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August 28, 2005
College Trip to Boston
I recently took my protegee, Fabiola, on a trip to visit colleges in Boston. It was a grand success, with both of us learning a great deal, and we got to spend some time with my Boston buddies as well. Christine totally waxed my ass at Scrabble.
Posted by me at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
A Modest Proposal for Teh Intarnets
While developments in Movabletype over the past few years have gone a long way towards helping me clean out comment and trackback spam, it still accumulates with regularity. I believe we need a more extreme solution. Could we develop a separate Internet for the people looking for V!0xx, Ph3nt3rm!n3, pr0n of various varieties, TX h0ld-3m, and the other informational plagues which are visited on my site by variable IPs from Russia?
We could even officially call it Teh Intarweb or The Internets instead of the Internet.
Posted by me at 11:33 AM | Comments (1)
Things we did not know about the Leet
Is the word "leet" OSPD valid? See for yourself. For the same reasons it's listed in the Jargon File/Hacker Dictionary? Nope. Uh, wait. It's not listed in the Jargon File. Screw you, Eric S. Raymond!
What's the S for, anyway? Sidney?
Posted by me at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2005
Advertisers and Geeks
Jess and I had an argument earlier this summer over whether advertising was on the whole good or bad. She came down on the side of it being more or less harmless, while I (after some wragling and apologizing and admitting I don't really think it's wholesale evil) thought it was universally composed of lies. A little addendum as a means of illustrating what I mean when I say it's lies:
This morning I ran into a neighbor of my housesit apartment, who I haven't seen all summer. Usually I see him around a lot, and we say hi; he's not much older than me, and I realized at some point we were actually working for the same company when I was proofreading for a medical advertising firm. He's considered a rising star at McCann-Erickson; I was startled at one point to find his face, framed by his familiar silver hipster haircut, in a copy of Advertising Age.
He asked if I was still at McCann, and I told him no, I was now studying video games at Teachers College. Oh, I used to work in video games, he said. Turns out he used to do global marketing for XBox. I'd figured; he and his gal have a Rockstar Games sticker on their exterior door.
Let me know if you want to talk more about the industry, he said. Actually, I do have a question, I said, and we proceeded to commit the New York foul of holding the elevator on our floor to finish the conversation. I want to know more about how the industry makes use of ethnographers, as that's my preferred methodology. He told me that in marketing at least they found it quite useful. While he was at XBox he undertook a study of different gamer types all over the world.
(This is the kind of thing we'd like to be doing in our department and departments like ours, I think, and some of the professors I know think the're breaking totaly new ground when things like this come up. It pisses me of royally, because of course we've never heard of this stuff, because it's proprietary, and because it seems like academics mostly don't even think to go looking for this stuff much less try to ask that companies share. I understand the critique that commercial research is biased by profit motives, but I don't see how it could hurt us to look at this stuff and then confirm or deny it in disinterested research. but I digress.)
I mentioned that I wished I got to hear about this research more often. I told him about the industry panel at DiGRA, and how strange I thought it was when the industry guys talked as if they weren't listening to academics at all, for example how they talked as if player contributions to the gaming experience were expendable and were more a hassle than something they'd view as free value-added material. Not to mention how defensive academics were about it all.
Yeah, Microsoft is pretty enlightened about research, he said, but some of these other companies, you know, they're still geeks. It's like the fat geek kid who goes away to camp, loses a few pounds and gets muscled up, and comes back, but you know, he's still a geek.
This is what I mean to get at. This guy does not consider himself a geek. To sell game consoles, he researches geeks until he's got a clear picture of their essence. He creates a campaign which makes gamers and other geeks feel like he understands them, and that the company he works for wants to fill their needs. And yet when you come down to it, he's a skinny, well-groomed, silver-haired hipster who's perfectly ready to perpetuate stigmas against fat people, against people who don't play team sports, against "non-joiners," against gamers and geeks and other people who don't conform to societal norms of what a good man or good woman does. This man is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and what he does when he's on the clock is ensure these stereotypes endure.
So as I said to Jess, I find the lie that advertising is about lifestyles when it's actually about profit offensive. But the lie that there are a few narrowly-defined good ways to live your life may be even worse.
Posted by me at 1:21 PM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2005
Terrifying New York cockroach stories
I have, praises be to God on high and probably knock wood just for good luck, been fantastically fortunate on the vermin front since I've lived in New York City. The notable exception is the place I am currently housesitting.
This has always been the case -- these guys are not so clean, and in particular they let their pets leave lots of food mess around their bowls. It's the kind of picturesque New York space where you turn on a light and a black carpet disintegrates before your eyes, heading for shelter.
However, over the past year the roaches in this apartment seem to have developed a sense of drama worthy of a USC film-school graduate. (Sorry, kiddo.) Witness the past two days' stunts:
The Godfather
Having made my way barefoot through many tiny swarming roaches in the kitchen to grab a last glass of water before bed, I return to the bed... only to discover that the granddaddy of them all, some three inches long and thicker than my thumb, is NESTLED AMONGST THE FEATHER PILLOWS.
Jaws
Again going for a late-night glass of water, avoiding the dog dish where the action is heaviest. I get about a quarter of the way full when something small and brown falls OUT of the spigot and INTO the GLASS. Alive? Dead? Was it crawling on the spigot or were there MORE IN THE RESERVOIR? I didn't stick around to find out.
I can only hope that dealing with the roach problem is on their list of things to do as they renovate. Either that, or they make a mint on these blockbuster plot twists and move to a fancier apartment.
Posted by me at 2:04 AM | Comments (1)
August 23, 2005
Warcraft Diary: Presenting the World of Warcraft to Educators
A week ago I took some of the patter I've been developing about video games and put it to use, giving a presentation on MMORPGs to a group of students and others who've been meeting at the TC library to discuss technology and education. The group was pretty young -- almost all of them around my age, plus Gary, a very forward-thinking library staffer who is already talking about developing a "virtual space," meaning a PROJECTION virtual space, in the library -- so the talk was really pretty exciting for me, with attendees asking excellent questions.
Most of the audience members were exceedingly sharp about what would and would not be doable educationally within a game. We worried about the binary nature of games as evaluators of skill, about the division of labor between players and their avatars, and about the ways video games take people away from the rest of their lives. Most of them seemed ready to consider the potential of games developed by educators rather than using commercial games in class, which was helpful, as it took us away from reckoning with the problems with existing games.
A few attendees raised their hands to suggest possibilities for the game, some of which were really interesting. One guy wondered if you could use avatar customization to get kids to think about the ways they represent themselves as sexual or as members of a group through the ways they dress. Not sure if anyone's done that yet, but it sounded good to me.
I was running through the things I liked best -- the chat functions, the pets, the professions, emoting, the scenery. The audience was also curious about whether we could get the av naked, so I stripped her down to her leather bikini. (Its impracticality was duly ridiculed.) Then, as I went on to discuss something else, I was interrupted by my av's cries of terror and the enraged growls of some horrible thing attacking because I'd sat still, naked, in one place for too long. I had to hastily dress her back up and somehow managed to neglect her pants, so she ran around for the rest of the presentation bare-assed, only the red and gold tabard of the Learned Freethinkers providing any modesty. I found myself anxious to have her running around like that in public places; don't know if it's the harrassment I get in WoW, or living in New York, but being less than fully dressed definitely makes me nervous.
There was one woman sitting in the back, maybe a few years younger than my mom, who didn't say anything the entire time. I took this silence as skeptical until, after an hour and a half or more of presentation and questions, she raised her hand. "So, wait," she said. "Are you controlling all of the characters on the screen, or is the computer? Why is this called 'massively multiplayer'?"
I've got my crackpot theories why their generation doesn't get it, or frankly anyone who hasn't laid hands on a controller doesn't get it. You have to be pretty profoundly screen illiterate to not have any idea who the protagonist is in a video game. My guess is this illiteracy can be chalked up to an incorrect reading of camera conventions. In most video games, the camera follows your avatar as the central point of its focus. World of Warcraft and contemporary games make this more difficult by giving the player control of the camera. But most of us know this, lock on to the av the camera seems to be following most often, and continue to watch that character. We've done it since we were kiddos.
The room rushed to answer the woman's question. "Hold on," I said. "I'll demonstrate." I piloted Roz out of the door of the inn in Goldshire and found myself in a large group of highish-level players. They were role-playing in earnest. I gritted my teeth, knowing they were going to hate what I was about to do.
"So, if you guys were talking to a bunch of teachers and librarians about WoW," I typed to the public channel, "what would you tell them?"
"It pwnz" appeared in the first bubble over a player's head. Had to explain that one, for sure.
"That they wouldn't understand it," wrote another. Two more suggsted that the game was good for teaching. One said math. The other said history -- "of the Middle Aegis (sic)." I was hoping it was clear the computer wouldn't come up with anything like this to say; I think the woman who asked the question got it.
* * *
At one point a guy raised his hand and asked, "So what's the point of this game?" Feeling a little protective of the non-combat elements of this game which I cherish so much, and which I'd spent so much time explaining, I quipped, "Well, what do you want it to be?"
It's been my approach to the game so far. I'm there to dance, to explore, to joke around with my friends, and to collect animals and other cool-looking loot. But Roz is level 16 now -- still a good 24 levels away from getting the horse I want so badly. And in the face of the REAL goals of the game, the thrill of the little flourishes the gods have given us is wearing thin.
Every time I log on I'm grinding, killing six crocolisks for their eyeballs or twelve rabid thistle bears for their rotting carcasses or twenty-four wailing Highborn for their ephemeral essences. Then I run to the questgiver, only to be given another quest. No questgiver ever says "Great job, why don't you go to Astranaar and enjoy the scenery for a while?" or "I like a gal who can take out sixty fleshrippers at a go. Care to join me for a swim? I know this waterfall that's off the beaten path..." It feels like fuckin' work, with no vacation! I keep expecting them to hand me a pile of textbooks and tell me to write 163 multiple choice questions. I begin to wonder whether I misrepresented the game in my presentation.
The divide between the things we do in-game for ourselves and the things we do in-game to progress in the game is pretty firm. And when my friends aren't on, I don't enjoy it much. Questing with Bill, Jess, and Chris is fun, but when you hook up with some random long-haired musclebound warrior dude there's a good chance he'll try to clumsily woo you between missions, and that's no fun. (Perhaps I should try only grouping with gnomes. Better people gravitate towards gnomehood, I find.)
* * *
Speaking of classes, being a human female has begun to feel almost intolerable. Roz's whiny voice is so ungodly grating that I swear I'm about to delete her ass. "Not enough energy," she mopes. "I don't have a target," she jeers. "Inventory is full!" OMG. "Attack!" sounds like she's telling off a cheating boyfriend. She makes me wish I was an effing dwarf. Posted my first comment to the suggestions forum today as a result -- I'd love to see a choice of voice sets, like there is in Neverwinter Nights.
Furious with my snivelling rogue, I fled to another server to begin life anew last night. I now have a tauren female on Terenas. Lowren is her name. She's red spotted, with black hair. A bay pinto. We've been enjoying the placid fields of her mesa, and the early levels of being a huntress. She's got a kind of Eeyorish voice, which may irritate me later, but is a welcome relief for now.
It seems very quiet on Terenas. I only know two people there, and they're not on often. I definitely wasn't looking to get away from people I know -- like I said, it's not fun playing without them -- but the solitude has definitely made Lowren a very different person. While Gunhild and Rozalind are the spoiled babies of the guild, showered with presents and gold, Lowren is an orphan. I have to gauge whether to spend my coppers on boots OR pants, rather than buying everything I need without regard to expense. If you'd like to join her there, it'll be us against the elements.
Posted by me at 9:12 PM | Comments (1)
August 8, 2005
Native American Boarding Schools, 1880-1920
In my last year of high school, I wrote a paper on government-run boarding schools for Native Americans. Books were quite hard to find. So I was thrilled to discover today, in the course of research for work, that primary source documents on the subject -- see the autobiographies of Zitkala-Sa, whose name I remember, and Ah-nen-la-de-ni -- have made their way online.
Carol Pixton, the American History teacher for whom I wrote this paper, has had a huge impact on my career. She allowed me to pick this very specific paper topic, indulging my interest in social and policy history; encouraged me to do in-depth research; provided us with lectures which modelled the actual practices of historians; praised the work I produced, and eventually recommended it for publication in the Concord Review (which I was too self-doubting to follow up on). Ms. Pixton had incredible enthusiasm for the topics she taught and a flair for making them come alive (studying the Cultural Revolution in her Chinese history class, we once held a criticism-self-criticism of the Latin class during which we denounced them as bourgeois pigs), and the longer I work close to social sciences the more I appreciate what that did for me. I'm humbled to remember that at the time I periodically snapped at her for being "too loud" in her 8 a.m. courses :\
One last note on the topic is my gratitude for Teh Intarweb. I can only hope that young students studying the same topic now find the particularly poignant memoir of Zitkala-Sa and can draw their own conclusions from it, perhaps in classrooms far from the university libraries where I had to look to find a scant few scholarly works on the subject.
Posted by me at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)
August 4, 2005
Once I Was The (Bald) King Of France
Oh, oh, oh, I love Bruno Latour. Have I explained this yet? Here's why I love Latour, as he speaks about relativism and the construction of reality:
Consider a sentence often cited by language philosophers: ' the present king of France is bald.' This sentence has launched endless discussion in the philosophy of language, because it is both grammatically correct and completely devoid of meaning, as it does not 'correspond' to any real state of affairs....
Historians know Charles the Bald, but not the present king of France. Hairdressers know a few bald people, but no kings, not to mention kings of France; they do, however, hold scalps, creams, and hair lotions close to their hearts. Much is presently happening in Berlin and Cambodia, but none of it has anything to do with the king of France. There are indeed people who run France, but they call themselves Presidents, and not kings. The only people who take this sentence into consideration are linguists and philosophers, who use it as a cliche!....
The judgement of [the] reality [of a statement] is immanent in, and not transcendant to, the path of a statement. To put this the other way around, forbidding oneself to exit a network [by which he basically means a network of meaning, the kind of thing we all mentally begin as children and add to and subtract from everyday] does not entail forbidding oneself to judge. In this example, we can correctly judge the degree of truth of the statement 'the present king of France is bald' without ever appealing to the notion of referent.... Indeed, all statements have a reality [a degree or measure of reality, he means], and this reality can be evaluated precisely by comparing, each time, what an actor [human, animal, object, idea, whatever] says about another actor with what this other actor says about itself. This comparison delineates a network which is both the existence and the essence of the statement. Unicorns, bald kings of France, black holes, flying saucers, appearances of the Virgin, chromosomes, atoms, Roger Rabbit, and utopian technological projects all possess, without excess or residue, the degree of realism delineated by their networks.
OK so it was really the bits about appearances of the Virgin and Roger Rabbit which I thought were hilarious, and which make reading Latour a total joy. But I copied down the rest because as I was going along I thought it might make for an interesting retort to people who sneer at "cultural relativists..." Many times the critique I hear of cultural relativism is that it has absolutely no sense of up or down, right or wrong, but of course what it means is situating the meaning of an event in an immediate network ("dead cow" in the context of "starving family/typhoid conditions" versus "militant veganism/easily upset stomach" versus "4H club project/college application" versus "Texas/steakhouse" is not a meaningless statement, it just means something else in each case). Of course, this works for objectivists who aren't slavering fundamentalists as well, because of course fundies want meaning to be transcendant. So this is just a shot across the bow of any atheist Randites out there: next time you try to tell me there's some universal truth out there I'm'a whip out the Latour and try to assure you haven't a leg to stand on.
Posted by me at 10:10 PM | Comments (1)
You can't have it that way!
In doing some research for work, I happened upon this article which notes that McDonalds is doing research to find out how to make their employees' uniforms "hipper"... and one of the companies they're looking to is American Apparel.
Now, I know American Apparel is not the spotless workers' utopia it makes itself out to be, but come on -- how dumb do you have to be to not realize that McDonalds can't borrow fire from a company whose image is about treating its workers nicely? I mean, it's not like AA's clothes make the brand; they're basically nondescript (though comfy and durable).
Hey McDonalds, I have an idea -- how 'bout you associate that uniform with a DECENT WAGE?! Or EDIBLE FOOD?! Or contributing to a PRISTINE ENVIRONMENT?! There's status for you. heh. How 'bout you just GO OUT OF BUSINESS ALREADY?!!!!1
Posted by me at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)
Warcraft Diary: Existential Blues
Mom, you asked the other day whether I dream in World of Warcraft. As of last night, I do.
The implications of this dream for Jim Gee's hypotheses about the relationships between avatars and players might be interesting. I am not totally clear whether I was the avatar for most of the dream, but by the end it was clearly Me in the dream, along with the real life appearances and behaviors of a few of my guildmates.
The beginning of the dream is not easy for me to recall. The guildies and I -- and at this point that included a significant ex-boyfriend, who is not actually in the Learned Freethinkers -- were trying to escape from or rescue things. (It's notable that "escape from" is not a genre of quest common to MMORPGs -- it's better-suited to platformers. I was watching Jess beat Rachet and Clank yesterday, so that's probably where that part of the dream came from.) At some point we ended up locked in a tall, silo-like, mostly featureless, yellowish sandstone tower through which we descended. We thought ourselves very clever when we bashed our way out through a wooden door at the bottom.
We found ourself in forest much like the one Katie and I and Isaac hiked through earlier this summer -- very Eact Coast. Standing in some loose shrubbery at the top of the hill where the tower stood, I realized there were two orcs nearby. One was superhumanly tall and the other was very short. They didn't look like orcs from WoW at all; I remember registering that they looked like cartoons of pale Pacific Islanders with large tusks. NO idea what that was about... aside from maybe the fact that there was some joking going on in the guild last night about people's Asian mommas.
The other guildies wanted to engage these orcs, who were talking about coming after us one way or another. I was tired of fighting, at this point, so as they clashed I ran away. Someone's grey Percheron horse was tethered nearby. As I drew near its flank in first-person camera mode, I considered my options for escape. What did I press to mount? Could I ride someone else's horse? (In WoW, you can't, because horses don't really exist until they are summoned, as far as I can tell, and ones which are just around for scenery can't be interacted with.) Then I realized there was no way I could ride, as I wasn't of a high enough level.
So I did the next logical thing: I grabbed the left stirrup, and smacked the horse on the ass as hard as I could. It took off at a gallop, dragging me along like a Western trick-rider. I ruminated proudly on this accomplishment as the world sped by -- now seen from behild my avatar and the horse. I was going to have to tell the guild how to do this.
Some time later the fighting was over and I found myself in a blue Voyager minivan with the guild, headed towards logging off for the day. The Significant Ex wouldn't give any indication he heard me no matter what I said to him, but Sam (the real-life person who plays Schmata) and Snizzlet (who I only know online -- in fact, I don't think I've actually seen her av, but my dream-state assumed she was a gnome) and I chatted amiably.
At some point it became clear that the other members of the guild were actually heading back to "the Tower" -- not the one we'd escaped from, but another one which seemed to basically be home. Even though I wanted to log off this didn't alarm me too much, because going back to this home state or logging off seemed to more or less be the same thing. I did worry, however, that the other guildies had been online for far too long already.
After I'd woken up, and was wandering around the house groggily preparing for work, thinking of and forgetting a song lyric which seemed to be a good title for this blog post, it occurred to me that I'd had a conversation the night before in the lab which could reasonably be called existential. It was an argument I often have with myself, played out for a change with a colleague who'd worked at Microsoft but is now studying at Bank Street College of Education down the road from TC. I'd showed him some of the complexity of WoW, and he remarked that players were spending significant time living life in its world while their own lives passed them by.
I tend to start from this position in this argument. But then I think, what other life would they be living? They can't be in two places at once. It's not like they're necessarily forgoing social time -- the game can be very social, it's not like staring silently at TV in that way. Sure, the cat box may be dirty, the bills may be unpaid, but as long as the players eventually grab the poop scoop or send some envelopes off to Con Edison their "real lives" will continue, and what else would there be to them than running around Kalimdor? We cannot be anywhere aside from where we are.
And then I think, sure, that's what they ARE doing, but as for what they COULD be doing, god, they could be fu(king VOTING or working on an impeachment drive or something. But this disconnect, of course, is not video games' fault. It's the fault of very well-established appliances like vacuums and washing machines, the attendant rise of leisure time, the development of TV, the fragmentation of large family units by mobility and economic unrest, and so forth. Like the man said, we didn't start the fire. It only remains to us to fight it.
So yes, we should do something other than play video games, because we do still have meatspace bodies, and to tell you the truth I really like mine and the dancing and the s.ex and the fresh produce and the sleeping and the feeling of cat fur and the smell of cut grass and all. And while we have our faces pointed into the monitor the earth is warming and the carcinogens are rising and the fundamentalists are going nuclear and the police can search our backpacks. The question now is How do we steal critical mass away from entertainment and consumption culture? I don't think either Neil Postman or Adbusters has the answer.
Posted by me at 1:05 PM | Comments (5)
More Maine News
And while I was at it, I thought I'd look up my other Maine friends online. It turns out that Ana and Rafi Keilt-Freyre have been making music. Following in daddy's footsteps. Further searching indicates little sister Gracie is involved in running. Yay!
Posted by me at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
Crap -- Chute in an Accident
Some weird sense that there was a disturbance in the force caused me to look up author, militia leader, and my-sometime-penpal Carolyn Chute online today, and Maine Indymedia, bless them, is reporting she and her husband, Michael, are in bad shape after an auto wreck a scant few days ago. It also reminds that they have no health insurance.
This is bad news -- Carolyn has a fractured hip socket, and while it's been mended well it sounds unlikely that she will get the follow-up she needs, and the hospital has been looking to discharge her. She has also had heart problems for some time. If anyone wants to help her out with a donation, I do have her address. Carolyn is very important in getting critical ideas out to her community, and it would be a shame to have her voice diminished.
An article in the comments to this thread also notes that it's been six summers since Stephen King almost died in an auto accident. Carolyn quipped they seem to have it in for authors up there :) but I know she doesn't really believe it; she loves her town.
Posted by me at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
August 2, 2005
Andrews Family Reunion
Was home recently for the largest official family reunion we've ever had, which also marked my dad's mom's birthday. And we poured out libations for our fallen homies. (Thanks to Mom; some of these pictures are hers, included for completeness.)
Posted by me at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
August 1, 2005
Making Fiends Birthday Party
The theme for my birthday party this year was emergent. First Abby and I dreamed up the "human pinata party." Then, realizing that was likely to go about as well as the Kissinger Pinata incident, I changed it to the Make-Your-Own-Party-Favor Party. Thankfully, before that got too far, it became the Making Fiends party. Didn't get any pix of the party itself (d'oh!) but here's the results.
Posted by me at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)