be just around the corner if the community stays the course with current efforts, even as increasing academic interest brings the genre a respectability it could never have dreamed of in the days of Infocom. Interactive narrative will be the literary form of the twenty-first century, and IF has every chance of continuing to be an important part of that movement for years to come. --Jimmy Maher --Chapter 11: The State of IF Today (Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction))

In the US, "Chapter 11" is the section of legal code dealing with bankruptcy, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Especially notworthy is the "Suggested Works of Modern IF" page, which includes a brief essay on canon.

666 is the occult "number of the beast," also called the "sign of the devil" (Wang 1994), associated in the Bible with the Antichrist. It has figured in many numerological studies. It is mentioned in Revelation 13:18: "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666." The origin of this number is not entirely clear, although it may be as simple as the number containing the concatenation of one symbol of each type (excluding M==1000) in Roman numerals: DCLXVI==666 (Wells 1986). --Beast Number (Mathworld | Wolfram Research)

I know it sounds nerdy, but I jumped at the chance to tag along on my husband's business trip to Hartford, CT last weekend so that I could re-walk the 2 miles that Wallace Stevens used to walk to and from his home on Westerly Terrace to Hartford Accident & Indemnity each day. I took along my EL 267 text and read some of his work as I walked along through a slightly dicey section of town... --Brenda Christeleit --Baby Blackbird and Wallace Stevens (BrendaChristeleit)

A student who was in my American Lit class this past semester posted this to her academic blog.

While I fully realize that blogs aren't equally beloved by all students in my classes, what other instructional tool gives students a platform to share their thoughts even after the class is over?

Well done, Brenda.

Katharine Close, an eighth-grader at the H.W. Mountz School in Spring Lake, N.J., is the first girl since 1999 to win the national spelling title. She stepped back from the microphone and put her hands to her mouth upon being declared the winner. She recognized the word as soon as she heard it.

"I couldn't believe it. I knew I knew how to spell the word and I was just in shock," said Katharine, who tied for seventh-place last year. "I couldn't believe I would win." --Darlene Superville --13-year-old N.J. girl wins spelling bee (Yahoo! News (will expire))

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as 'heavy-handed and brutal', banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia's natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. --Brendan O'Neill --Brad, Angelina and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism'  (Spiked)

"It shows that these forgotten people of the '90s had many of the same concerns as modern man, such as b-days, and slow periods at work," Caspari said. "The presence of the archaic slang verbalization 'what's up' appears to indicate that they cared about the immediate welfare of others in their closely knit community, much as we do today."

But the artifact reveals differences as well. According to Caspari, the find indicates that people from that era spoke a much earlier form of e-mail language alien to our own, employing the full spellings of most words, and lacking the versatility and advanced expression of smiley-face or frowny-face emoticons. --Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995 (The Onion (Satire))