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March 28, 2005
AAAAA OMG KLINGON PR0N!
Pictures of aroused Klingon males, inexplicably brought to you by a gay British skinhead. NO IT ISN'T WORKSAFE, YOU FOOLS!
Posted by me at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Hands-On Imperative and Video Games
One last thought for the evening. I started writing a note to a friend who doesn't play video games tonight and once again found myself typing the words "I can't really explain them to you -- you have to play them yourself" -- words which over the past few months I've spoken over and over to folks who did not grow up with video games. They started feeling a little odd running around in my head. Was it because this hands-on imperative (as Stephen Levy puts it about hacking culture) is really bogus?
In the end I decided it's not that it was bogus; it's that this guy is an architect, not a teacher, so at that point I was really being kind of knee-jerk, telling him that.
But why insist teachers play, for that matter? Let me just reaffirm a few key points, for my own purposes. First, this dictum seems to spring from the ludology-narratology debate: the idea is that you can't just watch video games and expect to understand them, because they're something more than a story. Second, I wouldn't recommend teachers play video games any more highly than I would recommend they listen to the music and watch a few of the TV shows and movies that their kids take in. It's just a good idea overall to have a good sense of the materials your students are using to construct their senses of self, and know how those selves might be at odds with the information you're supposed to be imparting to them. (Once again, the Margaret Finders defense. That slender little book is coming to look like it will be the cornerstone of my work. I wish that didn't make me feel strangely guilty. I feel like I ought to be drawing theory from some sere old teat... Derrida's, or something.)
Posted by me at 12:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 27, 2005
Video Games and Violence: Enough already!
Having gone through a series of lectures and classes leading up to the official opening of the video games lab at school this weekend, and having talked to a number of people not of an age to have grown up with video games during that time, I have had more than my share of conversations about video games and violence. I have begun to formulate my take on the topic. I am posting it here, once, and then I don't want to talk about it with anyone, anymore, until they've read this post and its revisions and comments. I swear I am going to print out a card which has the permanent URL for this post and just hand it to anyone who walks up to me with a question about violence on their lips.
Much as I am sick and tired of having to live with a market dominated by video games with violent and sexist content (see Don't Make Me Be That B!tch), I am tired of having to give the same spiel over and over to people who assume that just because these games dominate, they can tar all games with the same brush. This is really, really, REALLY not what I want to spend my professional career doing. I want to make good games, which in my estimation means games which make people think.
(I first posted a version of the following to a thread in my Technology and Human Development course.)
First of all, I think way too much energy is being spent talking about the relationships between video games and violence. If you do a Google Scholar search for "video games" you get about seven thousand results, HALF of which are about violence or deleterious health effects. Significantly less is to be found on possible applications of the technology. I think our ideas about video games and violence have less to do with empirical evidence than with our society's preoccupation with violence and with classist attitudes about mass media.
We're making a couple of mistakes in thinking about violence and video games the way we often do in
academia. One is thinking that EXISTING video games will be educational, which they will NOT aside from those made to teach. We don't ask the bulk of TV to be educational; we don't ask movies to be educational; we don't ask music to be educational. They're entertainment, and we should stop looking for educational content in media which are not intended for education. (Believe me, I am happy to talk about cultivation effects, agenda-setting, and other idea-shaping ideas that mass media have, but there's a difference between looking for school-like educational content in games and seeing that all forms of communication have the power to affect our conceptions of the world. Those are two different conversations, and we should keep them apart until school stops being a domain unto itself.)
Another mistake is not considering the full range of video games. There's video game versions of Scrabble and Tetris, soccer and tennis, historical simulations and dance games, and the list goes on. The biggest gaming demographic, in fact, is middle-aged women playing card and puzzle games with their friends online. Younger women do it too. So a lot of the time when we talk about violent video games in forums like this we are implicitly saying "We play computer games, which are different -- they're acceptable. Those console games you play are for kids and for men, and they're violent, and we don't understand them. They're not acceptable." It behooves us to overcome this divide -- it's bad for communication and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as girls continue to grow up believing they are "not good at games" and missing out on the technological skills involved in setting them up
and the privileged male discourses that go on in communities surrounding them.
Many existing games are violent because violence is far simpler to program than social interaction. It is much easier to program a response that runs [IF grenade sprite overlaps with tank sprite THEN show explosion animation] than it is to get a character to believably fall in love with you based on your skillful writing of love sonnets. A lot of the times people generalize way too far and say more cartoony games like Super Mario Brothers are violent, when the underlying code or idea is really no more violent than target archery, or even a game of tag.
I attended a lecture recently in which Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor, said that what we as a society really need to do is begin to talk about violence and describe what kinds of violence we deem acceptable and unacceptable. He said we can't just say "all video games are violent and we deplore them, end of story." Our kids are gonna feel like they can't talk to us if we don't know any better than that. They see in many games that violence is something the "good guys" use as a last resort when people or places they love are under attack. And honestly, I think kids (beyond, say, the age of seven, which becomes a sort of dividing line in the literature on TV and violence or judgements of reality) know the difference between Mario Brothers cartoon violence and, say, World War II simulations. What they may *not* understand, if we're not being explicit about how we feel about violence, is the contradictions inherent in our country's tacit acceptance of violence -- including as a "peacemaking" or "democratizing" force -- in the real world. (I'm with Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine on that one -- I think our societal ambivalence about violence is just as much to blame as media violence.)
We need to be able to express under what conditions we think violence is acceptable and understand what uses fantasy violence might have in child development (consider the catharsis hypothesis). We need to do this even if we are pacifists (which I am). And then, start studying which formal features of video games might be useful for education instead. We need to look beyond existing games and start thinking what excellent educational games would look like.
Posted by me at 9:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 20, 2005
Major cult documents online
Not everyday does a routine Internet cruise turn up a truly rare document whose visibility to the public has been repeatedly threatened. In case you haven't seen it, I give you: The F!shman Aff!dav!t, a public presentation of secret $c!ent010gy documents.
As the poster (who has been through a difficult legal battle but recently won her free speech case in the Netherlands) notes, this is largely unreadable horsewash, and sadly aside from one eerie document on lying, there's no admission that they lie, cheat, and steal to bleed their members' wallets dry. But some parts, like what is apparently Hubb^rd's last letter, give real insight into just what the hell it is these people are talking about.
Posted by me at 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2005
EGGPLANT Lounge Mural -- UPDATED
We've recently completed the mural in the EGGPLANT lab, where we do our research on video games at Teachers College. The theme is pastoral and incorporates video game elements, if you can grok that. I recently added pictures of the grand opening and TRON PROM, including the infamous prom pictures, to this page. Have a look!
Posted by me at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
My Trip Across The Pond
In January I presented a paper at the Creative Gamers Conference at the University of Tampere, Finland. I also scheduled myself an action-packed insanitinerary of about five days in Paris and London. Pictures are above, but please excuse if most of them have to do with transit, 'cause that's what I did most of.
Posted by me at 11:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 9, 2005
carmen sandiego
me: Where in the world *is* Carmen Sandiego?
Rob: That's what I'm always asking when the dishes need to get done. She's out clubbing, or something.
Posted by me at 7:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I make the papers nationwide!
I hadn't thought New York City's homeless census was likely to make a splash in the news beyond the city, so as the Getty Images photographer snapped away at me, my fellow volunteers, and homeless folks we met in the wee smalls Tuesday morning, I was pretty sure the pix weren't going anywhere. But I got a call this morning from a friend in San Francisco saying he'd seen me in USA Today! I haven't been able to find that shot or the article that goes with (though a really gorgeous one of a man we met named Richardo almost makes up for how invasive I thought the photographer was being) but I show up in Newsday a lot (see slideshow) and probably some other locals too. This particular Newsday picture has special meaning for me -- I've been intending to write the whole experience up, will say more about the man in that picture later.
Posted by me at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 7, 2005
T.M.I.
Can we talk about information for just a second, here? Is anyone having the same problem as I am?
I came to a point tonight -- it was when I was looking for citations at the root of the debate over whether video games should be looked at as narratives or considered as play, and instead I found myself reading an article by Gonzalo Frasca on Grand Theft Auto -- where I just had to step away from my computer and go lie fetal on the living room couch with the cats galloping all over my motionless bod. I had too many windows open, too many ideas I was pursuing, and too many options in trying to find them. I was completely overloaded with information.
I do so much work with information -- taking it in, spitting it out, making information about information -- that the world has come to look totally different to me. It used to be that I could watch a sunset or a rock for hours and just enjoy it on the level of pure sensation. Now I can't even look at something if it doesn't have text or icons on it. I've said this before: I feel like I'm just a midwife to information.
More and more I find myself awed by computers. Aren't they incredible? I admire them so much. They can tell me that there have been over 7,000 pieces of scholarly or professional literature written about video games, and that about half of those are about violence or other deleterious health effects. Then they can help me find specific articles, or even specific words in articles. They can keep track of all the websites I've been to for the past week, and call them up even if all I remember is the first few letters. They keep track of the books I've read -- hell, they recall every single word of every article I've read for school over the past two years, and then some I haven't even read yet.
So really, why don't we just let them keep track of all the information? Really, I feel quite redundant. I'm supposed to be synthesizing all this information and making sense of it, and the level at which I can do this is so pathetic compared to what computers can do with gathering and storing that I just feel ridiculous even trying.
Of course, I am hindered in my quest for synthesis. Chief among the hindrances is school. School demands I take courses. Courses try to stuff all kinds of information into me for which I have no current use. They are thus, as the courses THEMSELVES are teaching me right now, making poor use of my comparatively wimpy cognitive capacities, which would do far better if I was allowed to read what I needed to in order to support my own research interests. This contradiction has come to a head tonight as I scramble around looking for literature to make a case which I know could be made, but can't make. I haven't read most of the literature I know I need, but I know it's out there (the ludology/narratology debate I mentioned a second ago, as well as information on performance studies). I have only heard this literature described and referred to. Given my head, I would have read it by now. Instead, I have had to read some weekly amalgam of theoretical discussions of the purposes of the university, descriptions of the developmental stages of toddlers, essays on narrative, rubrics for instructional design, blog posts about social software, and chapters of chatty hints about how to do better ethnographic work.
It's not that these things aren't useful. It's just that they're not useful *right now*, and they're not useful all lumped together without proper integration.
It's my fault, I know it's my fault. I could have signed up for content-loose credits this semester, and I didn't. Frankly, my education to date still hasn't equipped me for doing independent research, so I'm a little scared to give myself that much of a break. I just wish I WASN'T taking a very solid four-course load during the first semester I've really felt like independent research was all I wanted to do. Now that we're past the add-drop period, I have no way of giving myself time for the articles I want to write and the presentations I'd like to prepare.
As much as I love my professors and their relish for the kind of broad-range work they encourage us to do, they honestly don't seem to understand the task they've set out for us. (I exempt my advisor from this statement. He pretty much gets it.) We are in a highly interdisciplinary program. Interdisciplinary means we are held responsible for multiple disciplines. I was called on the mat at a conference in January for not knowing how to frame a paper in terms of the ludology debate. Last week I watched a visiting job candidate whose dissertation was ethnographic face down queries about whether she'd considered cognitive methodologies. Some of the professors in our department still shove reading at us like they think theirs is the only academic tradition we could possibly be considering. How are we supposed to cover all these topics if we're not given serious time to think and synthesize and forge our own connections between them? Our only options are to become lopsided in our approach or to maintain large gaps in our knowledge.
Enough. I go back to California for spring break next week. Maybe I will go into the mountains for days without even a tent. I need to get away from all this information. (Sadly, if I don't finish this paper, I'm not likely to have a chance to.) I already know it's hurting me to play midwife all day; everything beyond five feet is a blur now, and I have so much to think about even in my downtime that getting to sleep is a chore in itself.
man, I wish I could just leave this paper to my computer to write.
Posted by me at 1:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 2, 2005
Another Musical Evening
I have had a very musical evening. First Jacob sent me a link to a bunch of Sesame Street songs I've been looking for (hooray! the Capital I song!) Then I read The Onion's interview with Afrika Bambaataa, who struck me as very wise, so I decided it was time to look up his stuff. And then, thinking "What music is genuinely missing from my life?" I went to find the band my friend Joanna's cute brother fronted in high school. I thought up a search query which was likely to actually find him for a change ("band-aid ring"), and it worked! Thom and Greg Moore are apparently still playing, and while I can't find Band-Aid Ring and some of my other favorites (the one that went "Dead bird in a rubber trash can..."), there was a song with a reference to Eaton Canyon which ran chills up my spine remembering the time Elana and I and some boys we were trying to impress crawled up a storm drain there. Of course, this all comes about because what I OUGHT to be doing is reading about ethnography and design. mmmmmhm.
Posted by me at 11:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
You, Rabbit! You'll get yours!
When MeFi posted a link to ten Soviet-era cartoons, I was delighted to find that a part of my own childhood was represented.
My mom used to bring home episodes of the Tom-and-Jerry-like Nu, Pogodi! (roughly translated as "You'll get yours!") for my sisters and I to watch when she was in the Slavic Studies department at USC. I was always mystified by the things I saw therein (a Hungarian rock group made up of lhasa apsos? buses that were powered by overhead wires?) and it piqued my interest about a country still inaccessible to U.S. citizens like myself. I just wish there was more of this up online! Maybe I'll check BitTorrent or something. Sadly, I do not see Bolshoi Chiripacha ("Big Turtle," another favorite) on the same site...
Posted by me at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack