Media: September 2007 Archive Page

If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay -- giving players challenges to work through and choices to make -- in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.

Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player's desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player's emotional and intellectual life.

There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can't play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these "interactive fictions" gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story. The steps required to advance the plot, though often devilishly perplexing, felt like natural behavior rather than arbitrary puzzle-solving. Today's game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

A newsroom is always filled with fast-talking, bright people whose main work is to speak to strangers, investigate a situation, get answers, develop a story. Since reporters are always finding out something about someone, they create countless stories with good beginnings, middles, and endings. The newspaper gave the moviemaker an endless flow of story possibilities in an atmosphere that soon became so familiar to movie audiences that journalists could be thrown into a film without the scriptwriter having to worry about motivation or plot.

By the early 1920s, audiences already knew that reporters were always involved in some kind of story, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic. They accepted it as a matter of course. In the process, they got not only large doses of entertainment but also a series of lasting impressions about the media that has stayed in the public mind for more than ten decades.

A journalist without a voice is only a shadow of the real McCoy. The images at first didn't speak, but all of the Jekyll-and-Hyde stereotypes of the newspaperman and woman were there in the pages of melodramatic fiction and in the silent films often based on that fiction. People who read newspapers didn't have the slightest idea how the news came to them until they read about it in lurid books or saw it on the silent screen. Right from the beginning of film, the world of the newspaper was an easily accessible and recognizable background.

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By the last decades of the twentieth century, the journalists most people remember are the anonymous journalists, played by nondescript actors, who chase after a story by rudely invading the privacy of the person involved. These reporters become bit players, an anonymous piece of an intrusive pack of harassing journalists, many armed with lights, cameras, and microphones. The public watches uncomfortably as these obnoxious reporters fill the movie and, especially, the television screens. They poke their cameras into people's faces, yell out questions, recklessly pursue popular actors - the kind who used to play journalists once cheered by audiences. The result of this particularly offensive image of the reporter from the 1970s to the new century is the public's rejection of the reporter as a hero, as someone helpful and necessary to society. In the beginning, these anonymous reporters were more likable because they were given witty lines, and they asked questions the audiences wanted answered. They were often used to advance the plot and summarize the action. They were created by former journalists who, no matter how critical of the profession, couldn't disguise their true love of the people in it.

 
It's all my fault
that now I hear their death -
their screams of pain
within their final breath.    


No, we are alive.

And thanks to you,
we'll get out.

A whole song about such a literal event?  Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely to what is happening on stage, have to be about the hopes and fears of the characters. There are a few other songs that seem to be closer to the right idea, but I wasn't really impressed by what I saw.

Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly found yourself 75 and toiling for an obscure cable operation that seemed to generate more press releases than viewers, it probably would be much more satisfying to see yourself as the victim of an intricate, high-level conspiracy than as someone undone by the kind of personal screw-up that would make a first-year reporter blush.

The problem is that there's more than one guy's injured vanity at play here. In fact, the adjectives that come to mind as you assess the substance of what Rather now has done are wanton, reckless and irresponsible. Let's put aside the fact that Rather has no evidence that the network's owners were anything but understandably embarrassed and angry at having their single most recognizable journalist air something as incompetently put together as the "60 Minutes" segment in question. Let's ignore any questions over why Thornburg and Boccardi -- two men with unimpeachable reputations in their respective fields -- would join a conspiracy to "get Dan Rather."

Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon.

Longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather filed a $70-million lawsuit today against his former employer, alleging that executives at the broadcast network broke the terms of his contract by marginalizing him in his final days at CBS News and forcing him to retire early.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

One of the reasons IF is so fascinating is that you have this junction of programming, game design, and writing. It's great to toy around with all three of those aspects and try to merge them into something beautiful.

The reality is that most of us have one, possibly two of those capabilities at a reasonably high level, but statistically very few people have all three of them at a high level (Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Michael Gentry, Paul O'Brian, Eric Eve, Adam Cadre, and more). I would even argue that some of these people have been able to overcome a lesser ability with sheer determination and free time.

I don't think you can build a business from this dichotomy. I do believe that if you offer someone a task that they're good at and give them a template to work towards, they will succeed. From there it was a matter of developing that template, which we've already done. The process is being duplicated for a second design and writing team and there seems to be a consensus that we've developed the right processes.

So technology's utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should they? Skeptics might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent when it comes to using the Internet and other digital tools for class, as the survey highlights. But the study's introduction, written by Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggests what professors can expect from digital natives' evolving modes of learning, what he calls "neomillennial learning styles." As new methods of interacting with information become more ubiquitous, he suggests, citing Second Life-type virtual immersion environments as an example, students will grow up with different expectations and preferences for acquiring knowledge and skills. The implication is less of an emphasis on the "sage on the stage" and a linear acquisition process focusing on a "single best source," focusing instead on "active learning" that comes from synthesizing information from multiple types of media. Noting that traditional ways of thinking and learning are undergoing a "sea change," Dede encourages a fusion of new and old. But what form that will take, exactly, is not addressed directly in the report.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

We at DHQ hope that we will eventually reach a wider audience (and trust our readers will help us do so), introducing the type and range of activities the digital humanities community is interested in, and featuring energetic, novel, and interesting articles on a variety of research, making use of all the Internet technologies at our disposal.

One of the papers in this, our second issue, has already done just that. Dennis G. Jerz's Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky, was posted on the test site for proofreading a few weeks before launch, when one of our editors featured an advance mention of it on his blog. A few days later, it was picked up by the gaming community on a popular discussion list (rec.arts.int-fiction), garnering comments such as "HOLY MOLY!" and "It is clear on a single reading that this is the most important single paper ever written on the history of interactive fiction" before it had even been formally published. It doesn't stop there: the paper went on to be featured on Boing Boing (a "directory of wonderful things" which is read by hundreds of thousands of readers), then being mentioned on Slashdot, the popular technology-related news site. (We are pleased to report our servers survived being "slashdotted" so far, which is perhaps the best load test we could wish for). Shortly after, it featured on Metafilter, a community weblog that anyone can edit with a vast readership, where comments included "What academic research should aspire to be" and "I can feel a new LOLCATS meme coming on. (I can haz mint-cake?)." On the eve of publication, we have had a request from a local Kentucky newspaper wishing to republish the paper (which our publication terms willingly permit). This paper has legs.

In addition, publication on DHQ has made the original game available again for a new audience. When the preprint version of this article became available on the internet in August 2007, Matthew Russoto modified Crowther's source code so that it will compile for today's computers. David Kinder made a Windows executable version. The colossal cave lives again.

Google's recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to Facebook's News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail's addressbook and contact list.

Public interest in news has changed slightly over the last two decades, but in a manner that suggests no meaningful trend. The average reading for the Pew News Interest Index did slip during the 1990s from 30% to 23%, a seemingly noteworthy decrease that represents nearly a fourth of the original level. Had the index continued to slide as much in the new millennium, that change would have suggested a trend of potentially great import. But in the current decade the index has bounced back to precisely its level during the 1980s: 30%.

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Money News registers with audiences, ranking second among super categories with a three-decade score of 34%. And, decade-by-decade, interest in Money News has increased. In the '80s, its index score was 23%; in the '90s it moved forward to 29%. In this decade it leaped to 40%.

Thirty-six hours? How in god's name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I'd been playing during that time. I'd also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I'd been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more. This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it. So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games? The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by what I call "gamer regret" -- a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.

High school and college students on football teams regularly die during practice (1, 2, 3), but their deaths are dealt with by the media with a very holistic perspective. The media questions whether the coach set an unreasonably exhausting regimen. The media questions whether the parents saw warning signs. They ask whether the school reviewed the coach's history thoroughly when the hiring was made. They wonder why the school mandates year-round practice that necessitates training in the hot summers. They ask whether the team physicians condoned the exhausting practices despite the individual's particular health idiosyncrasies. And in no time during all this does anyone suggest that football is addictive and caused the deaths. This is because that statement would be naïve and simplistic. When people die during or after playing an MMO however, it is typically "caused by an online gaming addiction". The wikipedia entry on "game addiction" lists several of these "notable cases". Even in cases where the person suffered from depression and other mood disorders, an "addiction" to the game itself is primarily blamed for the deaths. As another example, Kimberley Young's discussion of Internet Addiction Disorder implies that marital affairs that occur online are primarily the fault of the Internet, rather than having to do with personal choices. Why is it that explanations are complicated and holistic when it comes to football, and so simplistic when we talk about online games? Part of the reason is that football is too mainstream and too low-tech to be a tool for the media to instill paranoia with. No one is afraid of a leather ball.