Media: January 2008 Archive Page

Some thoughtful development of a powerful meme in cyberculture studies, from Henry Jenkins:

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family.

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

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.

Jeffrey R. Young (Chronicle):

The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise.... "We are a peer-review press--we're always going to want to have an honest peer review," says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. "The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model."

So the experiment will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing--old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the new method "blog-based peer review." Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. "My plan is to respond to everything that seems substantial," says the author.

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.]

Leigh Alexander tries to quit gaming for a week.  How long does she last?

What I did learn - and this was the primary aim - was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up just a little; that I'd divert that gaming energy into learning new things, visiting new places, developing more relationships. But, even given only a few days to experiment, I realized I felt then, at least for that moment, content with the size of my world and the people in it as they are.

On the other hand, the absence of games left a distinct sense of feeling stranded, as if bridges I had made from my imagination into worlds made by others had been closed for repairs. I didn't have a bad couple of days; more ordinary than I would have expected, and neither more nor less fulfilling.

But it did feel like my world was a bit smaller; there were emotions, impulses and dreams that had nowhere to travel to, that languished amid the everyday. It's true that I learned perhaps gaming has cultivated in me a lack of long-term patience, a need for more regular stimulation, a poorer attention span. It's also very possible that I zone out with games to avoid dealing directly with things that cause me frustration or sadness. But I'm now certain there is a singular fashion in which games engage both mind and emotion - not only for the purpose of play, but for personal reasons both creative and therapeutic - that no other form of media approaches. It's a quality unique to gaming, it speaks to the power and responsibility game developers have assumed, and it makes sense out of the intense, often perplexing personalization we feel toward the games they make.

In the passage I quoted above she said her days without games were no less fulfilling than her days with games, but the crisis in her experiment comes when she is lying in bed, feeling sick, and cannot think of anything to do in order to make her happy again, other than give up her pledge to take a break from gaming. (She also apparently hangs around with gamers, watching them play.)

I'm lying sick on the couch in the basement (which is where my wife banishes me when I'm ill).  Playing a game won't make me happy. Regaining enough mental capacity so I can evaluate the homework students submitted Friday -- THAT will make me happy. Feeling well enough that I'm willing to crawl out of bed to find out which child is dragging something heavy across the kitchen floor (and why) -- THAT wouldn't exactly make me happy, but it would make me less anxious.

Every so often I wish I had access to the unbroken swaths of time -- 12, 16, 20 hours at a time -- when I could do whatever the heck I wanted. But then I read this article and I realize how fortunate I am to have a rich life (with the attendant responsibilities) that mean my life still has meaning even though I have to go through long game-less dry spells (and can only sip at the casual games, rather than delve into RPGs or figure out how the heck to get out of the canal where I've been stuck in Half-Life 2 since June 2005).

Nick Tate had a rather thankless role in the cult British science-fiction show Space:1999. Note how the cheerful Disney guy, Mark Elliott, is skipping down the sidewalk at the end.

Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article.

Common threshold structures of the world - closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals - often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the rendering engine must be given time to catch up, a new portion of code must be loaded into memory) or limits of the game's database (transporting her avatar to a new "level," an elevator also redirects the player's attention away from the fact that there is no inter-level space beyond the elevator's compartment, as nothing there is computationally-defined). Crucially, the threshold matches the program trait to the gameworld trait concurrently, or with such close approximation that their difference is not noticed much. In this and similar moments of play, the user's attention is primarily on the gameworld rather than its software and hardware correlates; there is entanglement, but its expression tends toward a reification of one plane of gameplay. We may say that by some mechanism, which may vary from game to game and in the degree of its openness, the gameworld recaptures traits of hardware or software, repurposing them to its own ends and masking their potential disruption of the world with information that is notionally distinct from it. The back-directed orientation implicit in the term "recapture" is appropriate to the concept because, as I understand it, recapture takes place on the cusp of a sort of crisis in representation: exactly at the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game's determinism by its definite technical situation, that determinism is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules.

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). 

John Hockenberry, a former NBC journalist who now works at MIT, reflects on what he says is the increasing irrelevance of TV journalism. Some of my most promising "New Media Journalism" students are interested in a broadcast journalism career, taking on internships and entering graduate school, and they all know why I prefer to get my news from the internet.  So I read this article with great interest.

The specific anecdotes about what got aired and what got spiked, such as how the decision to air a particular news item depended on whether the item had anything to do with the plot of a TV drama that led into the news show -- wow.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

In the years since my departure from network television, I have acquired a certain detachment about how an institution so central to American culture could shift so quickly to the margins. Going from being a correspondent at Dateline--a rich source of material for The Daily Show--to working at the MIT Media Lab, where most students have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks, was a shock. It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple. I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. "It's such a great gadget. It changed my life," one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.