Media: October 2006 Archive Page

--Stephen Colbert on Blogs (Youtube)

My student Gabby Blanchard posted this on her blog. Hilarious.

In the new SDK it is necessary to build the client and server DLLs before running the MOD. Please build them if you see this message when trying to run the MOD.

--Source SDK Known Issues (Valve Sofware)

Chris Sherman from SHU's helpdesk has spent several hours helping me try to get the Half-Life 2 SDK working in a classroom lab for EL 405: New Media Projects. We're making progress. Once we gave the students SuperUser access to individual computers in the lab, we've been able to install Half-Life 2 so that the game plays. We've also been able to install the editor, so that students can create levels. But when we try to compile and run the maps, we get the above error message. When I track down this error message, it looks like we'll need to install Microsoft .net (which is a huge mega-installation that opens up a whole new can of worms). I know I didn't install that on my laptop, and I remember reading somewhere that there's an alternative C++ compiler that works with the HL2 SDK. I also noticed that that particular lab has Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 installed, and there does seem to be a conversion utility that lets you change the HL2 files so that Visual Studio 6.0 can use them. But that's not something I can fiddle with at home -- I have to be at the lab in order to try that. So I'm going to keep looking.

Students have been able to install Inform 7 and Blender 3D on the lab computers without any trouble. We purchased site licenses for The Games Factory 2 and Flash, so those never gave us any problems.

I've still got a couple of weeks before I'm scheduled to teach HL2 modding. At the moment, while it would be awkward and silly, I could have the students e-mail me the maps they make during the classroom exercises, and they could run them on my laptop. But that's hardly an ideal solution. (I really wish Tim Holt's Half-Life 2 modding book were out... sigh.)

Aside from a brief flirtation with Pong, Jenkins never really paid much attention to games until the mid 80's, when he first connected his son's new Nintendo Entertainment System -- and was blown away by what he saw. "Ever since I've been passionate about games," he says. "I want a serious game that engages me the way Super Mario did when I hooked up that computer." --David M. Ewalt --The Serious Business of Serious Games (Forbes.com)

Ewalt is blogging from the Serious Games Summit in Washington D.C.

I attended that conference the last two years, but didn't attend this year, in part because I'm giving a talk at a local conference next week, and in part because I didn't want to miss Halloween (again) with my young children.

Milblogs published by authors with "boots on the ground" received little attention from officials in the early days following the Iraq invasion in 2003, when the phenomenon of blogging was less known. But since then, Pentagon scrutiny has increased.--Xeni Jardin --Under Fire, Soldiers Kill Blogs (Wired)

I'll return to my analysis of Kairos as a project identity later. But first I'd like to consider one other aspect of Jerz's critique--attention to audience. Kairos's design (referring to Issue 5.1), Jerz says tongue-in-cheek, "has drastically improved," making it "no longer an easy target." The only mention of audience in Jerz's critique is when he mentions his technical writing students, whom he asked to critique Kairos's design. While he concedes that they are "not the primary audience" for Kairos, he affords their comments ample room as support for his argument. His instructions to students didn't seem to include analyzing design, let alone content, with Kairos's actual audience in mind--writing studies scholars who teach with technology. Through his application of Jakob Nielsen's laws of web-user experience, Jerz does speak indirectly of an audience, the ubiquitous "users" (see also useit.com). These users, it would seem, include all people with access to the World Wide Web, suggesting that anyone and everyone is a potential audience for the journal just because a page exists in cyberspace. --Tracy Bridgeford --''Kairotically Speaking'': Kairos and the Power of Identity (Kairos)

Bridgeford offers an excellent, thoughtful response to my rather blistering 1999 critique of the journal Kairos, which Kairos was brave enough to publish. My main point was that design choices interfered with the journal's ability to get its content in front of its audience.

Even as I was working on that article, the navigation of Kairos developed and improved, so that my critique was out-of-date before it was even published. And the invention of KairosNews addressed several of the points that I raised in my Kairos review.

My essay did focus on the design and user experience, and I did report what I observed after asking several classes of undergraduates to use the site. While their motivation for reading a Kairos article would differ from the motivation a scholar would have, I don't think that a student's frustration in not being able to find a search engine and not being able to find where to click in order to read the whole article would be substantially much different from the frustration a hypertext theorist would feel while trying to carry out the same operations.

In my defense about the audience issue Bridgeford mentions above, I did acknowledge the academic audience obliquely, in subordinate clauses such as "If the purpose of Kairos is to distribute scholarly information..." And elsewhere I argued that the use of consciously "clever" and obscure navigation techniques perpetuates the mythology that hypertext has to be difficult and challenging in order to be effective. Even in 1999, when I wrote the article, hypertext had been around for long enough that hypertext authors who were not consciously informed by hypertext theorists had discovered a separate set of expectations and methods for communication in hypertext, and that that set of techniques was quickly becoming a standard that Kairos was not reflecting. But none of that really affects the value of Bridgeford's points.

From time to time, I have thought about possibly revising that original review, but Bridgeford's thoughtful essay does an excellent job following up on the issues I raised, and reflecting further on Kairos's accomplishments in the 10 years it has been pushing the boundaries of online scholarship.

Public education in America operates on a manufacturing metaphor. Line up the parts, send 'em down the line, inspect them, then ship them out.

The assembly line idea couldn't be more out of synch with the way a wired (and now wireless) teenager deals with information and with other people. They are social in fundamentally different ways than when we were in high school. Yes, there is still peer pressure and acne. But what'snew is what isn't there: Barriers to communication and sharing of information. Technology has reduced and in some instances eliminated the distances and timeframes that defined the way we learned 20 years ago. This is a destabilizing thought for some people. So was rock ?n roll.

The teenagers walking into my classroom have iPods, cell phones (with movies on them) and twitching fingers from constant IMing and video games they play when they are not in class.

So I jumped at the chance to try Making History when it first came out. To their credit, the company behind the game was extremely honest about how to use the game and how not to use it. --David McDivitt --Do Gamers Score Better in School? (Serious Games Source)

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. --Brock Read --Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? (Chronicle)

I wish this article had come out a few days earlier, since the assigned reading in my Writing for the Internet class was a hodgepodge of articles that attempted to cover pretty much exactly what this article covers.

"You want feel-good and heartwarming, right?" Scorsese said. "I can do that. Or I can do casual violence with no strings attached. You know I can. What else you want? Kung-fu wire-work? Mentally disabled guy? Boring Robert Redford-style fishing movie? Just tell me what to do, I'll do it. Done. End of story. Give me my Oscar and I'm out of here. Poof." --Martin Scorsese's Next Film To Be Three Hours Of Begging For Oscar (The Onion (Satire))

A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book's definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface. --Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. --Thinking that Goes beneath the Surface (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This quote is almost 20 years old, but it's still valid.

A place to read? How many students come to scholastic grief because they never find one? Last year the daughter of a friend flunked out of a huge state university because, she claimed, she could never actually read anywhere. The dorm room? Her roommates were all fun and games. The library? Far too noisy. In effect, the girl fell victim to the energies of a text-messaged, i-Poded and above all cell-phoned American culture. --Terry Ceasar --A Place to Read (Inside Higher Ed)

The Federation of American Scientists called for major investment in digital educational games that could reshape how students learn and workers are trained for 21st century jobs.... The news may confound some parents, upset about the hours their teenagers "waste" on video-gaming or about the sex and violence portrayed. But scientists have long recognized such entertainment games also cultivate skills demanded by today's employers, and that "serious games" are a different "animal" from Grand Theft Auto-type games. --Video-gaming American schools (Enquirer)

I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave? Simple: Blizzard has created an alternate universe where we don't have to be ourselves when we don't want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I've seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ. -- The View From the Top (Soul Kerfluffle)

I have so far resisted multiplayer online games, simply because the demands of a job and family make mowing the lawn, showering, and sleeping challenging enough. I typically save my game-playing time for the summer breaks, and even then only play after the kids are in bed. I am conscious that I am missing a huge part of online culture, but quite frankly there is so much culture out there, all the time, that one has to be selective.

Of course, I speak as someone who has spent hours and hours using Google Sketchup to designing an imaginary monument that I might possibly use in a puzzle in a text-adventure game that I've been working on since 1999. But I digress.

Obsessions are fine, as long as you can turn them off when you have to. The author of this piece couldn't, so it's a good thing he finally stopped.

Universal Music, the world'slargest record company, has launched the established media industry'sfirst legal action against user-generated internet sites in the wake of its distribution deal last week with YouTube, the most popular video-sharing website. --Joshua Chaffin --Universal sues video-sharing websites (FT.com)

Note that YouTube isn't the one being sued. YouTube actually cut a deal with Universal.

I wonder whether part of the deal with YouTube sort of hinted with a wink that Universal should sue YouTube's competitors.

A cartoon version of the life of Pope John Paul II, telling the story of his life and death in animated form, is to be released on DVD by the Vatican.
--Cartoon tribute to Pope John Paul (BBC)

I'm not at all surprised. John Paul II was an expert at reaching out in all media, so this is very fitting. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Reginald Pike's Yael Staav takes us from model to billboard in under 60 seconds in this impressive new spot from Dove.

--Dove - Evolution ('Boards)

A short film that might be very useful for sparking discussion in a class studying the effect of marketing on women's body image. This advertisement is still banking on the power of the beauty myth to sell its product, but it does so in an unusual way.

On Wednesday, Friedman ordered Take-Two to give him a copy of the game, along with providing someone to play the game for him to watch before he made a decision. A Take-Two employee played the game for the judge Thursday afternoon, using a cheat code to go through the game faster.

A game like Bully is designed to take several days to complete. Friedman said he watched the game for two hours. But Thompson, who was present at the viewing, said it was only for one hour.

''You did not see the game,'' Thompson told Friedman at Friday's hearing. ``You don't even know what it was you saw.''

Thompson said he disapproved of a Take-Two employee taking the judge through a game because the employee could have avoided making violent choices. --Bridget Carey --Judge doesn't object to video game `Bully' (Miami Herald)

Thompson has a good point. Watching a game for one or two hours is not the same thing as playing it. No doubt a person who was devoted to getting the game banned could have played the game with the sole purpose of showing the most violent sequences.

Anyone over a certain age -- and you know who you are -- will remember those wonderful days of peppermint sticks and electric dog-washers, a magic time when running barefoot through the grass and having your cocker spaniel buffed and pressure-rinsed to a glossy sheen at the flip of a switch was every boy's birthright. Of course Rags is long gone now -- that unfortunate business with the faulty shutoff relay -- but you'll always have those stains on the ceiling to remember him by. --''Junior -- put down that book and turn on the electric dog-washer'' (Plan 59)

I love the retrofuture.

From a collection of what metafilter calls 50s print advertisements.

Many a Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Just a bit of fun with Flash. (My work for chapters 3 & 4 of Flash Journalism.... I'm just barely staying ahead of my students.)

The parser in Adventure is harder to use than most interactive fiction parsers, because this is the first of its type and fairly primitive. This is almost immediately evident when a user makes it to the building. One obvious thing to do would be to input "enter building;" doing so, however, returns the message "That's not something you can enter" (Crowther and Woods). Likewise, one puzzle requires the user to sic a bird they have captured on a snake, but the command "throw bird at snake" does not work. Instead, simply "throw bird" will take care of that problem. Another puzzle requires users to realize that a certain object (a wand) is useful on a certain object (an uncrossable gap) in a certain way (by issuing the command "wave rod," not "use rod"); these are probably not ideas that are immediately thought of by users. Another aporia that exists is the game's geography. As the annotation notes, the game doesn't utilize Euclidian geography: "a north exit from one room to the next doesn't necessarily imply a south exit will return you back to the original room" (Jerz). This makes map-making, a standard interactive fiction tool, somewhat difficult. --The Problem is Choice: Aporia, Epiphany, and Conflict in Interactive Fiction Endings (ENGL 668K: Digital Studies (University of Maryland))

Some good points, but the "enter building" problem is an issue with one particular edition of Adventure -- the Inform port by Nelson (1994), after Ekman and Baggett (1993). It's not accurate to ascribe this particular difficulty to Crowther and Woods. And the original Adventure parser was only built to recognize a noun and a verb (in either order). The Inform environment that enabled the 1994 port permitted the entry of more complex sentences, but the game itself doesn't recognize those complex sentences. since the game was written for a parser that only recognized a noun and a verb. And the practice of mapping an adventure game on an Euclidean plane only became possible after the Adventure genre took hold. Another classic cave-explloration game, Hunt the Wumpus, took place in an icosahedron, if memory serves.

While I'm quibbling with this passage about a digital text I know well, overall I thought this posting did a good job applying Aarseth's concept of ergodic to the chosen examples.

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit. Children who don't learn correct technique find it harder to write by hand, so they avoid it. Schools that do teach handwriting often stop after third grade -- right after kids learn cursive. By the time computers are more widely used in classrooms for writing, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, many children already have decided they don't like to write.

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills. --Margaret Webb Pressler --The Handwriting Is on the Wall (Washington Post (will expire))

The opening statistic that says only 15% of the 2006 SAT exams are written in cursive is fairly alarming. But I'm in no position to complain. My own handwriting is terrible. I remember consciously making changes to the way I wrote when I started taking notes in college -- ways to improve my speed. And I'm willing to carry around a laptop or tap digital keys on my PDA rather than deal with my own awful scrawl.

Internet search leader Google is snapping up YouTube for $1.65 billion, brushing aside copyright concerns to seize a starring role in the online video revolution. --Google Snaps Up YouTube for $1.65B (AP|MyWay)

That's cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute.

Here's where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. --Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch)

An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia. Since the article I'm linking to is a transcript of a TV item, it's pretty much useless to read on the web. The title "Community Papers Anniversary Lift" is completely meaningless, perhaps because this story was introduced by an anchor who read a script that was not archived with this story, which is why I had to add my own explanation of what you were reading in order for this excerpt to make any sense.

There are highlighted screenshots and excerpts, but they're not connected to links. Wouldn't it make sense to link to the Wikipedia source and link to the journalist's article, and let readers judge for themselves?

A great example of how not to do online journalism. (Link via Metafilter.)

[Y]ou're running around on a big circuit board, powering up at transformers, dodging resistors, your path barred by ROM chips. This probably seems pretty weird to The Youth of Today. In the years since Tron we've been trained to think that a journey to "the inside of the computer" might entail running around on a desktop peering into manila folders and perhaps occasionally hiding in a trash can from a giant grinning paper clip. The kids I see tapping out IM messages during lectures probably have no more familiarity with or interest in the innards of the sealed boxes they're typing on than they do in the what the profs are saying.

But in 1982, juggling circuit boards was part of owning a computer. --Tron (Adam Cadre)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I've fiddled with Flash before, but I haven't yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed that all the shapes I drew had this dumb blue box, and I couldn't select line segments or cut shapes into smaller sections anymore.

The problem is I had clicked the "Object Draw" button, which forces Flash to treat each shape (in this case a circle) as a single unit. The interface mocks me... the relevant button in the Options section is, of course, a circle with a blue box around it. (Why didn't I think of that sooner? Duh.)

Spent about 10 minutes being frustrated by this, which was frustrating, since I'm counting down the minutes since I've got to get out of the office and head for home.

Update: It took me a little longer than the 50 minutes I alotted for the classroom exercise, but I did finish a simple Flash animation. Getting it to display online will have to wait for another day.

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos - all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends. --Some Youth Rethink Online Communications (AP (MyWay))

--Timez Attack (BigBrainz)

There are flashcard "games" and is multiplication bingo and multiplication Frogger, and they're all well and good. But this is something else. Watch the video on the home page.

--[E-Mail is for Old People] (User Friendly)

Thanks for the link, Josh.

Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman'shabitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. --Matthew B. Crawford --Shop Class as Soulcraft (The New Atlantis)

I'm in the middle of a unit that's causing some stress in my Writing for the Internet class. I'm asking my students to code simple HMTL pages by hand.

I love this group of students, and I'm sure they'll do fine. But I find their struggles noteworthy, especially since our initial discussion of Vannevar Bush's brilliant essay "As We May Think" focused mostly on how difficult many of the students found it to read an old-fashioned essay. ("Why did he go on and on like that? Couldn't he have just given us the gist in a few sentences?")

Through their blogs, the students have already had plenty of changes to write for online audiences. Asking them to code their own HTML will demand from them a deeper understanding of how technology affects our writing. When you code something by hand, there are no shortcuts; no resources that you can skim in order to get "the gist." Since they are Humanities majors, they are used to earning grades by being bright, by innovating and improvising, and by having great ideas. They're not used to being flummoxed because they used the word processor program that they were familiar with instead of the text-editing tool that I recommended, so that their code ends up with curly quotes that confuse the web browsers. For some of them, it's a huge mental shift to keep them from habitually clicking on an icon to open the file. (If we want to edit an HTML file, you have to open it in a text editor, but clicking on it will open it with the default application, a web browser.)

It's certainly not their fault that the GUI is such a part of their lives that they find this kind of coding foreign and unsettling. I am giving them lots of time to work on this, since I feel it's very important for them to get under the hood of the web pages that we'll be analyzing.

I did feel the HTML textbook I chose was very straightforward, with step-by-step instructions on what you have to type at each stage, but so far it seems the book lacks context (such as an introduction to the whole concept of icons and filenames and file extensions, which I've internalized because I used the command line interface for years before I ever touched a computer mouse). I've been able to supply that context after the fact, but the end result is still a bit of a disruption.

In grad school, I did computer programming on my own, for fun, because I found it personally rewarding to have a compiler tell me "45 errors" at 10:45am and to see that error list drop to 10, 3, 1, and finally 0 by the time I took a lunch break. There was no such software to detect logical flaws or factual mistakes in my literary analysis papers, which meant I had to develop a different mental model of what it means to "make progress" in my academic work. But I've found the methodical approach to bracketing a problem area and zeroing in on it is useful in any intellectual task.

If you have a 10,000 line computer code, and you work in one section at a time, changing one thing at a time, and trying to run the program after each change, you'll always know what you did to introduce the error. If you work on multiple sections at the same time, making radical changes all the time, and you're not methodical about checking your results, then you'll have no idea what you did to cause the code to generate 467 errors, you'll have no idea where to start looking for solutions, and you'll be tempted to throw it all away and start over.

It's okay to throw away a paragraph or a 1-2 page paper and start over, but it's a huge waste of time to wait until your 5- or 10- or 50-page paper is beyond all hope, and then throw it all away.

Writing for computers (code) and writing for humans (essays) require different processes of drafting and revision, and the feedback loops are different. But in both cases, knowing the process is vital to generating a good final product efficiently. Crawford notes that the craft of wheel-making includes knowledge of what trees to fell, what time of year to cut them, and how to preserve the wood. While I don't expect the students to be able to mine the raw materials to be used to construct the computers they'll be using, I do feel they need to have more than a surface-level understanding of the medium they'll be using.

Fortunately, I've built the "Writing for the Internet" course so that, at this stage, students aren't being evaluated on the quality of the writing that they're doing -- right now, all they have to do is get the example website working, and they are free to work together as much as they wish. So, while the students have blogged about being terrified by HTML, the atmosphere during the workshops has been positive.

The games are now available for downloading. --IFComp 2006

Mmmm.... interactive fiction.

Bryan Louiselle wrote two new songs, "Cellular Fusion" and "Counting on You," ... --Disney retools its 'School' (Variety)

I don't get cable, so I haven't seen the TV version of High School Musical. But it turns out that the two new songs that are part of the stage version were written by someone I knew in high school. Bryan was a senior when I was a sophomore. He played Harold Hill the year I played Mayor Shinn in The Music Man. He was an all-around nice guy. From what I can tell, "Cellular Fusion" seems to be about cell phones. I'll bet his songs rock.