Aesthetics: October 2008 Archive Page

One of my freshmen recently submitted a paper about how to overcome writer's block.  It reminded me of this story, which I came across many years ago and was able to find again fairly quickly with Google. Fun stuff.

The purpose of this sentence (which can also serve as a paragraph) is to speculate that if the Declaration of Independence had been worded and structured as lackadaisically and incoherently as this story has been so far, there's no telling what kind of warped libertine society we'd be living in now or to what depths of decadence the inhabitants of this country might have sunk, even to the point of deranged and debased writers constructing irritatingly cumbersome and needlessly prolix sentences that sometimes possess the questionable if not downright undesirable quality of referring to themselves and they sometimes even become run-on sentences or exhibit other signs of inexcusably sloppy grammar like unneeded superfluous redundancies that almost certainly would have insidious effects on the lifestyle and morals of our impressionable youth, leading them to commit incest or even murder and maybe that's why Billy is strangling his mother, because of sentences just like this one, which have no discernible goals or perspicuous purpose and just end up anywhere, even in mid

Bizarre. A sentence fragment. Another fragment. Twelve years old. This is a sentence that. Fragmented. And strangling his mother. Sorry, sorry. Bizarre. This. More fragments. This is it. Fragments. The title of this story, which. Blond. Sorry, sorry. Fragment after frag- ment. Harder. This is a sentence that. Fragments. Damn good device.

The purpose of this sentence is threefold: (1) to apologize for the unfortunate and inexplicable lapse exhibited by the preceding paragraph; (2) to assure you, the reader, that it will not happen again; and (3) to reiterate the point that these are uncertain and difficult times and that aspects of language, even seemingly stable and deeply rooted ones such as syntax and meaning, do break down. This sentence adds nothing substantial to the sentiments of the preceding sentence but merely provides a concluding sentence to this paragraph, which otherwise might not have one.

This sentence, in a sudden and courageous burst of altruism, tries to abandon the self-referential mode but fails. This sentence tries again, but the attempt is doomed from the start.-- David Moser

From Wired:

Jim  Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I've been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I've been introducing my students to this term...

6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMES
Anyone out there play Zork as a kid? Or any text adventure games? Go west, Take sword? They were a type of videogame that was entirely text, and is also known as interactive fiction. IF is an amazing thing: a videogame you can make without programming or graphics skills.

Quick Tips:
-there's a community of people who write and play these games, and they have a competition each year that often attracts more than 50 new games (one's happening now! Download and vote!)
-and thanks to this community, there are now tools that make it possible for non-programmers to write these games, one in particular is called Inform 7
-the audience for text games is small but intense
-it's kind of like poetry in that there's no money in it, and the audience for it is small, but if you were affected by it in your youth you keep coming back to it -- some people had a slim volume of poetry and I had The Lurking Horror

Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over.

Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most student papers' Web sites. The average site has a clunky layout, sloppy design and little-to-no attention to color schemes or aesthetics. Many sites are a muddled array of hyperlinks, with uncategorized articles strewn every which way. Graphics are poorly sized. Fonts are dull. Multimedia is ignored.

All of these flaws are shocking when one realizes that Generation Y, the most tech-savvy ever born, maintains and codes these sites. Yet their designs are, excuse my snarkiness, very 1990s. But worse than my aesthetic objections is my philosophical gripe: Most student papers' online content essentially mirrors the print content. They are updated daily or weekly, only in conjunction with the print paper. Such an organization suggests a clear prioritizing of the physical newspaper -- a mistake that the professional news media, by and large, began to correct a decade ago. -- Brian Farkas, Inside Higher Ed

My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I've already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration.

Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to the Entertainment Software Assn., a trade group. Because making games crosses several disciplines, the diversity of programs that offer such courses is staggering: Fine arts colleges, engineering schools, film schools, music schools and even drama programs are sending graduates into the fast-growing industry.

"Some programs throw a drama guy together with a programming guy to see what they come up with," said Bing Gordon, a venture capitalist and former chief creative officer for industry powerhouse Electronic Arts Inc. "Games is the ultimate interdisciplinary art." (Alex Pham, LA Times)

During play, the screen background was solid black with a white border, with one color line representing each player.  We displayed the game score in a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen.  It wasn't the most graphically advanced program, but it was simple and fun.  It looked something like this:

[...]

"Both the AI and the humans had three missiles they could use during the course of the game. When a missile hit a wall, it would create a mini 'explosion' that would erase the color on the background back to black as it faded out - thereby eliminating sections of the trail left by previous cycles."

Soon we had players and computers firing missiles to shoot their way out of tight situations. Nonetheless, Tron purists may scoff, since the movie programs didn't have such luxuries as missiles to get them out of a bind.

[...]

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border.  Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped.  But this time was different - instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned.  The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field.  Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen.  It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen.  The computer had found a way to get out of the game.  When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory - just like in the movie.

Our jaws dropped when we realized what had happened.  (Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs)

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

Thanks to Nick Montfort for posting this gem:

Posted by Stephen Totilo on 10/8/08 at 12:00 pm.

"Lost" creator J.J. Abrams may not have have felt like explaining the smoke monster to MTV News movies reporter Josh Horowitz during an interview taped a few feet from my desk last week. But he both offered to adopt Horowitz and answered one question about his interest in making video games.

What kind of games would Abrams like to make? "Zork"-style text-adventures.

That's the story that's been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books. We choose to ignore the fundamental quality that makes games different and so compelling-- their interactivity.

The other approach is to "open up" Moby Dick, to allow the player real, significant choices in the course of events and their outcomes. In this configuration, an especially skillful player might be so good at the game that he does indeed catch and kill Moby Dick, triumphantly achieving Captain Ahab's revenge-- and along with it, destroying the whole point of Melville's story. Allowing such an alternate ending robs the work of its power; the story of Moby Dick is engaging precisely because Captain Ahab cannot find extra lives, rewind time or load an old save for a second chance, and the story of his obsession and undoing is fixed over time, a static sculpture in four dimensions.

The issue of these changeable outcomes is what the critic Roger Ebert infamously identified as the central problem with games-as-art, and despite the emotional flurries and dismissive grumblings from the gaming community, it is actually a good point without a clear answer. If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab "wins," no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance. Work hard enough, get lucky enough, and anything is possible -- Matthew Wasteland, GameSetWatch

Beautiful, beautiful 1980s introduction to "sophisticated word-processor" technology.

My student Dani Choynowski, a double-major in new media journalism and theatre, is a very busy woman.  She's getting top-notch grades in two challenging majors, her hand is usually the first one up during workshops or discussions, and she's always ready with some connection to the world of theater or Harry Potter.

Last semester, as a sophomore, she took a very demanding 300-level course, "Media Aesthetcis," the theme of which was the history and future of the book.  As part of her work in this term's "Writing for the Internet," she blogged about a major revelation that she had a few hours ago.  This is exactly what I needed to read on a drizzly gray day when I had been feeling a little grumpy and overwhelmed with various projects and responsibilities. This is the sort of thing that reminds me why I love my job so much.

Now I finally see what the point of that class was. El 336 was theory, and EL 236 is the practical application. Wow, what an epiphany. I'm a little in shock because when I say I loathed EL 336, I wasn't kidding. There was a 4 page paper due every week (think a super- ultra synthesized essay pertaining to all the readings you blogged about), not to mention forum presentations, an 8-10 page midterm paper and a final 12-15 page paper. I haven't had Digital imaging, Topics in media aesthetics, or Publications Workshop yet, so I can't speak for the rest of my time here, but EL 336 has been the most difficult (sans General Chemistry 1) class I have taken at Seton Hill so far.

Since the subject changes every time the class is offered, I don't know if you will have the same reaction as I did. But if you do find yourself cursing you papers to hell (especially when your hard drive crashes in the middle of your mid-term paper and you didn't save a backup because you were in the zone too deep to pay attention and then have to re-write it while wondering if the $1300 machine is ever going to run again !!@#$!@$), I will offer you these words of wisdom:

you will be so glad you took the class (and will also feel an immense weight lift off you on the glorious day the class ended). You will be a much better writer by the end of those  3 1/2 months.

It's strange how one little reading can cause you to have an epiphany. I haven't gone past the second link in Is Hypertext Fiction Possible?. --Daniella Choynowski

Ideally, the practical "EL236: Writing for the Internet" is a prerequisite for "EL336: Media Aesthetics," but I let her take the 300-level class first because it fit better with her plans for her double-major. 

It's possible that, had she taken the classes in the intended order, the theory class would have been a little less stressful, but then she wouldn't have had the "aha" moment that brought the material into such clarity for her.