Recently in the Cyberculture Category

#6 is devoted to Infocom text adventures:

And the fact is, the classic Infocom games (I have left it to the reader to pick his or her favorite, as there were so many of such a high quality that it is folly to pick one for this list) were just tremendous entertainment, mainly for two reasons:

Reason 1 is their goofy advertising slogan, which said in one way or another with great irony that their games "had the best graphics". Ha ha ha, yeah, had the best graphics, even though they had no graphics. So clever! But goddammit, tell me you have any visual memory of any video game ever as crisp, vivid, and lifelike as standing in that field west of that white house. Because I sure as hell don't. I can recall every inch of the first level of Doom, better than I can my own house, but I still only see it in 320×200 resolution. That white house exists, thoroughly and completely. And that just makes every moment of one of these games so much more real, more compelling than any graphics could muster.

Reason 2 is that finally unlocking that door and entering the hidden room is as satisfying as any experience to be found in any video game ever. It's almost sexual. It was even better back when you knew you'd done it because the floppy disk drive would have to spool up. Just the thought of it is enough to bring on goosebumps.

The site is heavy on the nostalgia, but does a great job describing why the text games worked their way into our memories.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:

I've had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide access to more material. True, but converting books into a textual format makes them much more accessible, allowing users to search, manipulate, organize, and analyze them. Here's my summary of what you can do with an electronic text. Most of these advantages are pretty obvious, but worth articulating.

It's not digital text if it's an image file. It's just an image, that might contain anything at all. Vannevar Bush's Memex was an idea for a text storage-and-retrieval system that worked by storing and linking microfilm images of pages of text, but his vision was purely analog. Page images do provide a certain amount of information, and today it's not too hard to find tools that convert page images to text, but an archival project is incomplete if the digitization process stops at simply supplying images of the the material to be archived.

Boston Globe:

Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

The study of literature is worth doing - and worth doing well. No one should be content to watch it fading gently into that good night.

I'm not the first to argue for a closer engagement of literary studies with science. For instance, in his famous 1959 essay on "The Two Cultures," the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented the scientific ignorance of "literary intellectuals," identifying it as a main reason for the yawning divide between the cultures of literature and science.

But I would go beyond Snow's suggestion that literary scholars should know more about science. Literary scholars should actually do science. --Jonathan Gottschall

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities:
The timing is right... I think I'm going to be able to attend this. Woo hoo!

According to Metafilter, "Nothing signals the death of a trend like an article in the NY Times Style section."

Even his clothing -- an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman's waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery -- is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early '90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, "steampunk" is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. "To me, it's essentially the intersection of technology and romance," said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

Our Sons their Father's failing mainframes see, And where lies reel-to-reel goes USB.

Jason Lutes:

With every step "forward" in any area of human endeavor, something is gained, and with rare exception there is a concomitant loss. I feel this keenly in video game design, as the cutting edge of graphics slices into the future, opening up new and ever hotter arteries of experience for the player, but leaving imagination dead in its wake. Consider an informal visual chronology of computer game graphics:

Left to right, top to bottom: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Rogue (1980), Lords of Midnight (1984), Master of Magic (1993), Age of Wonders 2 (2002), Battle for Middle-Earth (2004).

The earliest text adventures used words alone to suggest the game world, allowing the player's imagination to fill in all of the details. Later, the ideogrammatic use of ASCII characters made possible things like the dungeon floorplans of Rogue to be clearly delineated, but that "*" that represented a pile of gold was still something to conjure with. With each step in the progression from limited-palette, low-resolution graphics to high-res 3D models and particle effects -- with each step toward a more photorealistic rendering of the game environment -- the player has to do that much less creative work, that much less imaginative interaction.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad progression. The trade-off is that we get games that are more immediately, actively immersive, as opposed to ones in which we have to work to immerse ourselves. Something is lost, but something else is certainly gained. Even as better and better graphics technology is erasing the need for an active imagination in playing video games, increasingly sophisticated game design has made possible a range of consequential (as opposed to imaginative) interactivity that is unparalleled in any other medium. Plus, I'd hazard that most people who play video games don't want to use their imaginations -- they just want a fun ride¹. The more bells and whistles the better.

Each of us probably have our own sweet spot between abstraction and representation, a point where our imagination is fired up by the power of suggestion, but would be extinguished by too much more information.

This article from eSchoolNews does a good job emphasizing some of the relevant lessons from a recent Pew report:

For most media outlets that reported on an important new survey measuring the impact of technology on teens' writing skills, the big news from the survey was that emoticons and text-messaging abbreviations are creeping into students' formal writing assignments. :-(

Buried beneath the alarm of writing "purists," however, was a promising finding with equally important implications for schools: Blogging is helping many teens become more prolific writers.

The idea isn't new, but the phrasing is clear and effective.  Todd Alcott:

Just as movies began as novelties shown before "real" entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve years and from the 15-minute Great Train Robbery to the maximum-opus Birth of a Nation in seven. Gaming started with Pong and Pac-Man in the 70s and got to Doom in the 90s, then Half-Life a mere four years later. If Half-Life is the Birth of a Nation, that means that the Gone With the Wind of gaming is still in our future, and the Godfather of gaming as well.

Wired just loves technology. Here's an article about a technological solution to forgetting.

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular -- or supremely practical -- replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

Reuters:

To launch next year as a massively multiplayer online game, or MMOG to those in the gaming community, Lego Universe will let players create online versions of themselves and interact with each other.

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

AP:

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

Naomi Alderman (Guardian):

[S]ometimes I admire the beautifully-rendered star-filled sky, and sometimes I drive the in-game car into a lamp-post, just to see what happens. It is play, just like "cops and robbers", just like daydreaming, just like writing a novel.

I'm not a big fan of driving games, and the longest stretches of game-playing time I have are when I'm watching my kids play games on a different computer, so I'm not likely to get much time to invest in this game. Nevertheless, it does sound very impressive, and I'm looking forward to what the modding community might be able to make of it.

Wired:

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or "human collectors," as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry.

The Army game features a virtual detainee and interpreter; the player-interrogator speaks through voice-recognition software to the virtual interpreter, who translates the questions to the prisoner. Designed for rookie interrogators and more experienced personnel needing a refresher course, IEWTPTHICC teaches the player how to work through an interpreter, use culturally appropriate speech and analyze a detainee's body language, according to Lt. Col. Cherie Wallace, deputy head of the new systems training and integration office at the Army intelligence center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Inside Higher Ed:

"Information on computer science subjects in Wikipedia is likely to be accurate and informative, often using unique resources to illustrate concepts that are not available to print media," wrote de Medeiros in an e-mail. "This probably derives from the fact that computer scientists use the computer as their main form of access to scientific articles and journals, that they take advantage of electronic forms to disseminate their research, including instructional materials in various formats. Researchers and educators of high caliber are probably behind most Wikipedia articles in computer science."

In all likelihood, tech-savvy scholars are among those keeping such isolated corners in the digital stacks of Wikipedia relevant, up to date and accurate. For computer science, especially, many topics on Wikipedia are in a form polished and accessible enough to assign to students as reading, and the subjects aren't controversial in a way that would inspire the sort of back-and-forth citation wars that cause some articles to fluctuate wildly between competing versions. But other topics get assigned from Wikipedia as well -- not least in courses about digital culture itself.

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to  Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.)

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Pew / Internet (PDF):

Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.... Yet despite the nearly ubiquitous use of these tools by teens, they see an important distinction between the "writing" they do for school and outside of school for personal reasons, and the "communication" they enjoy via instant messaging, phone text messaging, email and social networking sites.

Geeky awesomeness from the Steampunk Workshop.

Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media.

My brain still hasn't fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem... different.  Here's my favorite.

Check out the others at Mightygodking.

Imagine that, since childhood, you've been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you've kept a weblog.

Imagine that, since 2003, you've taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). 

Recently, after about five years of on-and-off research, you published an article that included archival material about the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure.  Thanks to the kindness of innumerable e-mail contacts, you have been able to study the source code -- recovered from a 30-year-old backup tape -- that had been considered lost. 

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files.

Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.

Andy Baio offers some forensic digital journalism:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" -- a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good.

So let's start with the most notorious -- Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of "book" (International Herald Tribune):

Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are "The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea" ($24.95 and 168 pages long); "Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers" ($28.95 for 126 pages); and "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India" ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject -- broad or obscure -- and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

My former student Mike Rubino makes a good point about the encrustation of social networking icons that are clogging up the interfaces of content-rich websites.

Now, instead of a website having the normal "E-mail this article"; "Print this article"; and the occasional "Digg this article" link, it's got a slew of other services. You have the option to "FARK" something, "StumbleUpon" something, or "Redd" something.

Because no service is emerging as the clear victor (and other services keep cropping up), websites are forced to include everyone out of fairness. Sites are going to such extremes that they can no longer fit all the little icons along the bottom, causing them to include the "more..." button. Not only is it all confusingly unnecessary, but it's also ugly design-wise since not every logo is of the same quality. The Del.icio.us logo is hideous, especially next to the Facebook or Digg logos; the same goes for Fark. Media websites that feature large amounts of articles and features aren't always going for the most aesthetic design, but junking it up further with all these little icons (not to mention the ridiculous amount of comments at the bottom of every article) is just a mess.

The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online.  The term "sex" (which appears in the title paired with "violence") seems to mean "gender" in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven't heard from anyone who attended the conference presentation, and neither have I read the full study.

Sex and violence and playing games: reduced levels of anger after violent online play
Jane Barnett, Mark Coulson, Nigel Foreman, Middlesex University

Objectives: This study had two main aims. First, to explore the types of anger-causing scenarios experienced when playing WoW. Second, to identify the state emotions experienced before and after the anger-causing scenarios, as a function of sex and personality.

Design: Male and female WoW players (aged between 12 and 83 years) provided examples of anger-causing scenarios they experienced while playing the game (these scenarios formed the World of Warcraft Questionnaire: WoWQ). These scenarios plus other questionnaires examining anger, aggression, and personality, were administered as an online survey. Respondents completed state and trait mood measures, played WoW for a minimum of two hours, and then completed the state measures again. Participants also reported situations ingame that had made them feel angry or aggressive.

Method: Participants were recruited using the official WoW gaming forums. The forum post provided players with a link that took them to the introductory page of the survey. The final number of respondents was 292.

Results: Principal components analyses found a structure identifying four main anger-causing themes in WoW. Correlational and regression analyses examined the relationships between these WoW scenarios, and the emotional and personality constructs of participants. Mixed ANOVAs examined differences between male and female state moods before and after playing WoW. Results suggest that although online gamers are more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, the post-WoW mood state is dependent on sex, age, and personality.

Conclusions: The identification of a specific gamer personality type helped to outline the possible benefits and risks of these individuals who play video games. A standardised questionnaire was developed to examine the concepts investigated in this research, i.e. how anger and aggression vary as a function of personality, sex, and age, in gamers and non-gamers. This study improved the understanding of and the ability to respond effectively to public health threats that arise from playing computer games, and encouraged more responsible communication regarding these issues.

Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous.

Lindsay's father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on the MySpace social-networking Web site.

Teenagers use social networking websites. Teenagers commit crimes. As more teens use social networking websites, more teens who use social networking websites will commit crimes. No matter who started what, nobody deserves to be beaten up for a half hour.  But look on the bright side... thanks to the hubris of whoever posted the video to YouTube, the lawyers for the defense will have a much, much harder time in court.

The Smoking Gun has this snarky story... I've changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about):

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant's popular "Street View" mapping feature has made a photo of their home available to online searchers. Aaron and Christine Boring accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their seclusion and privacy since they live on a street that is "clearly marked with a 'Private Road' sign," according to a lawsuit the couple filed this week in Allegheny County's Court of Common Pleas. A copy of the April 2 complaint can be found below. According to the Borings, they purchased their Oakridge Lane home in late-2006 for "a considerable sum of money," noting that a "major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy." But when Pittsburgh was added last October to the roster of cities covered by Google's "Street View" feature, the Borings allege, their "private information was made known to the public," causing them "mental suffering" and diminishing the value of their home (which cost the couple $163,000, according to property records). The Borings are seeking in excess of $25,000 in damages and want a court order directing Google to destroy images of their home. Click here for some photos of the Boring property, which is now even easier to locate via Google Maps, since the plaintiffs included their home address on the lawsuit's first page. And while they are litigating, perhaps the Borings should consider suing Allegheny County's Office of Property Assessments, which includes a photo of their home (which was built in 1916 and sits on 1.82 acres) on its web site. Here's a screen grab. (8 pages)

A good analysis from Cory Doctorow:

Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the  non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named "Joe" and left-handed people died in the last three months?   OMG -- a trend!

Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.

New York Times:

"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

Information Week:

The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris.

Audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the informal collaborative group First Sounds created high-resolution, high-grade scans of Scott's phonautogram, converted the images into digital form, and played the sounds on a computer with a virtual stylus. Then they evened out speed fluctuations and tweaked the tracks to pull the voice forward.