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Ed Webb

M/C Journal: "Artificial Intelligence" - 0 views

journal.media-culture.org.au/...08-losh.php

bogost politics censorship USA Congress games rhetoric islamism jihad

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source.
  • The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists.
  • a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal.
  • The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property.
  • lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions.
  • To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses.
  • The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries.
  • hroughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order.
  • The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era.
  • In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.”
  • “oral tradition”
  • In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.”
  • Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see.
Rebecca Davis

Videogame preservation and massively multiplayer online role-playing games: A review of... - 0 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

preservation videogame games gaming research

shared by Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 28 Apr 11
     
    Videogames are important cultural and economic artifacts. They also present challenges that anticipate the problems inherent in any complex digital interactive system. Not only are they digital and hence very difficult to preserve but they also are software systems that have significant hardware, peripheral, and network dependencies, which are difficult to collect and formally represent. This article reviews the literature related to videogame preservation. In addition to covering the traditional technology-related issues inherent in all digital preservation endeavors, this review also attempts to describe the complexities and relationships between the traditional acts of technology preservation, representation, and collection development. Future work should include the identification of important user groups, an examination of games' context of use, and the development of representational models to describe interaction of players with the game and the interactions between players playing the game.
Rebecca Davis

PERFORMING THE SOCIAL TEXT: Or, What I Learned From Playing Spore -- Jones 17 (2): 283 ... - 2 views

commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/...283

gaming simulation spore digital_humanities

shared by Rebecca Davis on 25 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 25 Apr 11
     
    this article compares video games and digital texts, not in terms of their supposedly shared narrative content (not in terms of their content at all) but, rather, formally-in terms of how they model complex systems, how both video games and digital-text environments work by creating networked environments for the production, reproduction, transmission, and reception (indeed for the continual reediting) of their respective content-objects. Both texts and video games are systems, with their own special affordances and constraints, that provide both "spores" and "spurs," seeds and provocations, prompts for new performances of meaning.
Ed Webb

Digital: Facebook, YouTube, Gaming Time Spent Grows - Advertising Age - Digital - 1 views

adage.com/...article

use socialmedia email gaming US statistics USA

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • according to research by Nielsen Co. The time spent on social media accessed from PCs rose from 15.8% in June 2009 to 22.7% in June 2010, according to Nielsen, while online gaming gained more modestly to 10.2% of online time from 9.3% a year earlier. But that was enough to push gaming past e-mail, which fell to 8.3% of online time spent at the PC from 10.5% a year earlier.
  • separating social-media time from gaming time has become tougher, given that a growing portion of online gaming takes place via Facebook applications such as Zynga's Farmville, Nielsen analyst Dave Martin acknowledged.
  • . The shift of e-mail use from PCs to mobile devices accounts for some of the decline of time spent on e-mail at PCs
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • online video time still only averaged an hour and 15 minutes per person per month, an amount of time many people spend with traditional TV on the morning of the first day of the month
  • Instant messaging also lost share of time at the PC, Mr. Martin said, which was likely a result of increased use of mobile texting in part.
Brett Boessen

MIT TechTV - Part 2 of 3-Games As An Aesthetic Form - Frank Lantz (NYU Game Center) - 3 views

techtv.mit.edu/...rm-frank-lantz-nyu-game-center

games aesthetics mit nyu gamestudies art design

shared by Brett Boessen on 11 Jan 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Brett Boessen on 11 Jan 12
     
    Lantz, designer of Drop7 and head of the NYU Game Center, which has a new game design MFA, talks about aesthetic characteristics of games in this second part of his three-part talk at MIT (part 1 lays out his thinking about aesthetics and art in general, and part 3 is the QnA). I especially like his provocations that "all games are digital" and "games created computers", both of which have to do with his definition of games as "the aesthetics of interactive systems."
Ed Webb

Digital Video Games and International Interactions » Duck of Minerva - 3 views

www.whiteoliphaunt.com/...nternational-interactions.html

games gaming IR

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 13 Jan 14
     
    The persistence of Russia is fascinating. I recommend Metro 2033 as a balance.
Bryan Alexander

Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments - 2 views

www.tandfonline.com/...1369118X.2013.808365

gaming education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 29 Aug 13
     
    The recent promotion and adoption of digital game-based learning (DGBL) in K-12 education presents compelling opportunities as well as challenges for early childhood educators who seek to critically, equitably and holistically support the learning and play of today's so-called digital natives.
Bryan Alexander

Call For Papers: Foundations of Digital Games - 0 views

eis-blog.ucsc.edu/...s-foundations-of-digital-games

conference

shared by Bryan Alexander on 01 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 01 Aug 09
     
    Coming up in June of 2010. Looks like a variety of content and format encourages (workshop, paper, poster, demos).
Victoria Pullen

Tiltfactor Labs - 1 views

www.tiltfactor.org

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    Mary Flanagan's digital games lab at Dartmouth College. 
Ed Webb

The Shallows: Chapters 2 & 3 | Royce Kimmons - 3 views

kimmonsdesign.com/61

neuroscience education games gaming

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • I have not looked into the particulars of this study nor current issues in neuroplasticity in depth, but this experiment at least draws my attention because of my interest in educational games and simulations (and gaming in general).  I have often wondered, for instance, about violence in video games, and though there is no evidence that violent video games make people more violent, the really interesting question, I think, is whether or not acting out violently in a video game alters the brain differently than acting out violently in real life.  Likewise, what about other behaviors that can be acted out in high fidelity through a game from stealing in Grand Theft Auto to cyber spouses in World of Warcraft.  Do these activities affect one's neural mapping?Obviously, there are other, more curriculum-oriented implications of this study that are probably more pertinent to my field, but I think that generally we tend to view digital experiences in a different way than real life experiences, and if it's all the same to our brains, then it seems like that is something we should be conscious of when designing and consuming digital products.
  • Ed Webb on 27 Sep 10
     
    Royce should join this group!
Ed Webb

cyoa - 3 views

samizdat.cc/cyoa

games virtualworlds interactive cyoa books

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • I’d be very curious to know the reason for this progression toward linearity. Presumably the invisible hand was guiding this development, but whether the hunger was for less difficulty in the books or simply for something with more in the way of traditional storytelling is harder to unravel. I could also imagine that this balance between interaction and exposition was peculiar to the individual writers, so this could merely reflect a changing set of practitioners. In another way, this trend mirrors the adoption of more recent new media. In the early days of the web, people flocked to what was unique to HTML, namely links, animated gifs, and the <blink> tag. A similar cautionless exuberance marked the appearance of affordable typesetting systems – the first time people without phototypositors had access to typefaces beyond a choice of monospaced typewriter fonts.When a world of new possibilities has just opened, it’s hard to find the will for restraint. But, in time, people scale back the more gratuitous uses of this sort of glitz, moving from what’s possible to what best suits the material. It could be that the glut of choices in the early books reflected more a rush toward the new than a well-considered balancing of storytelling and reader-directedness. As the genre developed, the choice-based structure ceased being so novel that it was an experiential end in itself. Perhaps only then could it recede into its proper role as a gameplay mechanic – all the more potent when used judiciously.
  • a peek into the construction process the authors went through as they folded their nonlinear stories into a sequential medium
  • In a computer game, tracking this kind of inventory state is a simple matter. By flipping bits in memory, the program itself can keep a running tally of items you’ve encountered and possibly picked up. In a book this responsibility falls to the reader, and with it an expectation of honesty. To encourage a degree of fair play, the Cavern of Doom engages in a form of entrapment by asking the reader, in the midst of a dicy situation, whether they have a magic item that would clearly save the day. What the book knows and the reader may not is that this item does not even exist. Woe upon the adventurer who angers the gamebook in this way.
  • Bryan Alexander on 05 Oct 10
     
    Very nice to see this. CYOA is a vital antecedent for digital storytelling, from hypertext to gaming to branching YouTube videos.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 06 Oct 10
     
    I feel sheepish for not tagging this to our group when I saw it months ago, but thanks to Ed for remedying that. :) I wish I had the skills in infographic production the author has, but it reminds me that enriching your argument with different media forms is becoming more and more essential.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    This might be a good time for humanists to identify a bunch of easy, low-cost tools for that. Like Wordle.
  • Ed Webb on 06 Oct 10
     
    Agreed, Bryan. There are quite a few low-cost (in terms of learning curve and the general attentive economy) visualization tools that we could all learn to use more frequently. I've been playing again, after a break of a couple of years, with Dipity, for instance, to generate timelines. Word clouds and mind maps might be forms with applications in discussing digital storytelling in games and other media.
Brett Boessen

Terra Nova: Game Education: What Should You Study? - 7 views

terranova.blogs.com/...ion-what-should-you-study.html

games gaming industry education teaching learning

shared by Brett Boessen on 18 Sep 11 - No Cached
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 18 Sep 11
       
      The comments for this post are especially interesting.
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Sep 11
     
    Fascinating. On the one hand, a lot of talk around liberal education. On the other, that classic theory/practice debate.
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Brett Boessen on 19 Sep 11
     
    They're certainly two perspectives on pedagogy I myself encounter regularly, though for me it's digital media production instead. Still, I wonder if games is entering the academy at an interesting time in terms of opening up conceptions of learning and pedagogy. A decade or two ago, and we might have seen less interdisciplinary language in the way these folks are talking about games as an object of study.
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Sep 11
     
    Interesting historical perspective, Brett. How is gaming's incorporation different from digital media's, a decade ago?
  • Brett Boessen on 19 Sep 11
     
    I was really thinking about TV -- guess it's more decades ago than I'd thought -- and the way TV became the younger sibling to film. Of course there are more formal similarities between them than between either and games in many ways, so maybe the comparison is not particularly apt.
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Sep 11
     
    Will gaming become older media's younger sibling, then?
  • Brett Boessen on 20 Sep 11
     
    I don't really see that, myself, at least not from the production side, because computers and coding are such a prominent component. But it does seem like game studies is overlapping with existing media studies in many institutions. Perhaps we'll see a more demarcated split between studies and game design in a way we haven't seen with film and TV (not that film and TV aren't fairly demarcated at lots of schools; but they're still usually in the same department when they're both available).
Rebecca Davis

Ticker - The digital future of gaming - 0 views

www.theticker.org/...tal-future-of-gaming-1.2025307

gaming mobile

shared by Rebecca Davis on 20 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Rebecca Davis on 20 Oct 09
     
    "What is gaming's future? Sony's betting that they have a pretty good idea, as shown with the new portable gaming device, the PSP Go. Not only is the PSP Go slimmer, lighter and thinner than its predecessor, the PSP, but it can also play movies, connect to the PS3 and has Bluetooth capability. Most importantly, the PSP Go is the first game console to abandon conventional media. "
  • Bryan Alexander on 21 Oct 09
     
    Who has played with a Go? I've heard mixed reviews.
Brett Boessen

Press Start to Continue: Toward a New Video Game Studies | HASTAC - 3 views

hastac.org/...-toward-new-video-game-studies

games criticism hastac pedagogy theory forum

shared by Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • being a gamer is less an inherent attribute—either you are or you aren’t—than it is a malleable description of practices that change throughout one’s lifetime, whether from “hardcore” to “casual,” single-player to “social,” or genre to genre
  • one could argue that part of the origin story of game studies was the struggle to establish the idea that games are not narratives--that they were a radically "new" textuality, but this just delayed the needful discussions of how games related to the inherited media ecology, how they used narrative, music, video, etc. to new effects
  • students tend not to be "well-played," on an analogy to "well-read," but knowledgeable in one or a few genres
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • what about our students' physical abilities and skill sets? How does skill play into their experiences of games?
  • Can or should one philosophize about a medium one has not embraced to the point of design?  I vote:  no.
  • In an academic paper, I don't think that I would feel legitimate in citing something from a designer. It doesn't feel credible, even though the designer may be someone like Ron Gilbert
  • a senior-level seminar in “Digital Games and Culture”
  • Betty Hayes and I have been teaching an undergrad games studies course uniting new media reading/writing, academic readings across disciplines, and gameplay across genres for two years now
  • Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12
     
    HASTAC has started a forum (a blog post with lots o' comments) to discuss video game studies.
Bryan Alexander

Media - Social Studies - Play | Wolfsonian-FIU Freedom - 0 views

www.teenthoughtsondemocracy.wolfsonian.org/...media-social-studies-play

game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 01 Mar 12
     
    Spin is designed to promote student reflection on the power of words and images by creating and altering meaning in a fictional narrative. This fast-paced, small group storytelling game provides students the experience of "spinning" a story in different directions to convey diverse storylines or viewpoints-much like it occurs in print, broadcast, and digital media today.
Bryan Alexander

'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...-mental-flexibility-says-study

games education

shared by Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Aug 13
     
    By Riva Gold Playing StarCraft can boost problem solving and creative thinking, according to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London. Researchers found that those who engaged in the real-time military strategy game improved their "cognitive flexibility," or the ability to adjust their thinking to meet different situations.
Ed Webb

CIR's Hairnet Hero Turns School-Lunches Journalism Into Game For Kids - Eric Johnson - ... - 1 views

allthingsd.com/...ideogame-with-the-same-message

media journalism games gaming advertising

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Center for Investigative Reporting
  • It’s an interesting twist on “advergaming” — think Chipotle’s buzzy Scarecrow game — in which games are served up with a targeted message, explicitly or implicitly. Unlike edutainment (another unwieldy portmanteau), the goal isn’t to teach a skill, but rather to sell a brand’s value. In CIR’s case, that’s trustworthy donation-funded journalism.
  • sometimes investigative pieces like the ones found at CIR also pertain to children. To get those same facts across in a kid-friendly format, the nonprofit is this week rolling out a game, Hairnet Hero, with the help of a Berkeley, Calif.-based animation studio, Coco Studios.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Noting that CIR is “aware of the digital divide,” Farnsworth said that a physical card-game adaptation will also be distributed in some California schools.
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