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April 29, 2006
So what's Jon Land up to lately, you may be asking yourself?
Yes, that Jon Land.
No, actually they don't involve ugly stick figures. Or tasteless jokes. Or reviews of beef jerky. Or physical threats to hippies. Who knew?
In less cognitively dissonant news, his book The Spam Letters has just been translated into Japanese. He expressed some concern to me that broken English might not translate well to Japanese. I really don't think he needs to worry.
Posted by me at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2006
Why not get them bronzed, while you're at it?
Has anyone else heard about this? Collecting and preserving your baby's umbilical stem cells for later use in their medical treatment? Holy damn, yo. It's the martketing patter which gets to me: "What better gift to an expectant parent than a gift that may one day save a life." That, and they'll give you 4% back in college savings through the UPromise program when you enroll.
I mean, I've heard of planting the placenta under a sapling when the kid's born, but this is... really... this is the future, isn't it?
Amusingly enough, I found this through the Google Ads links in Gmail on a conversation I've been having with someone about twins. Y'all know I hate ads, but I love the shit Google Ads comes up with. I don't want them to ever improve their matching algorithms; I enjoy the cognitive dissonance so much, and seeing as it's in text and doesn't blink or scream at me I can totally put up with it.
Posted by me at 2:26 PM | Comments (1)
Dogwood Season (pictures)
Two new albums up: Game Developers Conference/Bay Area pix and miscellaneous pictures from around New York this semester.
Posted by me at 3:26 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
The Further Adventures of Simulation
Spurred by a particularly shoddy article we read in Lalitha's class, I've written what ended up as kind of a continuation of Bread and Circuits. It's also kind of my first channeling of theory-voice. Not sure I do it well. Probably I ought to read some Zizek.
(I've included the full text here as I worry I may eventually lose Lalitha's class blog. --7/11/07)
Simulation of Presence
I was really having trouble with the idea of presence; it just seemed exceedingly vague. I've done a lot of thinking about it, and I don't think the concept holds water. Here's my reasoning:
The author usually phrases it as "sense" of presence. On p. 34 they refer to Lombard and Ditton's definition, "an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated." (1997) They then borrow Witmer and Singer's definition, "the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another. As applied to a virtual environment (VE), presence refers to experiencing the computer-generated environment rather than the actual physical locale." (1998) The words "sense," "illusion," and "subjective experience" imply that "presence" is a product of the human mind. Thus it should likely be investigated qualitatively. A sense of presence is phenomenological and, as the author himself admits, cultural; it will be most effectively gauged through summaries of human description, not attempts to measure and quantify.
And this is the form the first paragraph takes, with the author speaking metaphorically (if not condescendingly fancifully) about "journeying to 'strange lands.'" Let's not lose track of that fact: "presence" as described in this article is essentially a metaphor, or more accurately a simile. "Being in the presence" of an object you are perceiving means all information about that object is coming to you, unmediated, through your own senses. Now that I have glasses, I can't avoid the possibility that this conception of presence might include minor enhancements to the senses, such as hearing aids or corrective lenses.
Still, "being in the presence of" implies physical proximity. "Having a sense of presence," by contrast, means what is being described here are experiences which are only like presence. It implies that what you sense has been transformed into another shape -- ones and zeros, electrical impulses, radio waves, ink on paper, paint on canvas, etc. -- before it reaches your sensory organs.
Thus "presence" is not a substance which can be measured independently of individual human standpoints, or outside of a social consensus. (Lance was arguing to me earlier that there's nothing which can be measured outside of human understanding, which is ultimately true, but I'd like to leave that point aside for the moment. I find trying to reduce socially and technologically mediated phenomena to measurable numeric quantities to be far more problematic than trying to use a device like a light meter, scale, thermometer, or pH test to emulate and quantify the human senses.)
Though the study of presence should therefore be phenomenological, in subsequent paragraphs the author talks about the "variables" which have been found to impact a sense of presence; "cognitive overload," "arousal," and other human states usually in the domain of empirical cognitive and physiological research; and discusses the effects of varying the degrees of a geometric field on reported sense of presence. As a result, the evidence the author uses to demonstrate the existence of "presence" is a mismatch for the phenomenon he purports to be studying; it is thus unconvincing. Presence, he says, is related to the "variables" "enjoyment," "involvement," and "motivation to complete the task," according to various studies. All of these are problematic when taken as empirical "variables;" they are highly subjective, very complex, and not demonstrably separable from elements of "presence" such as temperature, physical proximity, and frequency of feedback.
So the idea of presence breaks down as Fontaine proceeds; it proves inaccurate. I'll argue that another term, simulation, would serve the authors' inquiries better. It moves the question of how "present" a mediated object is out of the head of the individual and finds it instead in the object, its affordances, and the social surround.
I began my dissection of "presence" by trying to come up with a medium which had the least presence possible. I settled on the telegraph. It conveys a message which must be even more attentively decoded than written text in order to have an impact on the person on the receiving end of the line.
So does a telegraph message give the receiver a sense of "presence?" Well, certainly it consists of audio and visual stimuli, which the authors allow are part (though a small part) of creating a sense of presence. The net effect on the recipient is, in fact, the presence of an idea about the sender and their meaning in the recipient's mind.
But can we say that a person communicating through a telegraph is less present than a person communicating by audiovisual chat? Well, the recipient must mentally conjure up the missing aspects of what she would know in the "presence" of the sender in order to make sense of the message; also perhaps the sender's tone of voice, facial expression, etc. (Possibly why we apparently read the intent of about 50% of email messages wrong, as a recent study suggested; we have a lot of gaps to fill in.) Does it give the recipient a sense of being someplace else? If the recipient has conjured those additional factors, yes. There's no guarantee that the recipient will not imagine those additional factors to the point at which the telegraph message seems as auditorily and visually vivid as they would be in an AV chat. There's also no guarantee the recipient would not tune out elements of an AV chat, focusing only on the same idea which could have been communicated through the telegraph.
The sender's physical person can be equally far away in both cases, and ultimately distance does not matter. The receiver of an AV chat message gets more information about the sender -- some of their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. -- but what they perceive, ultimately, is still not the presence of the original. They perceive the sender's metaphorical presence, their sound and image encoded into ones, zeros, electrical impulses, reassembled at the other end of the line. The person is no more present for being represented in a wider range of media. Their mood and speech are simulated more accurately, but they are still not interchangeable with the original human presence or speech.
I suggest, then, that we can talk about a greater or lesser simulation of presence through electronic media, not greater or lesser presence itself. Like I said, this moves the measurement of presence away from its impact on individual minds and takes as its locus instead the social consensus about those impacts, be that through agreement on standards for empirical measurement or through description of interpersonally shared meanings about presence. This analysis also sits more comfortably with Fontaine's desire to speak of the "causes of a sense of presence," namely the affordances of a medium, lack of distractions, degree of control, etc. Simulation is the sum of these causes, rather than the sum of subjects' perceptions.
* * *
I'm probably just irritated by a minor semantic quibble here; more often than not Fontaine does refer to augmenting a "sense of presence" rather than augmenting "presence" itself, and when he just refers to "presence" it appears to be mere sloppy shorthand. But I think it's vital to say "a simulated sense of presence" to keep in mind the metaphorical nature of "telepresence," especially as we work with young children. If we do not, I fear we may end up serving only a narrow spectrum of human needs and further exacerbating existing social problems.
Leaving the semantics behind, we can now pose the question of how to "nurture presence" in a slightly different way: What elements of a situation must be simulated in order to give the user a sense that they are present in that situation?
This is a great question to ask within the domain of education. Instruction should be a process of shaping the environment to draw learners' attention to important details, so that in the chaos of the greater world they can later perceive salient patterns. It is thus an iterated process of elimination: gauging and adapting the ideal set of cues to best get a point across to the learner. (Trying to ensure that the specific point you're trying to make is kept intact in the learner's head has lately seemed to me like a form of coercion; especially when the lesson taught is about the best way to live one's life, who are we to insist on our correctness in such a diverse world? I'll put this worry aside for the moment, though, as I think it can temporarily be quelled by a desire for interpersonal harmony at least at the familial level.) It has been a process of such selective attention in many learning contexts across cultures, from agrarian people separating out qualities of plants, soils, animals, and seasons to teach their offspring the optimal means of cultivating food, to professors of medicine pointing out counterintuitive symptom patterns in medical cases, to kindergarten teachers reinforcing the differences in line between the letter M and the letter N.
But in the rest of the world, and even kinds of instruction which are liminal and not explicitly or solely educational, there are more troubling questions to ask about what elements of a situation should be simulated.
The motor driving technology now is a desire for more and more accurate simulations of the things we can perceive with our own senses. Each new video game console guarantees more lifelike movement of hair, rain, and grasses; the Internet tends ever more towards the visual and auditory, not to mention the sensations of teledildonics. I was told by an acquaintance at GDC this year that the Pentagon, taking cues from Star Trek, has developed a Holodeck. She swore that while in it, she saw the simulator create a door which was indistinguishable to her from the real thing when she opened it.
It is conceivable that within our lifetimes our technologies will achieve a near-immersive simulation of presence. One which might convince us, for example, that even though our bodies are physically lying immobile on tables in a cold, dark, low-ceilinged room in the basement of Thorndike, we are actually engaging in a vigorous game of volleyball on a pebbly beach in Fiji, with the sun beating down on our shoulders and the breeze riffling our hair.
Sounds great, sign me up, right? The basement of Thorndike is, in my scientific opinion, really fuckin' dank. If all of us could live less difficult, more fulfilling lives mediated 24/7 by technology, lives made more equal by a liberation from material resources, wouldn't it benefit humanity to do so? And if we have such technology at our command, and if adults regularly use it, shouldn't children perhaps receive their instruction fully immersed from a young age so as to prepare them adequately for a productive life?
I'm not sure. As I've said elsewhere:
Historically, we haven't done a great job of managing human sensation. We've managed the tastiness and attractiveness of food with alar, DDT, BHT, MSG, and red number five, and look where that got us. We tried to take away the pain of pregnancy with thalidomide, other pains with morphine. We tried to solve schizophrenia with electric shocks. Then there's been findings about the effects of exposure to natural light on depression.
I think about babies -- human babies, condor babies, monkey babies, horse babies -- and what we know about the sensations they need for healthy growth. How human babies which are not held or cuddled will generally experience higher stress throughout their lives. How condor and other bird babies will not imprint on others of their species if fed by human hands. How monkey babies sleep better even with the simulated sound and vibration of a beating heart nearby. How mares will not nurse orphaned foals unless someone rubs them down with the same herb or perfume, so that the foal smells like it belongs to them.
I don't think we have anywhere near enough knowledge of how much sensory s(t)imulation is enough for a nourishing experience. I have my suspicions that Western empirical ways of knowing, with their obsessive attention to measurable visual, auditory, abstract, and verbal cues, are dangerously ignorant of what's really important to leading a good human life. I have this suspicion my sister Sylvie is right when she insists she doesn't ever want a desk job because of the physical strain, and my sister Ariel may be right to avoid working indoors at all.
Should we continue eliding simulated presence as if it is just the same as real presence, we are at risk of losing an understanding of why it is not enough to sustain us.
Posted by me at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)
Bread and Circuits
This somewhat stream-of-consciousness post was written in late March, begun my last day in Australia and continued on the flight home. It has been modified slightly to fit this space. Speaking of Jon and Katina, I owe you each a letter overflowing with thanks for being such incredible hosts and showing me around Sydney; my life after break was a one-two punch of conferences, and I still haven't recovered. Letters are forthcoming.
The first thing I did upon waking to the sound of parrots this morning was check my email, and found I'd gotten mail from a former WoW guildmate saying he was beginning a blog about the game. I went to read it. About three posts down, under some writeups of guild activities, it became clear that this was more generally a personal blog -- and there was a post documenting how one day recently his depression had gotten so bad recently that he'd checked himself into an emergency room.
The semester had really done a number on me, enough so that even four days at the beach had not really shaken my stress. But waking up to that email, I suddenly felt I'd been given a new life. Like I'd dodged a bullet, kinda. I cancelled my WoW account finally because I knew the trip to Australia was gonna cost more than I could really afford... the incentive to save money was more palpable than my more general dread and ennui about the game, so it was the last straw.
Now I know that at least three of the hardest-core WoW players I know are deeply, clinically depressed to the point of not leaving the house, losing jobs, threatening suicide. These are the Joneses with whom the rest of us must keep up in the game. They get the best loot and have the highest-level characters. I wanted to play with them, because they were always doing the most fun instances, and they're generally better company than the leet speakers, homophobes, and gankers who you find on the general channels. I don't think at all that the game has caused their depression -- I'm not up for those frivolous causalities -- but it's clear it is a strong magnet for those who are already depressed.
I have deep, deep misgivings about video games. I have deep misgivings about the project of using them for education. Educators and parents uniformly believe that because video games are fun and motivating, education should be grafted onto them to make education more entertaining. Meanwhile, advertisers are keen to get into video games because they know they're addictive, that they can deliver eyeballs to their clients.
What if I could develop some means of thinking which could help my depressive friends out of games? Myself as well, I guess. I don't really have the academic toolkit to take this on, and aside from it being a gut issue for me, it's not along the lines of questioning I want to follow. I don't think.
Well, I guess it's not like I think an educational MMORPG would be counterproductively addictive. I think Sesame Street is mostly a great thing, and I think educational video games would be too, if it could be shown that they were actually motivating and actually taught content -- these are minor ifs, I think, pretty easily overcome with a little effort. A big if is clearly the motivational aspect of educational games... that's been exceedingly inconsistent to date. With game industry folks generally so antagonistic to the idea (not to mention the practice) of educational gaming, and educators so ignorant of "real" gaming, it seems this gulf will not be easily bridged.
It's thinking about what critical media literacy would look like in the video game age which gets me. To as questions about where a video game comes from is to question space, and how it is created. This is also a critical literacy in the meatspace world, and to the extent that the internet is a space, it's critical literacy there too. Many questions begin to arise in such a line of inquiry -- for what audience is a video game space created? How do the elements of its creation limit or facilitate the actions of participants? What could be done differently? -- but the questions which I think are most important for me, and have certainly been the most persistent are, Why are we here? Why do some people spend so much time in video game spaces? What does it mean to become a level 60 warrior, to own a complete matching set of epic armor, to be a guild leader, to own and ride a race-unusual steed which was a gift denoting the dwarven high council's indebtedness to you for your service?
What does all this mean when Blizzard owns every last bit of that character's property, skills, and reputation, and you don't have rights to take them out of the game or change them? What if you want to pass your loot on to your children, but Blizzard won't let you if they don't keep up a subscription? What if they'd like to recoup the money you invested in the game?
What if the game gets cancelled? What if, when the U.S. makes its inevitable use of the information weapon it's been developing, all the game data is destroyed? Who are you then?
What does it mean that what you own is not unique to you -- that at least a few other people in the world have some of the same epic pieces of armor that you do? That the backstory you keep in your mind for your character will not leave any material trace not already attributed to her by the programmers unless you record it separately from the game?
In regards to the question of what does it mean to have all such property, I keep returning to the intangibility of video game property. It pleases one sense only -- sight. Well, I guess it provides sound and some minor tactile sensation as well. Video games ignore our actual bodies in the same ways computers do, and I begin to think my sister is on to something when the first thing she plans to teach her technology class is how to get up from the computer and stretch.
The physical conditions of computers and video games don't care how the hell we're shaped, how we feel physically, what we can do aside from sit and look and press buttons. They don't care which odors we find pleasant and unpleasant; a cheese you pick up may be called Stinky Blue Cheese, but you don't smell it. They don't care what our favorite foods are; nothing has any taste. The objects afforded your character in a video game don't support the attention to fine craftsmanship you might enjoy if you collected hand-tooled leather armor from a past era, or the piquant natural irregularities which you might seek out in gemstones. While the leisure objects of meatspace restore to us some of the sensations of which the workplace deprives us, the leisure objects of digital games are as flat, grey, and substanceless as an office cubicle.
I don't doubt that eventually this superficiality will be overcome. But think about what it will be like when it is. This feels like a slippery slope to the Matrix, with your head jacked into a mainframe which convincingly replicates the smell of mown grass or the physical sensation of tap dancing. Maybe this will be just fine. After all, what's the meaning of our lives in ordinary meatspace life? Entirely fabricated. Mostly socially constructed, and it's entirely possible to construct a meaningful life with others within the bounds of a MMORPG, as my depressive friends have already helped demonstrate.
What of the individual physical body? We've got to have enough to eat and shelter ourselves, pay for medical bills, get taxed so there'll be serviceable plumbing. It has been demonstrated that enough of a living to sustain a physical body can be earned by gold farming. The argument that "a person can't just waste his entire life on this, he's got to make a living" is not a means of proving that the abandonment of the physical self to the game self will never happen. Besides, at the moment many of us seem to be supporting our bodies through spending all our time in the equally ephemeral space of the Internet, anyway.
Is that all there is -- fully simulated sensory input, enough protection and nourishment to sustain the body, enough social interaction to pass? Fine, jack me in right now. I just have a couple more concerns.
Historically, we haven't done a great job of managing human sensation. We've managed the tastiness and attractiveness of food with alar, DDT, BHT, MSG, and red number five, and look where that got us. We tried to take away the pain of pregnancy with thalidomide, other pains with morphine. We tried to solve schizophrenia with electric shocks. Then there's been findings about the effects of exposure to natural light on depression.
And if you do farm enough to sustain yourself in world, what have you produced? Something which Blizzard owns, which the person you sell it to will never feel or smell or touch. Something unneccessary for survival. Something for entertainment and leisure. Either Marx's theory of alienation comes into play here, or Veblen's theory of the leisure class does; probably both. One way or another, video games serve to essentially recapitulate conditions of production, commodification, and conspicuous consumption those two men laid out for us.
Encourage my addictive, depressive friends to immerse their senses video games, and what good do we do them? I'm not even totally sure they're "entertained" anymore, and that's really the point of video games anyway. Maybe, in the same way that we've overstimulated ourselves to the point where we can't taste salt and can't tell when we're thirsty, we don't even know what's actually entertaining anymore. Maybe our incredible thirst for entertainment has been mostly manufactured, and what we really need is something else. Something which might feel a little like a need for entertainment, but is actually something else.
holy shit. I sound like Neil Motherfucking Postman.
I don't think I'm actually saying that video games are thoroughly evil and should be nipped in the bud before we all get Agent Smithed. I think we just need to think more about why we need to engage kids in schoolwork more, and whether video games and television are the solution to that particular problem. In terms of using media which are relevant to them elsewhere in their lives, I think it's a motherfucking travesty that schools have been so incredibly fucking slow to make use of other media, so yes, absolutely, bring video games into the classroom because they're another way of thinking and communicating. While you're at it, try not to ban them from using email while at school, huh? sheezus.
But using media because kids don't otherwise engage with school is a bandaid on a societal problem which goes way, way beyond high school graduation. For starters, school is completely divorced from the rest of life starting in about junior high (provided they are not on their way to a career in academics), and kids know it. Very little that they do past that point will ever be useful to them in their working lives. If you want kids to engage with school, make schools stop sucking so incredibly hard first.
Beyond that, one of the reasons school sucks so incredibly hard is that it's not preparing people to be happy, productive members of communities, it's preparing them to be commodities -- specifically, its segmented, highly supervised, routinized structure is still half-assedly preparing people to be commodity labor for industry, which isn't appropriate when most of the jobs available to our graduates are in a service economy. As commodities, they need to be measurable against simple standards and thoroughly uniform, without any rough edges which might cut away the profitable production process. The individual meanings students develop about the things they learn are ever more irrelevant. Moreover, their senses of themselves as members of the communities they live in, and their communities' senses of them are irrelevant. Packaging workers for mobility within the economy is key, as we're all expected to hold a number of jobs, possibly in different cities or even different states or countries, in the course of our lifetimes. Lack of engagement isn't peculiar to schools; ask any office worker on a Monday morning whether they feel engaged with their job.
I don't think we can solve the lack of engagement with entertainment. We need to make deeper changes to schools and other parts of our lives. We need to recognize that an overwhelming need for entertainment may be a proxy for needs for human contact and other enjoyable activities. Again, I'm not saying we should give up entertainment media completely. Obviously entertainment has always had its place. It was just more intimately connected to other activities -- weddings, harvests, town fairs, church socials, family lore, successful hunts, Saint Monday -- which used to be enjoyable, too.
* * *
My last morning in Sydney was full. Jon and I headed down to Bronte Beach for a local cafe, where the vegetarian version of Irish breakfast was superb. Homemade baked beans and way too much Turkish toast. We talked about his academic history, and my academic plans. Then we hit the beach one last time.
The surf was ferocious. I'm used to riding over or with waves, but with these it was impossible. The sand constantly gave out under my feet, leaving me scrambling to push off and get my head above the crests. Each one threw me back a good yard. My eyes got so salty they stung, and it got hard to see. Jon insisted again I needed to go under instead of over. He showed me how to duck, or dive and let the chaos stroke down your back. Again and again we went under, the surges tearing at our suits, surfacing sometimes just in time to be hit in the face by another wave, staggering around the sandbar in the fierce undertow.
We emerged with salt in our ears and eyelashes, muscles aching from the effort of resisting the pull out to sea. I sought out the changing rooms around which loitered old Australian men whose leathery bellies hung over their loose Speedos. And then it was off to the airport, with a good conversation about religion and a tour of Coogee on the way.
full, full, full.
Posted by me at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2006
Better In Print
Everything that's going on with me right now -- writing essays on virtual presence (forthcoming), staggering under a one-two punch of Lyotard and Bourdieu, founding stupid unrequited springtime crushes on out-of-date Friendster profiles, going days without speaking to anyone save over AIM -- seems to have been summed up and mocked by Cat and Girl.
or maybe it's just really late at night. jesus, even the pets are curled up and in deep REM.
I am so damn tired of being mediated.
Posted by me at 3:16 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2006
And what rough beast
its hour come round at last, slouches towards Xenu to be brainwashed?
Posted by me at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)
Invisible Imaginary Horses: VHR Diary Day 1
I finally got myself set up to play Virtual Horse Ranch. Not sure what the hold-up was; I think when I first tried it, the game did not appear to respond to my registration... I pressed "submit" and nothing much happened. Regardless, I finally got back to it, got it to work, and am setting myself up in my usual way for a game whose mechanic focuses mainly on money: spending as much as I possibly can, and regretting it on subsequent turns. (Hey, the costs of bankruptcy in virtual worlds don't usually include not eating or being thrown out on the street, so I figure why not live a little.)
VHR appears, according to perfunctory research, to be the best horse game the market has going. Which, sadly, does not say much: the game seems to play like a paper RPG, and has no graphics. I'm really, really not convinced this is the place to skimp when you're developing a horse game, but then maybe they're demonstrating they can build an audience before they go tilting at venture capital brass rings. May be the only way a person can get this funded.
Initially frustrated at the numbers-heavy interface and play, I've begun to warm to the game a little. First of all, you can link a picture from any website to represent your horse, rather cleverly mitigating the lack of graphics on the cheap. Of course, these images subsequently aren't used in your interface, which would have made it easier for me to quickly choose which horse's profile I'm clicking through to... boo.
But! The major thrill so far is the prodigious breed list. Far more detailed than Marguerite Henry's sentimental Album of Horses, the bible of my elementary school years, or even the more complete book by Elwyn Hartley Edwards,, it includes the gilded Russian Akhal-Teke, the near-extinct Przewalski's Horse, and a number of the oft-neglected Asian and African breeds, including the ban-ei, hequ, and Basotho.
As a kid, the breed names themselves -- and the beautiful pictures accompanying them in books -- were my playthings, bright and peculiar words formed in the mouths of horse people. Until fifth grade, even into junior high when I was reluctant to admit it, I kept a "stable" of imaginary horses. I summoned myself a few from each breed (except mustangs and Chincoteague ponies, which seemed inclined to spend time in groups, so I "kept" whole herds of them). I kept a little red spiral-bound notebook with their names and descriptions. I still have it. When my parents moved over the past few years and I found it again, I made sure to mail it to myself. It's one of those powerful totems you just want to have on you.
Building Storm Bell Stables on VHR has evoked those same old pleasures, with the added intrigue of not understanding the stats yet, hence not understanding who it is I'm getting at bargain-basement prices. So far I have four young mares and a stallion. Permit an old woman to bask foolishly in their particulars:
Linda Vom Nordstern, 2.5 y.o. Knabstrup Mare, "holiday rare" spotted coat, Jumping specialty
by Sire: *Forbidden Concept* || Dam: *SSS* Forbidden Concept
(Knabstrup are a Danish spotted breed. There's a picture of one at the Getty Museum which was my favorite work there, so this mare was my first purchase.)
Fluckras Crime, 1.2 y.o. American Warmblood Mare, minally-spotted leopard coat, Jumping specialty
by Sire: fluckra || Dam: Miz crime prime
(I don't know much about the breed, but I love the name and like people throughout the ages and around the world, I love a spotted horse.)
Teska, 4.5 y.o. Tersk Mare, red dilute coat, Driving specialty
by Sire: 13763 || Dam: Slammed Safe
(How sad that her sire only had a number, no name. I've just bred her to a descendant of Man O' War.)
Phanton Moon, 0.9 y.o. Kentucky Mountain Saddle Mare, roan coat, Racing specialty
by Sire: *SS* Phantom Fire || Dam: Leasury Moon
(She came to me overworked, and before I knew what I was doing I wore her into exhaustion with training. Filly needs time to recover.)
and the man of the house:
Sunny California Storm, 1 y.o. Standardbred Stallion, palomino with dorsal stripe, no specialty yet
by Sire: Wind~and~Flire || Dam: Hojmey
(Named in part for my favorite horse at the long-gone Eaton Canyon Stables. Standardbreds are harness-racing horses, but I used to ride a very gentle and responsive old SB mare named Kismo at Arroyo Seco Stables.)
I'll keep you updated on their development. Somehow I already love them more than any of my WoW avatars, though I can't even see them.
* * *
Ah, timely -- while poking around for a reference I just came across NPR piece on the "science" of naming Thoroughbred racehorses.
* * *
UPDATE -- Have also begun making perfunctory forays into NeoPets; here is the homepage for my first, a Xweetok named Alfopy. Apologies to Nick Adams-Wright for stealing the name he gave his first cat. It's just such a cool name.
Posted by me at 1:16 AM | Comments (1)
April 12, 2006
Free the E3 Two, mama!
The Global Gaming League has recruited some hapless 17-year-old to campaign for the return of booth babes.
I posted a comment which may or may not get approved by the moderator. It was really quite restrained, for me, mostly focusing on how "free speech" is a scummy excuse for objectification of women in advertising, and how booth babes indicate to other women that gaming is not really "their" space, reducing the population of women available for real, actual, non-implied s3x with male gamers. Also, that the exclusion of women from gaming has probably contributed significantly to Hillary Clinton's bad attitude about the medium.
I'm trying to formulate a different shorthand for "free" as in "advertising is free speech," something like the way the Free Software movement came up with "free as in speech versus free as in beer"... I think the connotation of "free" here implies some of the substance of "fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free, wheat-free..." free as in "lite" or free as in "freebie," something flimsy and useless people give you to convince you to give them your money.
Posted by me at 9:38 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2006
No Zantigen Eusa Com
Tis the season for procrastination, and to that end I have been reading and obsessing over Riddley Walker. A good piece of fiction when you've been thinking about the scientization of human feeling all semester. I went and looked up some sites and one of them that the same year Hoban saw the Canterbury St. Eustace, setting him on the path to writing the book, an artist was showing his own rendering of the event, which seems oddly akin to Riddley's understanding of Eusa.
Posted by me at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
Detritus: Notes on Pop Culture, Critical Theory, and Geeking Out
if (conformity=1, playfulness=1)
then subject="fan"
if (conformity=0, playfulness=1)
then subject="geek"
if (conformity=1, playfulness=0)
then subject="consumer"
if (conformity=0, playfulness=0)
then subject="activist"
What do you think, sirs?
I'm trying to come to a grand unified theory of geekdom. Having spent the semester marinating in the Frankfurt School and its descendants; recently made the acquaintance of someone doing his dissertation on the rationalization of fiction and the stigmatization of fantasy; heard from kids in my thesis research that fantasy games "are for nerds;" wrangled over the finer points with Jess and Austin; and just yesterday returned to literature on fan cultures on the hunch that someone was already saying what I wanted to say, I sketched out the pseudocode above. Still a work in progress.
* * *
Apropos of something else entirely, I had breakfast this morning with TC's math department and Seymour Papert, developer of the LOGO programming language, having seen a talk of Papert's last night. He has the most wry, amused-looking eyes I've ever looked into, and a gentle voice. He appeared prepared to have a bagel for breakfast, or maybe he already had; by the time I got to him, he was eating cream cheese off a plastic knife, the tip of it popping in and out of the mouth within his beard, like a child with one of those summer plastic tubs of ice cream and a tiny wooden spoon. I asked him what his take was on using video games in education, and he retorted that was rather like asking whether you should use books in education. Score one for our team.
He talked about learning from Paolo Freire. He told us how, as a child in South Africa, he lived for months at a research station with his father, who was an entomologist, and a number of Black Africans involved in the study of tsetse flies. As a result, he said, he didn't grow up accepting apartheid. He eventually fled the repressive police state of South Africa to study at Cambridge, only to find Cambridge was "the training ground for the British Empire," fleeing it in turn for Paris, where the convivial culture of academic backtalk seems to have been more to his liking.
He talked last night as well as this morning about how education is divorced from reality, how the solution to what he called the "math wars" could be the teaching of computational mathematics: it is more rigorous than the standards we're operating under now, and yet can also be more applied and fun. Showing us brief LOGO demonstrations, he demonstrated the construction of polygons, and claimed a second grader had once tried to argue with a circle he'd just had the turtle draw was actually a polygon with a lot of tiny little sides. Score another for the constructivist team; Papert is certain we can teach basic algebra and calculus as early as first grade if we maintain hands-on methods like these.
He talked more than once about the $100 computer initiative. He admonished us, as I assume he's admonished its developers, not to think of this computer on the computer industry's terms; it need not be fragile, nor massively networked, nor reliant on electricity, nor closed source. When I asked if he found it problematic that kids don't have as much access to the guts of a computer as the used to, he replied that so long as we don't teach the computer as a black box, kids still have the kinds of opportunities they used to back when we had to learn BASIC just to manage at the command line. But such an education "is almost illegal" today, he said; with standards taking up all of educators' time, and science standards not insisting that students understand computers, teachers can hardly take the time out to cover this topic.
Standardization of education doesn't get him down as much as it does me, though. In discussing educational theorists like Rousseau and Dewey, he referred to Leonardo's drawings of flying machines. Leonardo didn't have the technology to test if they worked, Papert said, but if he had, Papert was pretty confident he would have worked out the bugs. The implication, it seems to me, was that we've got the technology to test out constructivist educational theories now. The bug comes in the social, not the technological, setup of education, of course, but Papert remains an optimist, god luv'im. I described to him Neal Stephenson's Primer, and he wrote the name of the book down for future reference.
Posted by me at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2006
I wish there was more I could do
than say Michael S. Cox is a filthy, dirty, lying, cheating spammer... but I haven't had the time to file a lawsuit against the people responsible for the nearly 200 pieces of comment and trackback spam this blog receives daily. I know Hugo is having the same problem.
Whether a lawsuit would even accomplish anything is a big question -- I believe James told me it would be hard to pull off because a lot of these a$$holes are in other countries -- the one I tracked down was in Russia. Any ideas, gang?
Posted by me at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)
Miyazaki and Earthsea
D'everyone know that Studio Ghibli is doing a movie of one of the Wizard of Earthsea books? Just wanted to make sure nobody's missing out. Releasing in Japan this summer, which means we don't get it til later.
Posted by me at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 8, 2006
Molk!
You all know I don't like insidious ad campaigns, particularly when they come from industry promotional agencies telling you their product is healthy for you when it may not be, but the latest twist in the Got Milk? campaign is just too funny to pass up. If educational websites approached things with this kind of sense of humor, we might actually end up with an educated populace.
Posted by me at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)
From A Land Down Under
I went to Sydney, Australia over Spring Break. That is totally my hand and I am feeding a kangaroo in that picture. See the rest. GDC pix to follow, maybe six months from now, because that is apparently how I roll.
Posted by me at 2:13 AM | Comments (0)
Preliminary Oz Pix
Bakon's got some up over at her Flickr stream. I have not posted mine yet, you see. Have you any idea what my life has been like? Two conferences in a row. Nothing but pizza for lunch this week as I have collected data. I feel like I'm returning to the undergrad womb. I'm dyin', here.
Posted by me at 12:19 AM | Comments (0)
April 3, 2006
The Opposite of People: Narrative, Interactivity, Performance, Mediation
I just got done indulging myself and taking a little extra time doing my assignment for game design this week, which was an analysis of heralded narrative game Façade. (Too tired to fix cedilled C. Imagine it's there.) I then went back to look at an earlier analysis of Zork I did, and realized that even though I thought GDC had marked a huge revolution in my thinking, I was saying pretty much the same thing I was saying then. Nota bene, though, that where I was previously concerned only with the limitations put on the player, I've now flipped the script and have started thinking about the limitations on the game producer's side. Here are both analyses:
Also note: where my prose has been merely fucked up since I entered grad school, it has now been permanently destroyed after a semester reading 180+ pages of theory a week. Thank you, Frank and Robbie. I'm going to need to spend a summer reading Hunter S. and Steinbeck to detox.
anyway. Before GDC and a semester of class with B. and A., on Zork:
Good lord but this was a painful exercise -- took me back to some of the worst parts of a childhood marked by my younger sister beating me at every single video game. (DAMN YOU, Hitchhiker's Guide!)
Zork is, more palpably than some video games, like a sonnet; story expressed within a rigid structure. The story is written out by the designers; your travel must move along their established paths. The player can certainly develop intentions, but they must be communicated to the computer through very limited syntax. This conflicts with the rich description which appears to offer the player the kind of boundless opportunities you’d expect from a narrative. You might think you’d be able to respond to the storytellers in kind, and only your imagination would set the limitations. When I first played these games, I expected to be able to do anything I could write.
But the syntax proved to be limiting. Programmers who were among the first players of these games understood this automatically, knowing you could only communicate with computers in inflexible syntax. To non-technical players like Me-aged-eleven, however, it appeared perceivable consequence had been taken out behind the little white house and shot. Nothing I did seemed to have any effect. No matter what I did, something killed me. Meanwhile, the game kept telling me it didn’t understand what I was saying.
One intent my peers developed in our early encounter with these games was black-boxing the syntax until the game's responses made sense. For example, we might type a line of cuss-words in Spanish. In response to "chinga tu madre, computadora de mocos grandes," the line "That sentence isn't one I recognize" is more satisfyingly reasonable than when it responds to the line "go behind the house." Thinking of text-based games again like sonnets, this kind of player intent can be seen as parody: ignoring the content of the game and making light of the game's structure. Wall-walking and other sploits in WoW are of this intent’s lineage; they may be unintended behavior and make the game less fun for others, but they’re often highly entertaining to the players who figure them out and make use of them. I think more games should support this kind of play. The art of supporting a parodylike, black-boxing intent has been perfected by the easter egg masters over at homestarrunner.com in their text game Thy Dungeonman, where attempting to do unreasonable things -- and even entering bad syntax – yield more entertaining results than playing through the game straight.
When I type "go south" in instructions for another human, she has a sense that she should continue south regardless of obstacles. However, when I was north of the house and typed "go south" in Zork, it responded "The windows are all boarded," which makes no sense if I didn’t expect to walk through the house. The descriptions in the game don’t always make boundaries to movement obvious. You can sometimes see in directions you can’t walk, and walk in directions which can’t be reversed with the inverse of a command you used to get there.
Barring simple movement, which tends to be frustrating, the designers do make some space for perceivable consequence. The text is written in such a way as to cue the player to interact with salient parts of the environment. Your sword glows blue, for example, when the troll approaches; buttons are there to be pushed, items to be collected, paths to be taken. There are not too many extraneous details to confuse the player about what they should do next. When you perform actions, your environment is indelibly altered. In this sense the game’s perceivable consequence makes more sense than its descendant, the MMORPG, where if you take a sword you might not be able to pick it up again even if it respawns again while you watch.
More on player intents: the counter of the number of moves enables the player to plot an intent to beat the game in the lowest possible number of moves. The counter also allows for perceivable consequences related to the passage of time, a neat trick for a simple game relying on bits of description; for example, when I pressed the blue button, then dithered for a few moves in the maintenance room, the water I had allowed to rush into the room rose turn by turn and eventually drowned me.
Another player intent could include managing inventory efficiently, which is puzzle-like – you want to be sure you have the right thing on you at the right time, but you have limited space in your inventory. However, consequences here are frustratingly imperceptible. Your inventory size is clearly gauged by weight – the game refers to how you can’t carry more things because you’re already burdened with a heavy load -- but it’s not immediately clear how much items weigh. Thus the player has to tinker with dropping and picking up items until they have a balance of items they need.
To some extent, the muddiness of perceivable consequence supports the storyline. This quest really is a challenge, and an exploration; you need to think hard about what you take with you, keep track of where you’ve been, and be resourceful with your items. However, the barriers to formulating intent and the confusion of perceivable consequence also detract from the story. If I really am a resourceful, questing hero, it should be a piece of cake for me to climb over those fallen trees, right? If this really is a fantasy land bounded by my imagination, why can’t I imagine that I’ve kicked in the door to the locked house? Not to say that we’ve solved these problems since Zork…
* * *
After GDC and a semester of class with B. and A., on Façade:
“We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!” –Player, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead
The idea of an “interactive” story is problematic when seen from a cognitive perspective. Cognitive science does not view reading, viewing, and other forms of audienceship as passive. All of them are interactive; you process stimuli, connect your understanding of the current text to your prior experiences, and formulate responses and hypotheses, even if you never voice them.
As for stories, there’s a line of thought in cognitive science which says human thought is narrative, I believe because we use language. Speech is linear, so anything we remember and subsequently relate through verbal media is going to be played out over time, as narrative. Gameplay would be included. Unlike many games where play leaves no narrative trace unless you retell your play to someone else, Façade actually produces a narrative artifact for you in the form of a script. It thus further focuses our attention on our narrative tendencies, and its narrative aspirations.
The script added to my feeling that what I was doing was neither playing a video game nor participating in an interactive story (even ignoring cognitive hair-splitting, I still don’t think I’ve ever seen an example of an “interactive story,” so I wouldn’t know one if I saw it), but rather acting my way through a Eugene Ionesco play in a dream. Unlike meatspace D&D role-playing games, where worlds and abilities are defined, the characters in Façade have set lines – except the player, of course. When I interrupted Trip or Grace by hitting return a second too late, the story became one of misunderstanding, of talking past one another. They frequently misinterpreted things I said, reducing complex sentences to something that felt like a couple of sliders on the game’s circuit board (communication, agreement, happiness, ?). Ionesco meant to evoke the alienation of modern society by writing miscommunications like this. Not sure if Mateas and Stern intended a similar effect, but it’s what they got.
The narrative takes on a slightly different cast when played through a few times in succession. Unlike platformers, FPSes, and others where replay is a musical, dancing experience without words or conscious attention to narrative – characters popping up at their orchestrated times, your avatar making her way through intricate footwork, a rhythm ultimately perfectable when practiced – you begin to feel you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, or perhaps Rosencranz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play. The effect is not like a script, but like a script gone wrong. Though the order differs, Trip and Grace say the same things over and over. Very little that you say or do matters. They’re going to make it through their argument one way or another. On realizing this, I made like Bill Murray in the third or fourth iteration of his day and started to sabotage things, to game the system. This is not a reader’s impulse, but rather that of a heckler watching a particularly awkward standup comic.
In sum, then, I think Façade is more of a surrealist performance piece than a story or a video game -- but then, weren’t stories originally performed unmediated? Ernest Adams said at GDC that the game designer and the player both spend from a “credibility budget.” When a player’s first line to Trip at the door is “Help me, I’ve been shot,” she’s blown all the budget at once and, Adams says, “lost the designer.” The problem with these imitations of emotion, conversation, and other human interactions is that the designer’s participation is tightly mediated and temporally curtailed, thus more quickly and thoroughly lost than he would be in conversation or performance. A warm body in the designer’s chair, acting in real time, would be able to keep up the fiction. When it becomes clear there is only a Turing machine, a voice-messaging system, in that chair, the player’s role must perforce be to turn hacker and pwn the box by whatever means necessary.
Posted by me at 3:29 AM | Comments (0)