History: January 2008 Archive Page

While walking an introductory class through a close reading of "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner,") I noted that a student had wondered whether the appearance of "In God We Trust" on US currency had anything to do with the inclusion of a similar phrase, "In God is our Trust," in the poem that became the U.S. national anthem.

I confessed to the student that I didn't know the answer, and suggested that the next time a thought like that occurs to her, I'd love to have her share her findings with the class.

An hour or so later, that student showed up outside my office, with a printout from the U.S. Department of Treasury website, having found (and highlighted) the answer. 

That wasn't the only reason she wanted to see me, but I was still happy that she had taken the initiative to follow up on a class discussion, and that she wanted to share with me what she had found.

The other poem I chose for the day was Jabberwocky, which I've known by heart since high school, so it was a lot of fun to do the oral interpretation while supporting a quick-and-dirty reading of Carroll's famous nonsense poem as a version the hero's quest, and Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty as a spoof of the scholastic tendency to consult an authority (Humpty Dumpty, who "can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet"), rather than encouraging Alice's instinctive reaction: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"

The Lego brick system was patented 50 years ago today. Gizmodo offers this timeline.

Filed away to read on a rainy day (after I've cleared some big projects from my to do list): Jonathan Bate

The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as 'his'. Shakespeare only survives because his works were printed.

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century, when the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The recovery of those texts had been at the core of the humanist Renaissance. The classical procedure was to establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription which had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts. The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn't be allowed second thoughts - that would imply some deficiency in his first thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones and a belief that the editor's job was to restore a single lost original, something approximating to the text as it came 'pure' from the hand of Shakespeare.

We are very unlikely ever to recover the manuscripts of the plays as Shakespeare originally wrote them (the ambition of the 'new bibiographers'). In the absence of surviving promptbooks, let alone dictographic or video records, we will never recover the plays as they were first performed (the ambition of the 'Oxford revisionists').

All plays change in time, metamorphosing as they go from writing to rehearsal to performance to revival. Many agencies (the playwright and his collaborators, the actors, the book-keepers and scribes, the compositors and proof-readers) were involved in the creation of what we call a Shakespearean text. Despite a hundred years of advanced bibliographic investigation, there is still a remarkable lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the copy for many of Shakespeare's plays.... Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the 'definitive' version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a 'definitive' text, based on a 'single lost original', was premised on the principles of classical and Biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and especially dramatic texts.

Interesting historical anecdote of an early attempt to make an artistic statement with photography, using visual elements that were acceptable in painting, but considered controversial in photography: Rejlander's "Two Ways of Life."  (via Metafilter). Useful, perhaps, as a point of comparison for what happens when video games cross the line, and attempt to make serious, or shocking, or deliberately provocative, treatments of issues that are, if not universally accepted, nevertheless commonplace in movies.

Shown in 1857 at an exhibition in Manchester, it provoked considerable controversy. Victorians were quite used to the portrayal of nakedness in paintings and sculptures, but photographs were so true to life that even though the posing was discreet, this was too much.

When steampunk was speculative fiction, not charmingly retro... Edgar Allan Poe pulbished this mock news story in the New York Sun.

The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty -- without any great apparent danger -- with thorough control of the machine -- and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage...

On Jan 21, 3:47 pm, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm supposed to not know what direction I can walk in?
>
> This is fun?

Play Adventure it to appreciate the big jump from Hunt the Wumpus and mainframe Trek.  

Play it, not merely seeking conformation for your own definition of "fun," but rather to understand why computer users across the early 'net who (according to one humorous estimate) lost about two weeks of work because they were obsessed by the their first encounter with the game.  They must have thought it was fun... why? How did their expectations differ from ours? How was their world differ from ours?

Play it to reach back more than 30 years in time, in order to understand where were are today.

Play it to expand your mind, to refresh your imagination, to challenge your assumptions.  

Play it to appreciate what Crowther and Woods created out of thin air -- all the more wonderful because they built it for love and shared it for free.  

Play it to exercise that part of your mind that will recognize next ground-breaking, genre-defining innovation.

Play Adventure so that, one day when you stumble across something new, you can be the one who says, "Look at this, guys... here's why I think it changes everything!"  

Is *this* fun?

I think so!

[Conrad did end his note by saying "  Well, I'll give it another shot...," and the above is my attempt to give him a bit of historical context for Colossal Cave Adventure.]

Times Online:

On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton's sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he had her name: Monica Lewinsky. The mainstream media were slow to catch up, but by the following Tuesday they were reporting that Clinton was being investigated for encouraging others to lie to cover up the affair.

A student in my Video Game Culture and Theory course, when writing a reaction to playing Andrew Plotkin's Shade, referred to a casual gaming genre that was new to me, the point-and-click "escape the room" game.  The Wikipeidia entry for Escape the Room mentioned a key-retrieval puzzle from Zork, but I thought that passage had a weak sense of history.  The first paragraph below is left over from what the article initially said, but I added the second paragraph in order to give credit where credit is due.

The game which popularized the term "escape the room" is said to be MOTAS (2001), though there are many older examples of the point-and-click variation. The genre was further popularized by the Japanese "Crimson Room" game (2004) by Toshimitsu Takagi, which has spread throughout the internet and can be seen on many gaming websites. Strictly speaking, MOTAS is not strictly an "escape-the-room" game, as it includes many levels, some of which include more than one location.

The basic idea of collecting and manipulating objects is a core element of text adventure games (interactive fiction). Colossal Cave Adventure (1976-77) featured a grate that requires a key to unlock and a rusty door that must be oiled, and Zork (1977-79) featured a trap door under a rug and a puzzle involving slipping paper under a door to retrieve a key (a puzzle which reappears in MOTAS). While these classic text games were not limited to one location, John Wilson's Behind Closed Doors is an early example of a commercial game in the genre, and Laura Knauth's Trapped in a One Room Dilly shows the genre was well-established in the text-adventure hobbyist community in 1998. While a single-location game may not be set inside a room, and while the player's goal may not necessarily be escape, in 2002 the interactive fiction community first hosted a One Room Game Competition (attracting six entries, all in Italian), and in 2006 Riff Conner wrote Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game, indicating that the genre is well known in the contemporary interactive fiction hobbyist community. Often, a game that features many different locations will begin with a prologue of sorts, in which the player must escape a cell or simply leave the player's apartment in order to get the main plot started.

A few months ago, Jeremy Douglass posted a thread on rec.arts.int-fiction that asked for early examples of the "My Apartment" genre, which is a common programming exercise (along with "My Dorm Room" or "My Office") created by people who are teaching themselves how to write a text game, generally with the intention of sharing it with their friends (so there are typically lots of in-jokes and not much else).