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July 25, 2005
This is TOO Disgusting.
I don't usually amplify things friends have posted on their blogs, but if you haven't heard about this, you should know about it. In the case of another 9/11-type attack, the Pentagon has plans in place to NUKE IRAN. UNPROVOKED. Even if Iran is not even implicated in the attack.
Let's impeach this president. This has gone too fucking far.
Posted by me at 4:48 PM | Comments (2)
Home in Pasadena
Home, where grass is greener
Where honeybees sing melodies
And orange trees scent the breeze
I wanna be a home sweet homer!
There I'll settle down
Beneath the palms, in someone's arms
In Pasadena town!
It's kind of funny I can even remember that. When I was forced to learn it for the first-grade End-of-the-Year Sing, I angrily told my music teacher I would have a locked jaw for the entirety of the performance. I really didn't like living in Pasadena -- or California, really -- as a kid.
It was only when I was about twelve that I realized I couldn't really say I was from Maine anymore. I'd spent the bulk of my life -- seven years -- in California, and was used to its vistas, its climate, and its people. Finally. I came to this realization gazing out over the Valley from Henninger Flats.
This all comes up because this trip has been a real education in how long I've been away from Pasadena. I write this from one of the tables in the Pasadena Public Library, which, while its doorways and arches seem smaller than they did when I was six and busily maxing out my library card, is still every bit as grand. (Its interior is very similar in style to the Columbia University Butler library, an odd mismatch to its Mediterranean exterior.)
Realizing my laptop was entirely out of juice after three days of disuse and a failure to plug it in, I went searching around for a plug. A tremendous number of folks are in the main hall using laptops, which was promising, and it appeared some of them were plugged in near the tables in the middle of the hall. This came as kind of a surprise; you'd expect an old public library to have ignored the trends and still be a mess of cords stretched across the floor and an uncomfortable passle of patrons sitting on the floor near the walls. But no. This is PasaDEEEEEna. (Pa-SAH-dina, in Steve Martin's mouth.) Gotta look out for the maintenance of class privileges, at whatever cost. The tables themselves are wired, and there was a free outlet for me. I marveled at this for a moment -- they retrofitted these antique-looking glass-topped tables for laptops?! -- and then realized it was likely the tables had always been wired, for the stately amber-shaded lamps in their centers.
Wireless is password-protected here, linked to your library card. I apologetically approached a librarian (who in the midst of this land of polo shirts appears to be affecting a Dragonball Z look, with shocked-up hair and a super-long banded goatee, bless his librariany heart) and explained I no longer had a library card, as I'd probably gotten mine when I was five years old. He looked me up in the system. While my original card was probably lost to the mists of time, my records were still in the library database! He sent me off with a flashy new purple card, recoded so that my address listed me as living in New York and not at my mom's former place on Chester Ave.
At which point I realized why any of this seemed noteworthy. I haven't lived a significant amount of time in Pasadena since the advent of the Internet. Well, sure, a summer or so at a pop. Certainly I hadn't lived here more than a few weeks at a go since wireless became widespread.
It's been ten years since I moved out of Pasadena. I was eighteen, and now I'm twenty-eight. Real estate prices here have skyrocketed to the extent that my sisters and I can hardly hope to live in town. Now that my dad and mom have both moved away, it's going to be increasingly more difficult to spend much time here. Dad recently sold his house for twice what he bought it for. Ironically, among the lizards profiting from my inability to move home are my former classmates, stuffed and glassy-looking at my last reunion.
With my grandmother unwilling to drive at night and everyone else in town busy with jobs or preparing for the family reunion, I decided that I was going to get to Pasadena from LAX by way of the Metro when I came in. The family protested. People on the plane told me it simply couldn't be done; there were no lines that went to the airport. But I was adamant. Los Angeles has a rail system now, and by gum, I was gonna use it.
I caught a bus to the blue line around 10 pm.
Neither ticket machine at the station worked, so I bought my day pass off someone hawking it at the station for $2 more than the machine price. I didn't even know what a valid ticket looked like, so I worried I'd get the $250 fine for travelling without a ticket. But there wasn't a single Metro employee around to ask, so I was basically stranded without it.
I waited some twelve minutes for the train. Meanwhile, I acquainted myself with the train map, which let me know there would be three transfers to make before I got to Pasadena. The trip would take me across each of the system's main lines -- blue, green, red, and gold.
My first thought on stepping onto the train was, "Oh, I remember why they thought I shouldn't take the train. Public transit in Los Angeles is for POOR PEOPLE." While a late-night train in New York would carry a number of overworked-looking immigrant folks and perhaps a few drunken hipsters, this train bore nothing but profoundly destitute-looking homeless people.
And it smelled more powerfully of pee than the Paris Metro.
And despite the repeated audio, poster, and digital reminders in Spanish and English that there was to be no food consumed on the train, there was food garbage everywhere.
Twenty more minutes to wait for the second train.
Which, like the first, was only as long as a jointed bus. Also smelled of pee.
By the third train, the stations were getting significantly nicer-looking, though they were still nearly deserted. An exhausted looking woman with an Ernst and Young bag sat across from me when we got to Downtown, the tops of her hose showing plainly below her exposed knees.
I noticed there were no ads to speak of on the trains, aside from the in-house Metro ones. No local podiatrists, no personal-injury lawyers, no Dr. Zizmor and his wife with her ridiculous hats; not even any advertisements for social-service programs. In fact, there weren't even any frames to put ads in. Completely astounding myself, I began to scream at the system's managers inside my head. How the hell do you expect to support a mass-transit system without advertising?! Do you really care about this damned system at all?! I mean, I knew the system was a public joke, but I hadn't realized how cruel it was.
The fourth train, to Pasadena, was very clean, and full of college students. But on not a single one of these trains was I EVER approached for my ticket. In fact, I didn't see a single Metro employee at all.
Joan Didion was right; you can't go home again. I could, up til now, but my hopes of coming back to Los Angeles to live as an adult -- without a car, without a house, without pervasive racism and classism -- have been completely dashed. Expect to hear a little less yearning from me, and a little less frustration with New York; deep down, I know I can't justify it anymore.
Posted by me at 3:55 PM | Comments (2)
July 19, 2005
Seattle and Vancouver: Details
This eclectic little batch of pictures must be from Caaaanadaaaaa. Why do we think so? "'Cause they're sloooooow, ehhhhh?" Should have put these pictures of my trip to DiGRA in Vancouver and visiting the best buds in Seattle at LEAST a month ago. Not sure whether I will ever get my DiGRA notes up... if I remember correctly, they were sort of inappropriately chatty. Meh.
Posted by me at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2005
Warcraft Diary: The World of Scarce Things
A few minor developments in the World of Warcraft: I've become more dedicated to my rogue (perhaps pathologically so... I am beginning to get to the point where I transgress against the time limits I set for myself) and don't play the other avs as much. Rozalind is level 10 as of today (shortly after my own birthday) and I am told that life, with all the good moves, begins at 10. Dave Sturgis says he will buy me a pony when I get big enough.
Tonight I had my first tour far outside the bounds of Elwynn Forest. Sam escorted me to the night elf island so Roz could go dance with Bill's elf. To make it there we really had to move too quickly; I would have liked more time to just stop and stare at the trees in the mist of the Dun Morogh plains. Neil describes the game as a labor of love, and at moments like that your awe reminds you of the game's creators. I wonder at what point the fundies will start calling these games sacreligious for positing other humans as Creator... hell, they still can't get over Dungeons and Dragons being satanistic, so perhaps they'll never find out about it.
I was late logging off tonight because I couldn't find an inn for my av to sleep in. I've developed a pattern: I like to move her to an inn and have her fall asleep on an actual bed there, putting my cat safely back in its carrier, before I log off. Something in this dates back to my dollhouse days, as many of the things in this game do. I wandered into an elven bank, then out of it again, complaining to my party that I couldn't sleep in a bank. Eventually, realizing how ridiculous this was, I piloted her to an island and put her to sleep there. I have this idea that when she wakes up I'll have to undress her before I have her swim off it. Then she'll have to get dressed again, probably behind some bushes, on the banks on the other side.
I'm getting too into this.
In other news. I've developed a routine pattern of moves I use when fighting: baffle the target, then sneak around behind it and backstab it, then stab a few more times while waiting for backstab to finish up again. Cheap, like most of my patterns (I play Pikachu and Kirby in Smash Brothers, and Eddie Gordo in Tekken). I don't always notice my patterns, though; actually until I started working with Jess I didn't think about them much. I don't know what my patterns were in the Final Fantasy games.
Coming back from the lab after I play late at night is always a little disorienting. Tonight I passed the busts of Russell and Dewey in Main Hall, and wanted to mouse over them to see if I could interact with them in any way. Earlier I found myself with my usual glasses out in the sunlight, pictured a little icon of prescription sunglasses in my head, and considered the amount of silver it would take to buy them, or the raw materials I'd have to gather to make them, and how much armor they would give me.
The latter point actually seems to me to be a useful habit, and I mulled it over for a while. Leatherworkers and tailors in World of Warcraft may not actually know how to sew, but they damned well know how much material it takes to make something, how scarce that material is, and how dearly it is bought in terms of life or limb. What if there was a game about sweatshop labor, or waste management? I think it could easily be done without it even being tedious. If you've played Escape from Woomera, you get a sense of how a game with a strong political statement can make you identify as strongly with the characters as a sentimental game like Final Fantasy.
Posted by me at 1:29 AM | Comments (2)
July 13, 2005
This Week's Highly Recommended
Back to David Byrne's website. It is highly recommended that you check out the newish clips from DB and the Extra Action Marching Band up on his Sound section. If anyone can get the visuals from those going, PLEASE let me know, because the sound is AWESOME and LOUD. If you have ever loved New York's Hungry March Band but wished they were bigger and angrier, you're gonna love the $hit out of this one!
Posted by me at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
Finland: A Primer
I have struck up a correspondance with Markus, one of the gentlemen I met at the Creative Gamers Conference in January, who was also at DiGRA. Through this correspondance, I am learning much about Finland!
Any such learning, of course, begins with an understanding of sauna and its accessories. Sauna often concludes with rolling naked in the snow. (Mind you, the culture of sauna very distinctly discourages rolling nekkid in the snow.)
For extra credit, there is the Kalevala, the Finnish equivalent of the Gilgamesh epic, which ends in an interesting adaptation of the Nativity.
Posted by me at 10:57 AM | Comments (1)
July 9, 2005
The Aristocrats Joke
[[WARNING: Link is text-only, but that text is ABSOLUTELY not worksafe and probably not for the weak of stomach.]] Was I the only one here who'd never heard of the Aristocrats Joke? No? That's probably for the best, though because Penn Jillette is making a movie about it, and because it is firmly outside the bounds of taste, not to mention sense, in any of its incarnations, it is worth a look. Try two or three versions, the one about Notre Dame probably being the best in its balance between the horrid and the surreal. Beyond that, the fe1(hing all starts to run together.
No, no, on second thought, better not read it.
Posted by me at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)
Warcraft Diary Entries 3 and 4
Meant to post last night, but the network was down. The big notable from yesterday was that I suddenly, and with great force, developed a class preference. I'd been playing around with a gnome rogue on a server where none of my friends were logged in, and found her range of abilities significantly more interesting -- she could pick pockets, sneak around, and use a broader range of attacks than my priestess. All in all, there was simply more to do as a rogue, and I was much more able to play without anyone else logged in.
So I told my friends I was abandoning the priestess character, and went about the task of transferring my wealth to the new character. As I dumped 15 gold into the trade slot, I realized the letter space was empty.
"My darling," the computer scratched out for me in goofy medieval all-caps, "I am not long for this world. I hereby transfer all my worldly goods to you. Do the guild proud." I attached the guild tabard -- a purple and gold rendition of something suspiciously similar to our college emblem -- and sent it along.
While that moment of avatar-mediated self-talk was strangely touching, it was a bit of a relief to leave behind the priestess. I had given her a surprised, innocent face and soft, nurturing powers, and that's never really been me. (I'd looked at a number of male characters during the avatar creation process, and was surprised to find how little they appealed to me. I've been much more accepting of my femaleness over the past year, and the male characters in WoW are all way too musclebound for my taste.) I threw my heart into the new av, a butch-haired, bare-armed human rogue with a shrewder look. Knowing my way around a little better now, I began to level her up with alacrity. Her name is Rozalind, the name I've given all my digital characters since I was in third grade, a name which gave her a sort of permanence.
I had to leave behind the priestess's Cornish Rex cat, my gift from Skirmish. Today I chose a new cat -- orange, like so many of mine. (and oh, let me geek out for a second, real hard -- orange like Yar's, at least according to one book.) Cats are basically useless, just a way to take up a slot in your inventory, but I love to watch them race along behind my avatar as she runs. Not something you get to see, in city life -- there isn't that much room for an animal to move. or, well, when Moishe does it, it's destructive.
Every time I watch the cats gallop, though, I feel a twinge of guilt. My own cat is back at home, unattended, while I'm down there in the dungeon plonking my minutes out on the Alienware's keys. I can't really justify it. I can't justify any of this.
The social time, maybe. Schmata's pilot was on with a different avatar today, a level 60 gnome with one of the race's weird ostrichlike steeds. I've become an every-night player, I bashfully noted to him. (I didn't mention I'd cut short time with my soon-to-depart roommate in order to get to the lab to play.) Am I addicted? I asked.
He pooh-poohed me. I've got thirty-six days in this character, he told me. And no, I'm not proud of it.
I may be wrong, but my impression is when he says thirty-six days, he doesn't mean he's six days into a second month's subscription. He means thirty-six times twenty-four hours of his life have been spent pressing buttons to move a picture of a gnome around a field too-densely populated with animated wolves, which don't react to the gnome's passage and periodically appear in midair due to code errors. (well, not ALL his time is spent in that situation... some moments, like gryphon rides, are less ugly... but if you think about it as a life lived, it seems a little absurd.)
As we bounced along the darkened road back from the Jasperlode Mine, I wanted to get meta on him. Why is he here? This is a guy I haven't seen much since college; I don't know what else is going on in his life. Is there something he's avoiding? Is he lonely? I know these have been my own reasons in the past for losing myself in the undertow of a game.
But this was a roleplaying server, and even though our guild doesn't seem to go in for the thees and thous, I didn't want to disrupt playtime with possibly difficult thoughts. I'll probably bring it up at some point.
Thousands of people logged on to these servers. A lot of them kids, but a good portion vocally annoyed enough with the kids to mark themselves as adults. At some point, everything we do will be deleted or otherwise lost. Think about this generation of humanity, doing this. I can't tell if it's better or worse than life has ever been. It's not as passive as the couch potatoes of the last generation, I don't think. But we make and move and fight and boast and dance in a world which is ephemeral: the question is how much more fragile is it than human culture has ever been?
Looking at it politically for a moment: we take in more than our share of corn syrup and petroleum and sweatshop clothes, we do our jobs during the day which do nothing to stop the awful things done in our names in other parts of the world, and at night we sit in front of burning tubes and pour our feelings and energies into a place where they're just about guaranteed not to have an impact on this inequal system of resources.
Why?
just a guess, for now: the virtual world is the only place we have some semblance of control.
just a guess.
Posted by me at 2:12 AM | Comments (5)
July 5, 2005
Warcraft Diary, Week Two
Last week I played WoW with friends for the first time. I met two college buddies, Neil and Sam, on the Silver Hand server after sorting out my confusion about how to find people, invite them to quests, and above all negotiate the command-line chat system which seems like it should be analogous to IRC but isn't.
The three of us were finally united at a crossroads where a large number of players were duelling. Neil's gnome avatar began pulling all his pets out of their carriers like a kid showing the contents of his toybox to a new and interesting guest. Sam, in the thickish, hearty form of a female dwarf cheered and leapt around and danced with and blew kisses at me. Responding in kind was a joy -- I was slowly coming to master a new means of expression.
Then a trade window popped up with a cat carrier in it. Neil was giving me a Cornish Rex. "Really?!" I whispered to him. It would have taken me eons to work up the money to pay for one on my own -- money I was going to need in order to buy equipment to fortify my frail priestess. "Of course," he said. I greedily accepted and fiddled frantically with the commands to bring the cat out. There he was, at my side just like Sam and Neil's own cats. My avatar burst into tears. And kisses. And cheers. (Avatars are mercurial creatures.) Sam admitted to getting a contact high off all the newbie thrills; his dwarf leapt and danced.
Neil gave me a rose for my non-weapon hand as we headed off to fight a cave full of kobolds. "What's that for?" I asked. "Nothing," he said, "it just looks pretty." A little femme-y for me, but then, so are my priestess's robes. And, like the whaleskin boots a mysterious night elf later bestowed on me without explanation, that rose was mine, and made me less of a naked, helpless avatar without any status crawling on the continent's frozen wastes.
I am sitting up on another New York night when I ought to be sleeping, writing this out, and the reason why I can't sleep is more than just the oppressive humidity. I kept having these images of a little pointy yellow pile float before my eyes. In a jerk of recognition, it occurred to me what was going on. The gold dust was an item I was supposed to be collecting last night to complete a quest. Let me tell you about it: that dust wasn't something my priestess would get to keep. It appeared in little bounded squares in the loot from kobolds, and I was supposed to collect ten and return them to someone who'd sent me on a quest. I don't remember who it was, and in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't going to matter to my play. That dust wasn't useful, or really even pretty or fascinating. In short, collecting the dust was not an intrinsically motivating part of gameplay. And yet, I am going to have to do dozens of missions like this if I want my priestess to advance. (And why do I want my priestess to advance? I need her to get to level 40: I want a pony, goddamn it! I've been screaming this for years, why hasn't anyone heard me yet? It's the secret of "pink" gaming, ladies and gents....)
Yes, this is what keeps me up at nights: the nagging thought that Jim Gee may be wrong about games incorporating intrinsically motivating learning. I'm not by any means the first one to note that the grind of MMORPGs is boring; I first remember hearing about it at a panel that Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen, and Warren Spector sat on at Parsons two years back.
I want to take apart what was not motivating here:
The gold dust would not be mine
It was not something I was excited about!
It was not an intrinsically useful substance
It would not be transformed into anything else (that I knew of)
There were no options for what I could do with it
The incident was not a meaningful one on my quest,
it would eventually be commoditized into other items
just as other quests, which consisted of boring things like killing ten of the same animal
would also be commoditized into clothes or money.
Ergo, this was not a matter of learning for learning's sake, or even playing for playing's sake. This was a disposable, forgettable moment. Granted, life has plenty of those... I guess movies and other forms of entertainment do, too....
Meanwhile, let's look at what was motivating for me about meeting with Sam and Neil at the crossroads
It was social
It was hilariously ridiculous
It directly contributed to my avatar's identity and skills
If we're talking in Jim Gee's terms, it also developed my own skills with the interface -- I became more competent
It was a performance
These two motivational moments may ultimately come into conflict: why am I motivated to improve my avatar if my game experience is for the most part forgettable?
* * *
Wrote this last week, and have since chatted with Chuck about it. He gently reminded me that there's more than one way of looking at motivation, and that a model which suggested that "games incorporate intrinsically motivating learning" might assume that motivation is a monolithic thing. Which I don't think it is. That's just dumb. Because I want a pony, and obviously George W. wants something else out of life (having doubtless been offered all the ponies he could possibly hope to bonk as a child). This puts the lie to the idea that using games in education to motivate kids is a sure thing: obviously, some of them won't even like games, and then where will we be? Walking straight into Larry Cuban's pointy, pointy traps. So can we talk about something else now?
Posted by me at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)
Reading and Writing Locally and Globally
I'm reading through the article "Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice" from the Journal of Literacy Research and have a few thoughts.
First of all, this was just the article I was looking for and didn't even know it. The authors set out to bring the global back into the very local practices studied in new literacies research. Let me step back and explain.
I had not been fully aware of this, but apparently I've been taught two contradicting takes on literacy without even realizing it. One is epitomized in the work of Walter Ong, I guess, and others who have suggested that the development of written literacy causes a revolution (a "Great Divide") in a society's ability to think, to develop abstractions, to recognize their emotions as changeable, to remember, etc. The other take is the new literacies approach, which questions the Eurocentricity of this approach. It studies literacy practices on local levels, finding that different communities use it differently and that there's much more of a gray continuum between oral and written verbal practices.
So the authors start out by saying that new literacies folks have gone too far towards eliminating any possibility of the global from their work, and their intent is to reconcile the two takes. And this is interesting to me, because it basically parallels the problem I am trying to face down in my current paper on Dance Dance Revolution. I am trying to reconcile the ideas of folks like Sut Jhally and Robert McChesney, which assumes that audiences are helpless in the face of media hegemony, with the ideas of Henry Jenkins, who finds that audiences repurpose media texts for their own uses. I think both the media monopoly and the Great Divide theorists are to some extent (though not purely) technologically determinist -- the medium being the message, whether that is print text or network television. So anyway, this article looks like it will be a pretty useful tool for knitting the two together.
There are a couple of points in it which stand out so far. The authors draw on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, in which technologies and other objects are seen as more or less on equal footing with people in communicating meaning, making arguments, and so forth. The authors use for an example an event in which someone enters a bank to apply for a loan. The authors say that "interest rates, the disclosure language, the reporting mechanisms, the counting machines all will transform this local literacy event into somebody else's meaning and send it into somebody else's setting where the meanings of the original context will not matter." (emph mine)
My initial thought was: what they meant to say was these objects have a standard meaning, which brings in connotations of the industrial period in which individual differences in product or process were smoothed out (standardized) for the sake of efficiency. Would this mean, then, that objects could not be considered actors in a network in another sociohistorical moment? Is actor-network theory an artifact of our era?
But the fact of the matter is even non-standardized objects bring meaning with them -- handmade tools, vessels, etc -- about how they are to be used. But it's pretty clear that standardized goods can carry their meaning more powerfully, more uniformly to more people. A passport, for example, has enroled (not sure I'm using that Latouerm correctly) the willingness of governments around the world to accept its claim to vouch for someone's identity; a letter of recommendation from the president, if handwritten on plain paper, would not have the same cachet and would face time-eating scrutiny in customs.
Perhaps standardized goods also carry with them the additional meaning "I am standardized" -- a claim which may mean different things to different people (depending, of course, on other networks or Discourses they participate in). When we pass by a Starbucks franchisee, for example, my student Fabiola sees a certain guaranteed quality of Frappucino, to which she aspires, whereas I see guaranteed bland inoffensiveness of environment, at which I feel comfortable turning up my nose.
Moving onward... The authors begin to define what they mean by "global" and "local" practices, and put forth a few promising categories of each. However, I think it's problematic trying to determine where local practices end and global ones begin. If I am watching someone watch Star Trek, how do I know when she is engaging in the global practice of watching TV as a generic viewer (the authors call the Internet and other communication systems "globalizing instruments par excellence," and I don't think they'd quibble with labelling network TV viewing as a global practice), when she is engaging in the probably-less-global practice of engaging with this fictional world as a Trekker (fictional worlds and abstract categories also cited as being globalizing), and when she is engaging as a fan participating in a local network of friends? I suppose the surround matters -- if her friends are with her and they're chatting about their take on the show, I guess that's mostly local -- but how do we know she hasn't suddenly stopped thinking about the show in terms of the semantic network of Star Trek, and begun to associate it with other shows?
We're clearly dealing with shades of local and global, here; it's not a clean dichotomy. And sadly, it leaves me without an answer to one of my major questions of Henry Jenkins's work, which is: if not everybody interacts with pop culture texts the way hard core fans do, revising them to their own tastes in fanfic and conventions and filk music, how is everyone else interacting with these pop culture texts? Mightn't they still be sheepishly sucking up the messages Sut Jhally thinks they are? Certainly advertisers are still confident enough to banking that they do. (At least some of them. Frankly, they're probably savvier about local audiences than these theorists are.)
The question then is roughly the one Jess and I would like to answer: How do people become creative manipulators of texts, rather than passive consumers of them?
Posted by me at 9:15 PM | Comments (3)