Here is his take on Thucydides claim that the ship sent to revoke a hastily sent command to punish the men of Mytilene averaged 7 knots an hour for 24 hours:
While it's possible that ancient oarsmen were super-rowers, isn't it at least as plausible that our data about ancient feats is suspect? If history is written by the victors, sports history is written by the over-testostoroned victors.
Then I came across this statement in Robert Fripp's online diary:
"We are looking at a royalty statement for an album I produced some years ago that now includes download income. The record company receives 67 US cents per track; I receive 2 cents per track as producer.
In the days of vinyl, the company used to receive c. 24% of the wholesale, and perhaps the artist received 40-50% of that 24% ... So, the ratio of record company: artist earnings was nominally a proportion of perhaps 1:1 (ish),and post-deductions maybe 2:1.
For downloads, the ratio is now 67:12; or around 5- or 6:1.
This is the new model of digital music provision? "
In the days of vinyl, the company used to receive c. 24% of the wholesale, and perhaps the artist received 40-50% of that 24% ... So, the ratio of record company: artist earnings was nominally a proportion of perhaps 1:1 (ish),and post-deductions maybe 2:1.
For downloads, the ratio is now 67:12; or around 5- or 6:1.
This is the new model of digital music provision? "
David Byrne was right: musicians should find ways to make the live event the source of income. The digital download world can be an even greater scam than the world of plastic and tape. Perhaps not much has changed since Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music."
"Those living in the instability of a democracy have the constant image of chance before them, and, in the end, they come to like all those projects in which chance plays a part, not only because of the promise of profit but because they like the emotions involved."
Biggest lesson learned so far:
Young Adult Fiction has developed far more sophisticated narrative tricks than the kind I grew up with.
Pete Hautman's All-In is structured like a YA Pulp Fiction. We begin with a set-piece: teen gambler Denn, possessed of a preternatural ability to read other players' "tells," is being slaughtered at a medium stakes table. He is reading the others' tells but still keeps losing hands. The scene is being viewed by a veteran gambler named "Jimbo" and is narrated from his PoV. The book switches between this 1st person narration, the 1st person narration of Cattie (the girl dealing at Denn's flame-out) and 3rd person narration centred around Denn's consciousness but not narrated by his voice. In the shuffling between narrators the reasons for Denn's defeat are revealed. An much-older rival from Denn's home town has connived with Cattie to get revenge on the teen for beating him in a big Texas Hold 'Em match about a year before the action opens.
Chronolgy, cause-effect, motivation all have to be pieced together from the partial perspectives.
And the book refuses the typical "drive towards payback" common in gambler narratives. Denn has to learn a few things about the game and himself before the rematch with his old foe. In most sport or gambling movies this rematch would be preceded by a training-sequence montage and "Eye of the Tiger" music. The big rematch provides an open-ended conclusion to the book and does not provide a formulaic resolution of previous tensions in the narrative. Denn does not develop a real romance with Cattie, whereas one might have expected her "redemption" for her past deeds to come about as a result of either the gaming skill or personal charm of the gambling protagonist.
In the final Texas Hold 'Em game, Denn stake is whittled down to almost nothing. He is in a situation where he must win "seven times in a row just to build his stack high enough to cover the blinds" [compulsory bets in Hold 'Em] (173). But Denn's disappears from the novel with his decision to go "All-in" (174). The Epilogue -- told from Jimbo's PoV -- suggests that what happened to Denm at the tournament was a "bad beat" story, a situation where (according the novel's handy Glossary) "a strong hand loses to a longshot draw" (179). Does that designate a hand that broke Denn? Was Denn's play subsequent to his decision to go all-in a longshot victory over the strong hand held by Artie?
An ending more reminiscent of The Sopranos' "Don't Stop Believing" coda than the moralizing that concluded my young adulthood's novels.
Hautman, Pete. All-In. New York: Simon & Schuster Children's, 2007. [sequel to No Limit, a.k.a. Stone Cold]
- Location:home office
- Mood:
uncomfortable - Music:Chinese Dub
This is a snippet from the works of Eugene F. Ware, a political figure and popular poet from turn-of-the-century Kansas and part of the Progressive movement. Remarkable how themes from Darwin, Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer were, at one time, the common currency of a public sphere. I wonder how much play they would get in contemporary Kansas. (better ask Thomas Frank about that)
Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources
The cards are shuffled and the hands are dealt
Blind are our efforts to control the forces
That though unseen, are no less strongly felt.
( From a chapter about Clarence Darrow in J. Anthony Lukas' Big Trouble: a Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (305))
- Location:home office
- Mood:
hot - Music:baby snoring
That will change, soon.
- Mood:
embarrassed
There is some evidence that the former may be true but, most disappointingly for those who want to reach unmotivated or low-performing students, the later might not be the case.
The authors of this paper discovered that an economics game did result in superior retention of concepts for those students who were already doing well but LOWERED the performance of those students who were not.
Mean quiz scores were not higher in the sections in which the game was played than in the other sections. The most striking effect of participation in the game was to increase the performance of stronger students while decreasing the performance of other students.
Something for all educators to remember: the average results were no different between those sections of the class that played the game and those that did not. But that does not mean that the mode of instruction had no effect. It created a bi-modal distribution -- high performers clustered too closely together at one end and weaker performers at the other. Woe to the educator who looks at mean results to understand what is happening in the classroom.(This article was pointed out by the fine folks at Games Economists play)
http://about-creativity.com/
http://cecilvortex.com
Anyone who does a 3 PART interview with one of my favourite guitarists is funktastic in my book.
* Michel Foucault's Heterotopias are (more complexly) "real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted."
So what is an atopia?
It's a coinage by ludic theorist McKenzie Wark, to be found is his GAM3R 7H3ORY, an internet book hosted by The Institute for the Future of the Book.
It is a tricky notion that builds on the two preceding terms.
Wark propses thinking of Roger Caillois' treatment of the social function of games as heterotopic:
Post-war play theorist Roger Caillois’ answer to the Nazis was agon mixed with alea — games of chance and competition — each in its proper place and time alongside but not above everyday life. They would take place outside of the uncertainties of mundane time and space, in special zones where consistent rules apply. Such spaces are ‘heterotopias’.
Art with a ludic dimension -- the intellectual games of conceptualists, the provocations of Dada -- was similarly heterotopic. But if Frederic Jameson, Peter Burger, and Raymond Williams are correct, the revolutionary breakthrough of art into life could never really take place once media production hypertrophied with the expansion of the culture industry. Wark has his own take on this phenomenon:
Art tried again and again to break out of its heterotopia. Not only was it no match for the game, it ends up playing a subordinate role within the expansion of the game beyond a mere heterotopia. Art provides the images and stories for mediating between the gamer and gamespace. Rather than actual games played in actual arenas, art expands the reach of the game to imaginary games played in a purely digital realm, anywhere and everywhere, an atopia of gamespace.
The culture industry and its recent outgrowth, the gaming industry, have a role for what used to be the craft of making images. That craft plays a functional role in making effective gamespaces. To be in atopia means to be a game that is everywhere at the same time but in to place, to participate in a virtual world that is present in a myriad of destops and servers and handhelds.
I can't wait to read Wark's print version.
- Location:home office
- Music:Bruckner
(note: this military board game does not include a "cemetery" square)Most of these are culled from the British Museum's database of prints.
Other standouts include a "Manga" game illustrating the life-choices of Japanese women circa 1930, and everyone's favourite pastime "Pluck the Owl."
The author concludes with a quotation from Goodfellow's "The Development of the English Board Game, 1770 - 1850." Which I should have read a while back.
The prints bear up Goodfellow's division of boardgames into 4 types:
"There are only a few basic methods of playing [board] games and over the past 250 years many thousands of variations have been created. The basic methods of play come down to four types – race games, strategy games, table games and card games. Many were originally developed for adults and were later adapted for children. [..]
The Game of Goose is generally regarded as the prototype of the modern race game. Devised in Italy and taken from much early formats of games played in the Middle and Far East, it was first noted in England by John Wolfe in 1597 as “the Newe and Most Pleasant Game of the Goose”. [..]
Many of the first publishers of games were in fact cartographers and they quickly included the race game idea into game of Geography. The spiral format was not used; it was replaced by a map – of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland (collectively or individually), of Europe or of the world."
So a "race" is transposed on maps of territory. The board is a microcosm of the territory to be visited or conquered. Just look at all the examples posted by BibliOdyssey -- journeys of trade and conquest are common. The problem is that the "strategy" game is little more than randomized dice rolling to gain victory. There seem to be no games that adopt chess or even checkers as models for other kinds of conflict. The Prussians developed "Kriegspiel" to teach modern tactics but none of the games in this blog or in the article seem to follow this lead. And "wargaming" itself has never been much of a mainstream hobby, although the invention of successful games like "Risk," "Stratego," and "Axis and Allies" represent a strand of really "strategic" gaming that appears particular to the 20th century, the century of game theory and global conflict.The Game of Goose is generally regarded as the prototype of the modern race game. Devised in Italy and taken from much early formats of games played in the Middle and Far East, it was first noted in England by John Wolfe in 1597 as “the Newe and Most Pleasant Game of the Goose”. [..]
Many of the first publishers of games were in fact cartographers and they quickly included the race game idea into game of Geography. The spiral format was not used; it was replaced by a map – of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland (collectively or individually), of Europe or of the world."
- Location:home
- Music:baby going "bbbrrrttttt"
As improvisation is common in theatre as a rehearsal technique, performance mode, training strategy I had thought loosely about the relationship between the two.
His "Towards and Ethic of Improvisation" (1971) contains some directions towards the development of "virtues" which might be of use to performers.
The Score as Dissociative Discipline
* There are advantages to following a score. Like extreme repetition, a simple score can take a performer beyond his/her limits and self-definitions
" Once in conversation I mentioned that scores like those of LaMonte Young (for example "Draw a straight line and follow it") could in their inflexibility take you outside yourself, stretch you to an extent that could not occur spontaneously. To this the guitarist replied that 'you get legs dangling down there and arms floating around, so many fingers and one head' and that that was a very strict composition. And that is true: not only can the natural environment carry you beyond your own limitations, but the realization of your own body as part of that environment is an even stronger dissociative factor. Thus is it that the natural environment is itself giving birth to something, which you then carry as a burden; you are the medium of the music. At this point your moral responsibility becomes hard to define."
* The sticky point is when you undertake this discipline, under what conditions do you enter it with others, etc.
This point naturally flows into Cardew's next subheading "Music is Erotic."
The "virtues" are
1. Simplicity Where everything becomes simple is the most desirable place to be. But, like Wittgenstein and his 'harmless contradiction', you have to remember how you got there. The simplicity must contain the memory of how hard it was to achieve.
2. Integrity What we do in the actual event is important -not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind.
3. Selflessness To do something constructive you have to look beyond yourself. The entire world is your sphere if your vision can encompass it. Self-expression lapses too easily into mere documentation -'I record that this is how I feel'. You should not be concerned with yourself beyond arranging a mode of life that makes it possible to remain on the line, balanced.
4. Forbearance Improvising in a group you have to accept not only the frailties of your fellow musicians, but also your own. Overcoming your instinctual revulsion against whatever is out of tune (in the broadest sense).
5. Preparedness for no matter what eventuality (Cage's phrase) or simply Awakeness. I can best illustrate this with a special case of clairvoyant prediction ... Of course there is an immense difference between simply being aware that something might or might not occur, and a clairvoyant conviction that it will or won't occur. No practical difference but a great difference in feeling. A great intensity in your anticipation of this or that outcome. So it is with improvisation.
6. Identification with nature Drifting through life: being driven through life; neither constitutes a true identification with nature. The best is to lead your life, and the same applies in improvising: like a yachtsman to utilise the interplay of natural forces and currents to steer a course.
My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world (rather as Shelley does in Prometheus Unbound).
7. Acceptance of Death From a certain point of view improvisation is the highest mode of musical activity, for it is based on the acceptance of music's fatal weakness and essential and most beautiful characteristic -its transcience.
The desire always to be right is an ignoble taskmaster, as is the desire for immortality. The performance of any vital action brings us closer to death; if it didn't it would lack vitality. Life is a force to be used and if necessary used up. "Death is the virtue in us going to its destination" (Lieh Tzu).
It seems as if both Cardew and Brecht -- in their rejection of the ego, a belief in a flow of the world and events to which one must be in tune, and an acceptance of death -- manage to find the Tao through Marx, or bring the Tao into Marxism.
But Cardew's attempt at cosmological musical Maoism goes beyond Brecht's attempts to revise the apparatus of production, or even the learning pieces, where performers and audience are one. In neither case is improvisation admitted to any appreciable extent.
Cardew's work of the mid-sixties where, in the words of James Weeks,
"Cardew's subtle prescriptions of games, rules and rites were intended primarily to stimulate the participants to collective- and self-discipline within a liberated musical environment"
would be of particular interest to me where the Cardew of "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism" would not.
From William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life
"Every maniac in the world that ever brought about the murder of people through war started out in an attic or a basement writing poetry. It stank. So they got even by becoming important heels. And it's still going on ... Right now on Telegraph Hill is some punk who is trying to be Shakespeare. Ten years from now he'll be a senator. Or a communist ... Language is all right. It's the people who use language that are lousy."
From Erasmus' Praise of Folly
[I]f you consult historians, you'll find no princes more pestilent to the commonwealth than where the empire has fallen to some smatterer in philosophy or one given to letters. To the truth of which I think the Catoes give sufficient credit; of whom the one was ever disturbing the peace of the commonwealth with his hair-brained accusations; the other, while he too wisely vindicated its liberty, quite overthrew it. Add to this the Bruti, Casii, nay Cicero himself, that was no less pernicious to the commonwealth of Rome than was Demosthenes to that of Athens. Besides M. Antoninus (that I may give you one instance that there was once one good emperor; for with much ado I can make it out) was become burdensome and hated of his subjects upon no other score but that he was so great a philosopher.
And now to grading examinations.
Are there any missing?
Now that's a reading list!
THEORY
Background reading for people interested in what games are and what they do.
Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
DESIGN PRACTICE
Practical considerations of designing games for sale.
Fundamentals of Game Design, by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings
21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon
Gender-Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray
A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, by Chris Crawford
Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky
WRITING
Writing for games, which is very different from writing for presentational media.
Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris Bateman
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Creating entertainment, interaction, and comprehension visually.
Creating the Art of the Game, by Matthew Omernick
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information, all by Edward Tufte
Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, by Mark Stephen Meadows
MUSIC AND AUDIO
Sound in video games.
The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, by George Alastair 'The Fat Man' Sanger
SOCIOLOGY
Video games as cultural phenomena.
Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin
PEOPLE, PROJECTS AND BUSINESSES
Surprisingly little is available on project management for videogame developers, and still less on how developers and publishers function as businesses. These are a few
relevant works that I could find.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
Postmortems from Game Developer, edited by Austin Grossman
Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material by Andy Eddy
Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console by Dean Takahashi
OTHER MEDIA AND USEFUL DISCIPLINES
Creativity in other spheres that we can learn from.
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee
A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
DEEP BACKGROUND
Only for the truly dedicated students of our medium. Most of these works were written before videogames were even invented.
Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
INSPIRATIONS
This last category includes books that aren’t about games, for the most part. Instead, these are works that have inspired us and whose influence can be felt in many games.
They have helped to make the game industry what it is today – for good and, sometimes, for ill as well.
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
how did the world survive without me?
Aside from a few interesting comments in the footnotes there is little consideration of the use of violence for anti-imperial or insurgent ends. Or broader considerations on political violence as such. Reference to Paul Virilio could have linked the integration of military technologies in first-person shooters to broader trends in the application of military technologies of perception, speed, and destruction.
Sure, the political and social contexts of game playing must be concerned when critiquing or proposing practical action. But the practices, mores, and ethics that grow up around game playing are what they are and can be addressed pragmatically. There is a "spate" of youth school shootings. But violent crime is down (at least in Canada) and the number of young people committing violent crimes is going down. So it might very well for the US to be a successful imperial nation without a corresponding increase in violence at home.
Beware positing the imperium as an expressive totality. And always bear in mind the slogan MIT linguists once put on departmental pencils: "context sucks."
Sources to Bear in Mind
Military & Game Links
* Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
* Mintz, John. "Making More Than Missiles; Defense Giant Martin Marietta Expands into the Worlds of Arcade Games, Robotics." Washington Post 29 August 1994, final ed.,
sec. F: 1.
* Platoni, Kara. "The Pentagon Goes to the Video Arcade." The Progressive July 1999 1999: 27-30.
* Toles, Terri. "Video Games and American Military Ideology." Arena Review 9.1 (1985): 58-76.
Military & Culture Links
* Mayers, David. Wars and Peace: The Future Americans Envisioned 1861-1991. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
* Rogin, Michael. "'Make My Day!': Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics [and] the Sequel." Cultures of United States Imperialism. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds.
Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 499-534.
* Springer, Claudia. "Antiwar Film as Spectacle: Contradictions of the Combat Sequence." Genre 21 (1988): 479-86.
Violence & Games
* Buse, Peter. "Nintendo and Telos: Will You Ever Reach the End?" Cultural Critique 34 (1996): 163-84.
* Barker, Martin and Julian Petley. “Introduction: From Bad Research to Good—A Guide for the Perplexed.” Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate. Martin Barker and Julian
Petley, eds. New York: Routledge, 2001. 1-26.
Video/Computer Game Theory
* Schroeder, Randy. "Playspace Invaders: Huizinga, Baudrillard and Video Game Violence." Journal of Popular Culture 30.3 (1996): 143-53.
* Strehovec, Janez. "Vertigo on Purpose: Entertainment in Simulators." Journal of Popular Culture 31.1 (1997): 199-209.
* Sudnow, David. Pilgrim in the Microworld: Eye, Mind, and the Essence of Video Skill. New York: Warner Books, 1983.
* Wolf, Mark J. "Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Video Games." Film Quarterly 51.1 (1997): 11-23.
- Location:home office
- Mood:paternal
- Music:"Old Man Blank" by The Bevis Frond
________________________________________
Miller's conclusion put me in mind of an earlier post I made on Miller that compared his ideas about oral communication and interaction to Merkel's Spielen/Erzaehlen/Phanasieren.
Our exploration of the fine but distinct border between the hyperfiction narrative and the role playing game suggests that successful interactive narratives are likely to look more like role playing games than like the hyperfiction currently being written. They will allow readers more freedom to interact directly with the author and, more importantly, to resist the author's attempt to control the reader's choices. They will retain the interdependence of the reading process and the plot of the narrative, which hyperfictions tend to divorce, and which makes the reader's unfolding experience of the narrative meaningful. They will offer narrative structures that motivate and give meaning to that plot, while allowing for that plot to unfold in response to the reader's decisions. They will, in other words, more resemble the earliest form of interactive narrative, the face-to-face oral tale, than they will the latest computer simulation.
The pen-and-paper RPG experience does owe much to the face-to-face oral tale but it also points back to the dramaturgical aspects of play, the kind of "putting-into-a-scene" (or inszenierung) or group role-playing activity that young children do. Storytelling and, evenmoreso, solo activities such as navigating hypertext fiction or playing a computer game, are derealizations and interalizations of play activities. Just as daydreaming is a derealization of child's play (according to Freud).
Miller also makes a very good point about hypertext's inability to fully unseat authorial power and bring in the reader as a co-creator:
Hypertext authors thus appropriate an activity--in fact, a freedom--that is part of the process of reading print fiction and perform it for the reader. While some of the gaps in print fiction are physically inscribed into the text, for example between chapters, for the most part print narratives so forcefully assert their continuity and coherence that organic wholeness and closure have become conventions of print fiction. As Ong and Bolter both note, the very physical stability of a printed novel, its text fixed securely between its covers, becomes a figure of conventional narrative closure. This convention underlies Iser's theory, for gaps can only exist within a structure that is presumed to be otherwise coherent: gaps have to be gaps-in-something. Iser's reading process must begin with a presumption of—or willing suspension of disbelief in—the potential coherence of the text. In noting and filling those gaps, therefore, the reader of print fiction is actively resisting the work's presumption of closure and authority; as noted above, the relationship between reader and work (and thus author) is an antagonistic one. <12>
The reader of hypertext fiction is locked in a disorienting topography. One may follow the links and jump around -- note, that the reader can't just roam wherever s/he might wish -- but one is still locked in the space. You are playing a "finite game" (in game theory terms) whereas reading a novel or playing a game can fall into the category of "infinite game." Role Playing Games are, at their worst, a boring exploration of a bland topography, one wherein the players are limited to choosing which door will be smashed down first or down which corridor they will run.
"<34>One might hope, however, for new games designed around more interesting problems than the slaying of imaginary monsters and the acquisition of wealth and power."
Some games have moved beyond topographic exploration to foreground the creation of stories like those in genre fiction
- Sorcerer (horror, dark fantasy, swords and sorcery)
- Dust Devils (grim Westerns)
- Spione (Cold War espionage fiction in the manner of LeCarre)
Some ask players to consider some pretty serious topics
- Grey Ranks (adolescent partisans in Occupied Warsaw)
- Steal Away Jordan (19th century American slave narratives)
And some invite players to make narratives out of the texture of everyday life, like Emily Care Boss' trilogy of games about romance:
- Breaking the Ice
- Shooting the Moon
- Under my Skin
- Location:office
- Mood:
confused - Music:baby breathing
Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997)
McRoy's judgment of the "survival horror genre":
No longer merely spectators, players assume the roles of the frequently imperiled lead characters and, in order to succeed, must rely on their wits, rather than sharpened reflexes, highly developed finger muscles, and impeccable hand-eye coordination. Weapons and ammunition are often scarce, and when a player's character "dies," the game is over; there are no "extra lives." However, despite the fact that Survival Horror video games traditionally allow those that play them to interact with the virtual environments in ways that determine which supporting characters, special weapons, or alternative endings are accessible, the Survival Horror genre ultimately adheres to the technological conventions, established themes, and (at times frustrating) narrative linearity of the cinematic tradition from which they arise.
Conclusion -- a call for a theory that takes into account tangled encounter of player with linear structures offered by producers:
the degree of player interaction often required in third-person persepective games pushes the usefulness of film studies as a mode of critical inquiry to its limits. Perhaps, then, given the decrease in critical distance constituted by the video game player's ability to control (to varying degrees) their characters' actions, the analysis of video games requires, as Julian Kücklich proposes, "the development of independent aesthetic criteria, i.e. independent of... the criticism of other media" (§ 3). Or, perhaps by recognizing "what is different about [video] games" (Rockwell, § 11), namely the extent of interactivity required on the part of the game player/spectator, an ever-more effective mode of analysis may develop that both builds upon the obvious strengths of a contemporary film theory approach while also considering the insights of other related (or seemingly unrelated) disciplines.
Some other drive-by insights:
- the cinematic cut-scene "wrests control away from the player and reinforces the sense that a metaphysical 'authorial' force is at work, shaping the logic of the game"
- cites a judge who ruled that games don't count as free speech because they do not include any real intellectual content (Associated Press. "Federal Judge: County Can Limit Children's Access to Video Games with Sex, Violence." The Detroit News. Thursday, April 25, 2002 <http://detnews.com/2002/technology/02
04/25/technology-473794.htm>. § 7. Accessed 15 July, 2002.) - As Johan Fornäs points out in "Digital Borderlands: Identity and Interactivity in Culture, Media and Communications," without bodies there can be no interaction with technology: "in spite of all ideologies of the pure incorporeality of computer-mediated communication, the body remains an inescapable element. With tools and technologies, we can reach further away, but our physical bodies still remain the first and the last step of each communicative act" (§ 46).
- Given the extent to which the Internet provides a space for the sharing of certain (socially sanctioned) interests and ideas, independent fan, as well as corporately-sponsored sites dedicated to both video game genres, like Survival Horror, and specific video games, like the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, continue to emerge As Demaria and Mascio note, “a real culture has emerged in the world of video games (culture of play – pixel culture), made up of groups who share a passion, language, and habit. Those who belong to this culture sometimes create a virtual community – gathered around several media (particularly specialist magazines) – which can be found on the net” (§ 1).
George Landow's Hypertext (2.0) (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997)
Hyper/Text/Theory, edited by George P. Landow (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Coover, Robert. "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer." The New York Times Book Review. August 29, 1993, pp.1, 8-12
Cinema Theory
Bordwell's 1989 book, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).
Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (Rutgers University Press, 1995)
Richard Allen’s Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997)
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th Edition (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds.) Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (British Film Institute, 2001).
Game/Technology/Horror Texts
- Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
- Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
- Demaria, Christina and Antonella Mascio. "Little Women Grow Up." Fourth European Feminist Research Conference Cyber Archives.
- <http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/file
s/demaria_mascio.html>. - Finn, Mark. "Computer Games and Narrative Progression." M/C: A Journal of Nedia and Culture 5, October 2000. < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0010/ narrative.html>
- Fornäs, Johan. "Digital Borderlands: Identity and Interactivity in Culture, Media andCommunications." Nordican Review, 19:1 (1998), 27-38. Available online at <http://www.jmk.su.se/digitalborderlan
ds/digitalborderlands.htm>. - Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
- Jancovich, Mark. "Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, and the Horror Film." Horror: The Film Reader. Mark Jancovich (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
- Krzywinska, Tanya. "Hands-On Horror." Spectator: The University of California Journal of Film and Television Criticism, 22:2 (Fall 2002).
- Kücklich, Julian. "In Search of the Lost Text: Literary Theory and Computer Games." Game Culture: Thinking About Video Games <http://www.game-culture.com/articles/in
search.html>. - Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
- Rockwell, Geoffrey. "Gore Galore: Literacy Theory and Computer Games". Full Conference Program: Consortium for Computers in the Humanities 1999 Meeting at the Congress of the Social Sciences and the Humanities. (June 3-4, 1999, at the University of Sherbrooke/Bishops University in Sherbrooke, Québec). <http://www2.arts.ubc.ca/fhis/winder/coc
hcosh/ppr1999.htm>. - Schleiner, Anne-Marie. "Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons: Gender Analysis of the 1st Person Shooter Game with Female Heroine" and Gender Role Subversion and Production in the Game Patch." Switch vol. 4, no. 1 (1998).
- Larry McCaffery's edited collection Storming the Reality Studio (Duke University Press, 1992),
- Jay McRoy's "There Are No Limits: Splatterpunk, Clive Barker, and the Body in-extremis" in Para*doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, No. 17 (2002).
- Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press, 1993), and Dani Cavallaro's Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson (Athelone Press, 2001)
- Gillian Skirrow’s “Hellivision: An Analysis of Video Games” in MacCabe, Colin (ed.) High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film (Manchester University Press, 1986)
- Kristen Drotner’s “Modernity and Media Panics” in Skovmand, Michael and Schrøder, Kim Christian (eds.) Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media (London & New York: Routledge, 1992)
- J.C. Herz’s Joystick Nation: How Video Games Gobbled Our Money, Won Our Hearts and Rewired Our Minds (London: Abacus, 1997)
- Alloway & Gilbert’s “Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence, and Pleasure” in Howard, Sue (ed.) Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media (UCL Press, London, 1998).
Fisler proposes a specialized kind of electronic narcissism to explain the identification players make with their online avatars.
In this process of interaction, the video game generates a specialized kind of electronic narcissism, ego transference that Melaine Klein explains as the projections of polar or conflated understandings of self into idealized objects. A mediated, or "performed player" emerges from the medium, generated by the interaction between the digital representation (usually referenced to the viewer rhetorically as "you") on the screen and the organic human being controlling (to lesser and greater degrees, depending on the particular game) the actions of the digital representation. This performed player is a productive starting point for both intrinsic analyses of games and extrinsic studies of the educational, cognitive, or psychological efficacy of games in empirical reality (in so far as any cultural object or event can be said to influence reality beyond the boundaries of gameplay). <4>
The player is not really immersing himself or herself in the game (Tron fantasies notwithstanding). You are the subject of the games address but you are not inside the game. We have a McLuhan-style extension of the self through technology. A player is not just the passive recipient of images either.
Query: why is the projection of the self onto the on-screen avatar a projection onto an idealized object. What about a debased object, and abject object, why no masochistic pleasure in watching the feeble homunculus that embodies all your ego's contradictions and instabilities being obliterated by irresistible forces and shattering against immovable objects.?
Contains a survey of some basic literature on the subject with which I am wholly unfamiliar and with which I will have to acquaint myself at some point:
- "Personality Differences between High and Low Video Game Users" (1983)
- "Video Games as Psychological Tests" (1984)
- "Videogames, Sex, and Sex Differences" (1984)
- "Video Games: Competing with Machines" (1987).
- Overview of 1 to 4 to be found in David Myers "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," Journal of Popular Culture 24. 2 (1990): 17-32.
- Gillian Skirrow, "Hellivision: An Analysis of Video Games,"
- High Theory/ Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film, Ed. Colin McCabe (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1986)
- Music:clatter of keys
We could calculate risks instead of diving headfirst into uncertainty.
Well the Risikogesellschaft has become the Emergency-management Society.
The Ernstfall has stepped in and the decider had decided. But will the state of emergency come to an end?
Once again the laws of physics have been triumphantly affirmed by our houses crashing around our ears.
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