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And it’s my own damn fault, too.
Normally, I never get sick. Audrey thinks it’s the flu, since I’ve been basically out of comission since Monday. In my own hubris, I did not elect to get a flu shot when I had the opportunity earlier this year. Curses! I think I’m on the upswing, though. It is still a real drag, though, since I had been planning on doing a lot of work this week, and have only been able to do a fraction thereof.
Oh well, so it goes.
Normally I don’t spend much time with political games. I like the idea of political games in principle, but it is frequently difficult for me to really get into them. A few days ago, I stumbled on Ian Bogost’s post about Molleindustria‘s new game Oiligarchy.
The idea behind Oiligarchy is that the player is in control of the oil industry. Not just one part of it, but all of it, the whole thing. Early on, the player is responsible for exploring and building: looking for reservoirs and whatnot. However, over time, domestic reservoirs begin to reduce in output, and demand increases, so the player must look elsewhere for oil. The player can drill for oil in Venezuela, Nigeria, Alaska, and Iraq, and each of these have reaching political implications. The game keeps track of many ongoing variables, such as domestic stability, environmentalism, as well as other events and factors. It is oddly fun to play, and each play through can lead to one of four potential endings.
The most fascinating thing about the game is the postmortem written by the developers. It explains in very explicit terms the model at the core of the simulation, which is the Hubbert peak theory, and the political implications of the model. All of the events in the game are based on either real events or theories, and most of them come with citations. I find the explict focus on the model, specifically the way that it manifests and is ever present within gameplay to be very impressive. This careful exploration and critical approach to models is precisely what I want to encourage in my work about adaptation.
While the model is transparent and visible, it is also integral, so it would not, for instance, be easy for someone to try out their own model within the context of the game. Molleindustria did release their source code, though, so someone could presumably try. This is an aesthetic of openness which is becoming more prevalent in games, and that is a very good thing. Sid Meier’s Civilization is a game that I usually criticize for its colonialist and expansionist approach to history, but even the fourth installment of the series comes with extensive modding capabilities, including the ability to swap out the core of the game code.
I’ve become totally addicted to this game. It’s made by Tilted Mill, which is the wonderful studio responsible for Pharaoh, Caesar, Sim City Societies, and many other delightful city building games. Nile Online is very fascinating conceptually. It is a broswer-based casual MMOG. Contrary to many browser-based MMOGs, it is not implemented using Java or Flash, but rather PHP delivering dynamic HTML with Ajax. It is casual because player actions are implemented over time. Creating a building in the beginning may take 15 minutes, but later on, upgrading it to a higher level may take 6 hours.
The primary mechanic of the game is trade. Players can trade with each other, but much of the trading is unchecked, so it relies on trust and communication (via an in-game email/scroll system). One could probably say that it is about economies, but the way that the economy is implemented in game, it relies on issues of time and distance that make it unlike many contemporary economic games which are much more instantaneous. It’s a lot of fun.
Meanwhile: When did Open Office 3 come out? Sun really needs to figure out how to cultivate popular enthusiasm and support! Maybe I’ll give some sort of review later after I get it installed. It’s a great project, but needs more publicity for it to get recognized. I don’t want them to advertise. I hate advertisements passionately. But they could see about getting their product reviewed on blogs or on tech news sites.
Renowned media and culture scholar (and blogger) Henry Jenkins visited us this past week. He gave a lively presentation on media technology as used in the election campaign, and later met up with several of the research groups. I stuck around the group meeting with Janet’s narrative schema group where we looked at some of Sergio Goldenberg‘s eTV projects, as well as Hartmut Koenitz’s Advanced Stories Group. I was at this last meeting, but was not especially conversational, as one, I don’t have a huge amount to say about the projects, and two, I did not have much completed work of my own to show. Nonetheless, there were a few very interesting bits that I picked up from both events, and I’ll try to convey them here.
I’ve studiously avoided discussing politics here. This is not to say that I don’t have my own strong beliefs, but I find nearly all political discussions to be exhausting and ultimately futile. Nonetheless, there are a number of very interesting and noteworthy things discussed in Jenkins’ talk about media in the election, and in political communication in general. So, I’ll try to review what I can.
The talk opened with a review of how media has been used in previous elections. The Lincoln-Douglas debate is an example which is frequently used as a non-mediated political event. The historical debate was dry, logical, and textual. However, the situation of the debate was still at a carnival. Bands played, there were sideshow performances and greased pig chasing contests. Spectacle was still very much an issue. Neil Postman claimed that the spectacular nature of television could never match the rationality of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, but this claim misses a complex relationship between politics and media.
Media has been used by all candidates in recent past, and the skilled use of media has tended to make for successful elections. Examples are FDR and radio, Nixon and Kennedy over television, Reagan and dramatic iconography, Clinton with cable, and finally Obama and the internet. This election is marked by a convergence of media. Obama’s skilled use at weaving many kinds of media together to create a coherent and consistent message is in part responsible for his overwhelming success.
The pivotal moment to Jenkins is the CNN-YouTube debate. This is revolutionary and pivotal because it marks a return of control from an institutionalized system (television or town-hall debates) to popular control. The clash between participatory (meaning user/popular controlled) culture with the authority of mass media. There were two sets of controversies that came out of this. The first was the reaction against the legitimacy of the YouTube questions, and the second was a reaction against the authority of CNN to filter and screen the questions in the first place.
The issue of legitimacy takes a complex spin when examined carefully. one of Jenkins’ examples is a snowman, asking about global warming. The example was decried somewhat as illegitimate, because it is ostensibly not serious. Literally, the snowman is fictional, and it is at odds for a candidate to be faced with a question from a fictional character. However, a snowman asking about global warming is still apt metaphorically. Furthermore, there is a deeper thread: The snowman speaks with a squeaky voice that is reminiscent of Mr Bill from Saturday Night Live. Mr Bill was, in turn, a “user-created” tape sent to SNL. This example thus taps into a somewhat deeper set of meanings than may first appear. User created questions work beyond the questions themselves, but also pull the weight of a larger set of cultural meanings.
The YouTube debates are one example in which users were able to “talk back” to the candidates and the media, but there are also other cases. One example is the “3-AM girl” who was in some stock footage used in an advertisement by the Clinton campaign, but then was able to post a response saying that she supported Obama. All of these cases are ways in which users have taken control of media and used the internet to talk back, taking control away from the usual media authorities.
In turn, existing media still does not go away, but rather takes on a new relationship to the internet and other media sources. Television broadcasts something, and this is reacted to on the internet, and is in turn broadcast out by television. There is a feedback cycle between blogs, YouTube, cable television, and national news and television.
On reality television: This has always had to do with ethics. While reality TV always focuses on conflict, or strives to create conflict, the conflict is ultimately about ethics. Characters have different ethics, and observers project their own values onto them. Jenkins explains that this is how some theorists have come to understand gossip: people project values onto characters, and talk about those characters to communicate their ethical values. In a sense, reality television is used by audiences to discuss their own ethics indirectly.
We were still discussing the eTV projects, in terms of exploring fictional worlds, specifically as relates to convergence, and an interesting point came up. Convergence is the process of revealing a fictional world through many different kinds of media. An example of how this works is when a franchise (for example, The Matrix) splits off into several media forms (beyond films: an animated series and some games), and while watching or consuming one form of media, there is a reference to something that occurs in the others. This sort of connecting process is an active function of the viewer, and helps build a better sense and knowledge of the fictional world. Jenkins called the sort of pleasure that results from this “epistemophilia,” which is a pleasure of knowing and connecting. Epistemophilia is associated with puzzles and transmedia works.
Epistemophilia is also conflicted with a different pleasure, the pleasure of immersion, even though the two are often confused. Immersion is the sense of being in a world and experiencing it viscerally. (Maybe I should call it “ontophilia”). Immersion is at odds with epistemophilia, which can be seen as a type of “spoiler” that undermines the sense of being. Immersion is normally associated with transparency and immediacy. To be in a fictional world, the media that exists between the user and the world must be overcome. On the other hand, with epistemophilia, the media is necessary. An epistemophilic desire is to take advantage of a medium in order to understand and piece together the world as an external observer. This can be done for instance with freeze frames in DVDs (to catch some subtle and impossible clue). Both of these desires relate to the relationship between the user, the medium, and the world.
Later, while discussing the advanced stories system, Jenkins warned us about the mechanics of fan fiction and interactive story systems. Character drives fan fiction. In this case, characters are used projectively: to explore values and idealizations. Branching narratives do not deal well with the complex matter of character motivation, which is what drives fan fiction. There could be branching narration (not narrative), which explores different perspectives. The culture of writing is compelled by character psychology. In rich environments and settings, the world is a character.
This last bit was somewhat troubling to me, though. My work is focused on adaptation of fiction, and is looking at Jane Austen specifically. Austen has a huge culture of recreation, and adaptation, much of which reads very much like fan fiction. However: my approach and focus has been on recreating the social world and model, rather than capturing the characters exactly. I could make the argument that real motivation is impossible without some social or cultural model (that expresses values), but I do not attempt to express the deep complexity of character. At least not yet, the essences and complexities of character are extremely hard to formalize.
Nonetheless, I did speak to him for a few minutes afterwards, in which I hurriedly (and possibly incoherently) explained my ideas, and he seemed to give me an endorsement, so that is a positive sign. Hooray!
I haven’t had the chance to do much reading this week. I really ought to do more, but it has been hard to fit it in. What I have been doing, oddly enough, is a lot of writing. Last Thursday, I gave a presentation overviewing my work on game adaptations of Pride and Prejudice to Janet’s narrative schema group, and it went alright. It was… tricky, though. She was expecting me to be further along than I was, and presenting slightly different material than I was, but there was a very productive discussion afterwards. A few new ideas floated up, but mostly I had the chance to “try out” some of the ideas I have been thinking about for a long time. Now that it is over, I have been writing an overview of the adaptation project. It started out as a small thing, but has quickly evolved into something quite big.
Rest assured, I will put it up when I am done. Whether anyone will find it interesting or not, well…. we’ll have to see.
One of my classes is cross listed with an undergraduate course, this is Nancy Nersessian‘s Cognition and Culture. One fun advantage to having a course with undergraduates is that they make a lot of interesting and occasionally profoundly brilliant observations. Not to say that us graduate students are incapable of insight, but we tend to be very bogged down by our own research objectives.
We have been discussing Jean Lave‘s book, Cognition in Practice, and came to a segment where Lave discusses how mathematics is a cultural artifact, but we view it as universal and supremely valuable. An example of this is that we “beam” the Pythagorean theorem into space, in hopes that, were the signal ever to be discovered by extraterrestrials, it would help communication because mathematics is a universal language, that transcends humanity. I didn’t find a source on this beaming precisely, but it seems like the sort of thing that people might do. Coming from a mathematical background, and moving into the complex and tricky field of cognitive science and cultural studies, I had very torn reactions to this conflict, and only realized how to articulate that reaction after the discussion ended. So, I present it here.
Mathematicians are extremely strange people. I don’t really identify as a mathematician anymore, but I still consider myself close to the culture, so I say this pridefully. The conclusions of mathematics are universal, and they are fundamental, but, and this is where things get difficult, these universal conclusions rely on premises. These premises are necessarily situational, and depend on other cultural factors. Furthermore, the practice of mathematics is also culturally relevant, and lots of mathematicians disagree, not on conclusions (a proof is a proof, after all), but on the relevance, importance, usefulness, and elegance of different practices of math. All of these terms are subjective, and while there are many common impressions of what elegance means, it is far from universal.
Generally issues regarding the practice of math applies to topics that are more sophisticated than the Pythagorean theorem. The Pythagorean theorem has to be universal because of its simplicity, elegance, and universality in almost all kinds of math that we use conventionally, right? Those aliens must use that kind of math too, right? Well, mostly. Even in this case, the situation is ambiguous, and that ambiguity arises from the premises under which the Pythagorean theorem is valid, namely: Euclidean geometry. If you are dealing with some other domain of planar geometry, (most notably, spherical or hyperbolic geometry), then the Pythagorean theorem breaks down. It has analogues (which are quite elegant, I might say), but the existence of these alternative types of geometries, and the ways in which the theorems are modified illustrates that our idyllic Euclidean world is not quite as simple or so complete as it first seemed. Space itself is non-Euclidean, according to both relativity and quantum mechanics. So perhaps the Pythagorean Theorem may actually have something to do with our experience as humans on Earth, and may not be quite so transcendent after all.
For real transcendence, we need Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. That’ll do it for sure.
Last Thursday, Barbara Stafford came to visit LCC as part of our distinguished speaker series. I read her book Visual Analogy last year, although whether I understood it or not is a different matter entirely. Stafford’s background is in art history, although recently she has expanded into the study of the cognitive dimensions and neuroscience of images. Her talk had the quality of weaving in and out among a number of conceptual domains, putting together a complex web that related to a few specific themes.
Because I am boring and no fun, one of the things I am going to try to to is unravel Stafford’s carefully woven tapestry, and isolate her exploration into more explicit bullets and categories. My drive to do things like this may strike the more poetic minded as undercutting her message, but without finding a graspable end of the woven yarn, it is hard to get the message at all.
Stafford’s central theme in her talk is the notion of attentiveness. One of her goals is to devise a taxonomy of attentiveness. In the process of exploring the kinds of attentiveness, there are a few binary conflicts: Speed versus slowness, automaticity versus spontaneity, and focus versus attention. Her exploration weaves through each of these conflicts, valuing the virtues of slowness, spontaneity, and attentiveness. The last of these conflcits is perhaps the easiest to explain.
Attentiveness is not focus. It is related: a chiefly visual practice, but takes a different aim in mind. Attentiveness is embodied, whereas focus is disembodied. An observer is focused when engaged with something at a distance, and with a specific objective in mind. Attentiveness is aware of the subject in its surroundings. Attentiveness is has many channels, and makes use of emotion and the body. Attention encompases affectiveness and affection. Focus narrows both the observer and the object observed down to a single channel: The observer is a detached eye, and the observed is reduced into components and parts. The rhetoric of focus comes from many sources, and is found in a sort of postmodern criticism. Pathological focus is voyeuristic in nature: it is the subjugation of the heat of affective life to icy scrutiny.
Automaticity relates to focus. The rhetoric and language of automaticity emerged from cybernetics and computation. The converse of this is sponteneity, whose language comes from art and the life sciences, especially biology. Both automaticity and spontaneity are about reactions and behavior. The difference between the two reflects the difference between focus and attention. Automaticity is disembodied where sponteneity is embodied. Automaticity is about precision and correctness, where sponteneity is about naturalness and freedom. Automaticity is rational where sponeneity is emotional. Automaticity has infiltrated our lives through computation. Stafford explained, hearkening back to an argument that has been made since Heidegger, that while we transfer data to computers, computers transfer their way of thinking back to us. Cognitive science has been infiltrated with the language of automaticity, especially that which comes from economics: We talk about “cognitive productivity.” Parts of the brain or mind have been deregulated or privatized. Automaticity is a language of parts, sponteneity is a language of wholes.
The final binary separation is between speed and slowness. Computation and automaticity aims to reduce things in a way that make them more easily systematized and more efficiently computed. Movements in art have moved toward slowness. Slowness demands a certain hesitation, something which Stafford considers a lost concept. Slowness also encourages reflection, and awareness of circumstance. Much postmodern architecture encourages the aesthetic of speed: glass is used to reduce the time that is necessary to look at things. Stafford gave several examples of artists who used slowness as an aesthetic, but I was only able to capture two of them. One is a documentary by Steve McQueen, called Gravesend. The other artist is Andy Goldsworthy. Both of these artists encourage the viewer to slow down and reflect. Instead of emphasizing the degree of information that can be observed, more can be learned and understood through careful observation and attention.
Slowness, sponteneity, and attention are all the same kind of thing. The virtues are wholeness, affection, and living in the moment.
Stafford’s goal is to develop a taxonomy of attention. She explores these by examining several kinds of looks, all reminisent of certain kinds of attention. Stafford’s presentation made use of paintings, photographs, and some digitally edited photographs. The kinds of attention are represented both in the subjects of the images, but also are evidenced by our own reading of the images. Becaue I am a dork, I’m actually bulletizing these:
This past Thursday, after Barbara Stafford (which I will write about later), Audrey and I came home after a quick stop at the grocery store, and passed by an onion on our way to our apartment. It was outside, lying at the side of the road, without any obvious defect, other than it might have fallen from someone’s grocery bag and touched the ground.
So, we took it upstairs and cooked with it. Cooking with found food, I suppose. Delicious!
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Oh yes, and one of my priorities for this weekend (or maybe this month) is to fix the categories on my reading system. Reading posts should be getting matched with the readings label, but that hasn’t been happening lately.
I’ve been having a Michael Mateas moment. I spent some time over on InteractiveStory.net and ProceduralArts, and found an interesting little bit about Robert McKee. It is just a set of notes, but relates to some concepts that are very relevant for adaptation, and thinking about the mechanics of fiction in general. To summarize his summary, story is about better understanding the world. Maybe I’ll put the book on my reading lists, but who knows.
I also had the chance to spend some time with Mateas’s Semiotic Considerations, which is very interesting. His perspective and my perspective are very different, but we’re getting at something very similar. It’s nicely bulleted, and only four pages, but it is so dense. So very dense. I may want to write about it just to unpack it.