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August 29, 2006

Grand Theft Moral Purpose: Fear and Lovey-Googly-Eyes in Harper's

... grand theft yadda yadda... dance dance doodlydoo... pac manhammina... and other pointless game-title-memes we should abandon... the biff! pow! sock! phenomenon... one of these days it'll be an art form that nobody bats an eye at anymore. like film. you've heard of "film," right? full disclosure, I saw one of those once. sheesh ;)

The Harper's Magazine back-to-schoolmarmishness issue this year consists of a panel discussion on video games, literacy, and education... and guess who doesn't appear in the discussion at all. Despite this oversight, the article has sparked some very lively blog interlinkage among various people whose opinions I respect, among them Raph Koster and my classmate Ulises Mejias. The following is my response to the article, and to comments that appear on Ulises's site.

OK, now I've read the Harper's piece. A few more off-the-cuff thoughts, which will probably be refined into a letter to the editor and sent in:

They did a piece on games and literacies, didn't invite Jim Gee, and THAT'S what they gave us instead?! Very, very, very disappointing. I haven't ever felt this shortchanged by Harper's before; usually if they say something I disagree with, it's still a useful exercise to go through the argument being made. Not only did I disagree with a lot of what was said (could someone PLEASE take Steven Johnson off the speaking circuit now?! Why is he considered an expert on video games, or for that matter human cognition? And why didn't Wasik encourage de Zengotita to speak up more?), I felt like the treatment of the idea of "literacy" was extremely superficial for Harper's. Almost modernist, to boot.

Of course, I'm having a hard time divorcing my reaction from my wounded dignity as a researcher... the entire field of "new literacies," in which my colleagues and I have been toiling, has been ignored. There was no mention of this tradition, which is rich in anthropological and social understandings of how people use "texts" to form their identities and societies. This makes for a very different, far more than functional understanding of what "literacy" is, and helps us approach digital, visual, and structural texts in addition to print. Gee's book comes out of this field; he's primarily a linguist. While Gee's book has its flaws -- it's speculative, for one thing, more of a research plan for games and literacies than a summary of findings -- he really is the person Wasik should have gotten to fill the fourth chair, not Johnson, who is a journalist and dabbler in "brain chemistry" models of human understanding. (And knowing that de Zengotita is a thinking partner of Frank Moretti's, I wish he'd had a chance to go head to head with Johnson on that aspect. I'd pay good money for ringside seats to that fight.) I'm guessing this roundtable was formed out of convenience, though -- Koster and Johnson were in town for the Games for Change conference a few months ago, and I'd bet it happened then.

If anything I guess it's a sobering reminder that we as academics really are doing far too little to get our research recognized. Gee's book was all anyone was talking about in my circle when it came out, but its reach was limited to educators. I'm really not surprised if the folks at Harper's have never heard of it, but it's a crying shame. I mean, it's hard enough to get new literacies recognized by the No Child Left Behind set... the last thing we need to do is be uncommunicative enough that even potential sympathizers have no bloody clue what we're up to.

(deep breath)

Ooooookeyyyy. What else...

I want to say to Raph that I wish Wasik had given you more of a chance to riff with de Zengotita. He appears to have influences as broad as yours; I believe he holds the title Senior Educational Curmudgeon at the magazine. I was impressed by your talk at Games For Change, Raph, and I'd really like to see what you have to say about games and education when challenged by people who are a better match for the diversity of your experiences.

Also, I wish the magazine hadn't picked a scenario which was so softball and so gee-whiz. Games to teach grammar and plot? Harper's chose THAT as the jumping-off point? I mean, I know they tend to get schoolmarmish in their annual September issue, but come on -- is that really the center of our concern about education? How about games to teach people how to pick apart White House flak and advertising hooey? Games to understand ecosystem balances? Games to gain a finer understanding of multiculturalism? Games to heal the isolation, cruelty, and malnourishment seeded in human souls by the culture of global capitalism?

I don't believe the latter is possible, actually. I agree with de Zengotita about the importance of mystery, and with Raph's assessment that "gamist" thinking risks losing sight of human ineffables. In my view this is the most critical issue when we consider the quality of a life which is more and more caught up in the binaries of machines.

So I was disappointed when Wasik didn't pick up on this thread and run with it. I talked to him at a reading some years ago, and he told me Harper's mission was to be "perverse," which I have come to feel applies to its take on the culture of capitalism. So it seemed a surprisingly tame digression from the magazine's editorial vision when he went back to the topic of narrative structure.

Back to Ulises's questions:

Why aren't people taking advantage of the new technology's affordances for original creation? Hmmm. Could it be because the genre is spreading through them like they were... a mass?

Ulises, would you really argue that the only way cultural ideas spread is through massification? Are we going back to those classical Greek arguments about written language which Frank had us pound through, and agreeing that point in history is where massification began? Because otherwise, it appears there are other possible reasons for cultural ideas to spread. Could it be because human beings are SOCIAL, and interpersonal communication requires some measure of standardization -- even if it arises organically -- to function?

ok, 'nuff said. Oh, in closing -- I notice they actually *did* mention Typing of the Dead, and at some point the panelists who hadn't played the game seemed to lose track of the fact that it is played with a keyboard, not a gun. The EGGPLANT Lab has a copy of the game, by the way, including the Dreamcast keyboards to play it with. I highly recommend everyone come down and try it! It's a hoot.

Posted by me at 11:25 PM | Comments (1)

August 20, 2006

More Adventures on the Internets

For those of you who often find yourselves wondering how the hell it is that people make their way around the Internet without ever reading their search results, I suggest you go to AOL's database of search results from specific users which it recently put up online, and search for number 711391. It's a magnificent case study in how some people use search engines. What I want to know is how and why they come to use them this way; I know my own use of search strings is significantly different. (For one thing, I don't feed search engines my cries for help, or even questions worded as such.)

I've been in the Google offices and seen their scrolling wall of real-time search terms, and I can tell you these are more or less par for the course. The amazing thing is seeing one person's searches play themselves out over time. As Bakon says:

I can't even explain how overwhelming it is--it's an incredibly heartbreaking and bizarre blend of vanity, "Christian" values, insecurity, sexual manipulation, and something akin to a descent into madness. It's like Dostoevsky meets the world wide internets, except worse, because you know it's all true.

Thanks to Bakon for pointing this particular thread out.

Posted by me at 2:40 PM | Comments (2)

August 17, 2006

OMG PONIES!

The current ad up on both sides of the phone booth across the street from Teachers College is for the Nintendo DS Lite. It features a woman of color, against a white background, joyfully holding her stylus at the ready over the little console's touch screen as crayon-colored 3D characters from Super Mario Brothers fountain forth from it. Lighter, it says. Brighter.

On my way home in the dark last night I was struck by the promise of this ad in a way I would never have been before yesterday. Its brightness held me, and I found myself smiling, thinking kind of stupidly, That could be mine.

At exactly that moment I nearly ran into a girl of about nine years old who was crossing the other direction, holding her mother's hand. Long-haired, blue eyed, she looked up at me, and as if she were confident she knew me, said, "Hello."

"Hi," I said back to her. And I thought, Dude. Totally. Yes.

yeah. so if you want to know what I'm being all cryptic about, you're going to have to check back in in a couple of months. watch this space.

* * *

In mostly unrelated news, you know you've been working too hard when... for some reason I dreamed last night that my grandma -- the no nonsense one -- was offering to drive me and a group of colleagues, including Ian Bogost, for a night out on the town (town being either Old Town Pasadena or the San Antonio Riverwalk, not quite sure). They were all being altogether too rowdy for her taste -- she has to focus when driving! -- and Ian was being the rowdiest, I'm not sure why, even though the rest of the group may have been the hackers I went out with a few weeks ago. Ian's presence in my dream doubtless has to do with the fact that I'm reviewing his new book for the TC Record. If you've met Ian or heard him speak, you end up with the uncanny feeling after reading a few chapters that you've actually been hearing him talk about all these ideas -- it's one of those rare academic books in which the author's voice seems to come through. Strong authorial presence translates to shouting in grandma's car in dreams? who the hell knows.

So there he was, and somehow by the end of the evening everything ended up in the narrated third person and all of us were running through an office building trying to escape some shadowy Yakuza types.

Posted by me at 2:58 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

William Shatner Is Creepy

Could someone please explain to me why All The Words In Posts On William Shatner's Blog Have Initial Caps? Weird enough to read about the man boast about selling a kidney stone for $75,000, but to read it with the first letter of every word in every post capitalized is really kind of upsetting, in a visceral way. Posts and comments both. The only explanation I can muster is that it must have something to do with his signature stilted acting style.

Posted by me at 12:54 AM | Comments (1)

August 7, 2006

Ender's Brain: Science Fiction Models of Intelligence

"It's an ongoing experiment," [Ronald Hoeflin, a "severely gifted" man cited in the Voice this past week] says. "It has a certain science fiction quality -- what is the maximum boundary of the human brain?"

I started reading Ender's Game Saturday. Along with The Diamond Age, it's got me thinking about models of intelligence, particularly in science fiction.

I'm not an expert on sci fi, by any means; I have a passing acquaintance (as well as the card from my Official Star Trek Fan Club membership, circa 1990). Normally the sci-fi I gravitate towards is heavy on world-building, with elaborate description of social norms and cultures. I had an argument with a Battlestar Galactica fan about this orientation a while ago; he finds Star Trek too much like watching C-SPAN, and prefers the simple engineering problems of his own show -- how do you survive when you're way out in space with no water, for example.

Models of intelligence in science fiction are probably a subset of my subgenre, but as I've gotten thinking about it it seems to me that they are rarely central to the futurism. They're mostly taken for granted. So far (and I emphasize again I haven't finished it), Ender's Game seems to take intelligence as a preset guideline for the story.

The book follows a six-year-old boy who has been singled out by the leaders of his future world -- indeed, bred at their behest, in a world where most people are only allowed two children, and he is his parents' third -- as the possible salvation of his society because of his gifts. The book so far has followed Ender as adults secretly manipulate him to improve his skills, other children beat the crap out of him, and he is steadily alienated from "normal" childhood by his incredible braininess and the situations it gets him into.

It seems to me that this "genius-child" theme is a persistent one in science fiction. I can't come up with too many other examples right now; one might be the lesser-known book The Shockwave Rider; perhaps Wesley Crusher would be another? These books center on a protagonist who, by dint of breeding or genetic makeup, has superhuman powers of intelligence. What he does with his brain is important to the plot, but by beginning with an assumption that he was born this way, these books proceed on an "entity model" of intelligence, as I hear it called at Teachers College. In other words, smart is mostly who you are, not what you do.

And their brilliance is a burden, these books make it clear. So prodigious, in fact, and so quick to attract others' scorn -- despite the protagonists' obvious righteousness! -- that one begins to wonder whether this archetype is yet another incarnation of Mary Sue. I may raise hackles by saying that; let me say I agree with that link's author when she counters that "sometimes, believe it or not, the best [Mary Sues] can wind up being lauded as legitimate characters and gathering fans beyond their original scope."

It seems reasonable to expect this kind of response among the second and third and subsequent generations of science fiction writers, who spent their childhoods imagining themselves in the spaceboots of sci-fi heros and heroines. (This is perhaps even the mechanism by which science fiction replicates itself for survival: providing ever more homey and welcoming situations, however farfetched, for those of us who are smart and sensitive and alienated, and grow up to write them ourselves.) The entity model of intelligence is of a kind with IQ tests' judgment of intelligence, and IQ tests are marked by the scientific positivism from which early science fiction arises.

A different model of intelligence in science fiction can be found in Alfred Bester's book The Stars My Destination; let's call this the Eliza Doolittle model, or maybe the Horatio Alger model. Bester's protagonist begins as a convict locked away on a ship in the unreachable bowels of space, barely verbal, but motivated by revenge to better his situation. He gradually flowers into a more thoughtful individual, who, once again, develops superhuman powers of the mind. OK, I'll grant you most of Bester's portrayal of Gully Foyle is about his instinct or human will, but as the endpoint of this seems to lie in Foyle's becoming a more "civilized" or rational person, the book seems to move towards intelligence, at least as we know it.

At first glance, The Diamond Age's heroine, Nell, seems also to be little more than an Eliza Doolittle stand-in, with author Neal Stephenson standing in for Henry Higgins to civilize her. This was the point made to me by Michael Hart, head of Project Gutenberg, as we lounged around a hotel room the other day in truly extraordinary company after a day at the hacker conference. It was me, Hart -- who was bearded, wearing a Panama hat, spandex bike shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, and is not a lithe man -- and two of the only people of color at the conference, Dominican brothers from the Bronx who worked day jobs in network administration. None of us had met each other before that day, and the meeting was impromptu; I never figured out how Hart met these guys. He'd buttonholed me into the conversation as I passed by saying "We were just talking about the Primer!" That's a book which features prominently in The Diamond Age; he'd brought it up in his keynote address earlier, and I'd challenged him to do more with it afterwards. It turned out the brothers from the Bronx had never even heard of the book, so Hart apparently grabbed me out of the crowd for the hell of it.

Anyway, his POINT, the man had a point, some of us have points sometimes -- Mr. Hart was at pains to highlight where The Diamond Age begins. It begins with Bud, he insisted. It begins with Nell's father, who's a punk and a petty crook and who meets an untimely end. Hart's point was this transformation. Bud is where Nell starts, essentially in the gutter, with no resources and no safety and ultimately no shelter to protect her. And like an Alger hero, Nell rises through the ranks to become -- again -- society's salvation. It's a very heartwarming story, when you look at it that way. The tool which helps cultivate her capabilities is the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an artificially-intelligent digital book which teaches her everything she needs to know.

But despite the clear Alger overtones of her trajectory, Nell's story is not so simple. And this, as it turns out, is what attracted one of my favorite professors, Frank Moretti, to The Diamond Age. What he likes about it, he told me the other day, is that it's about the nonlinearity of a single person's educational path, all the parts which come together to make her a great leader. He likens the book to Rousseau's Emile, and has even taught it in class a couple of times.

And Stephenson is explicit that it's Nell's path that makes her so brilliant, not just the book. The Primer's creators come together to discuss why Nell is such a deep-thinking and resilient person compared to two other girls who received a copy of the book. They note the diversity of experiences Nell has had outside of her work with the book -- something the other girls, cosseted away in a neo-Victorian setting -- never got, and also the devotion of a woman who has been helping Nell learn through the book throughout her life.

It is this central theme which I think makes The Diamond Age an unusual book among other science fiction; no other sci-fi book I've read so far -- of course I'm happy to be corrected, and I suspect Ender's Game will do so shortly -- takes such a clear (and actually, realistic) stand on the nature of intelligence, and makes it such a central part of the plot.

Posted by me at 12:21 AM | Comments (15)