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Brett Boessen

Why I Blog - Andrew Sullivan - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...307060

Sullivan atlantic blogging opinion

shared by Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12
       
      Instant Feedback -- blogging is the gamification of authorship?
  • The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness.
  • The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.
  • But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink.
  • in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context).
  • a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience.
  • A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit.
  • The blogger
  • a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
  • If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument.
  • Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.
  • Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth.
  • To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth
  • Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does
  • The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it.
  • He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.
  • You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard.
  • Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.
  • The proximity is palpable, the moment human
  • friendship
  • Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.
  • A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
  • There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.
  • The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings.
  • You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with. But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock.
  • If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
  • To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.
  • The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Oct 12
     
    Good one, Brett. Some people were talking about social media as gamification, in terms of checking points (hits, links) and getting rewards. Can't remember where.
  • Brett Boessen on 31 Oct 12
     
    If you think of it, drop me a line; I'd be interested to see what came of that discussion.
Ed Webb

Auditorium - The Online Experience - 0 views

www.playauditorium.com

music game flash auditorium puzzle fun interactive

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 05 Aug 09
     
    That's a fine project, Ed. I like the combination of puzzles with soothing music, a minimalist exploration.
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.
Todd Bryant

2015 Games for Change Awards nominees announced | Games for Change - 5 views

www.gamesforchange.org/...ange-awards-nominees-announced

shared by Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15 - No Cached
Brett Boessen liked it
  • Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15
     
    Drumroll, please! Here are your nominees for the Games for Change Awards, which celebrate the year's best social impact games. Come to the Festival to play and
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Apr 15
     
    Have you played any of these yet?
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    I did play Vi Hart's "playable blog post, "Parable of the Polygons," and found it a fascinating and innovative experiment in procedural learning. Reminded me of a series of mini-lectures on game design or game theory that were a combination of animated lecture and playable exercises...started with a version of Pong? I can't find it in my bookmarks at the moment, but they had a similar combination of commentary and interactivity as her Parable does.
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    OK - just tried "That's Your Right" too, and it's a fun little digital card game, like Blizzard's Hearthstone, that definitely had me more familiar with the five sub-clauses of the first amendment by the end of it than I was before my 15-minute play session. I'm curious what political science faculty in higher ed would think of it's cutesy interface and music, and of it's fairly straight-forward political content regarding the Bill of Rights, but I found it engaging enough during my first playthrough that I (re-)learned something.
  • Bryan Alexander on 07 Apr 15
     
    Thanks, Brett.
Ed Webb

With video games, public diplomacy by mobile phone - SmartPlanet - 0 views

www.smartplanet.com/...387

games gaming public_diplomacy phones mobilephones mobile

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Cached
  • MetroStar Systems, a 75-employee tech start-up contracted by the State Department to bring a better understanding of the United States to the countries with which it has less-than-amicable relations. The company plans to do so with X-Life Games, an initiative that effectively wraps a U.S. history lesson inside a downloadable video game for a mobile phone.
  • The products of this initiative — so far, “Driven,” a car-racing trivia game, and “Babangar Blues,” a music-based role-playing game — are intended to “demystify” the U.S. to foreign audiences, starting with the Middle East.
  • Ironically, the trivia very much resembles the test administered to new citizens. I asked Manouchehri if it was really fair to expect an Iranian to know who Patrick Henry was. “The hope is that they’ll look them up,” he said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the State Department gathers and receives behavioral data that helps it track “macro behavioral trends,” particularly among the Generation Y demographic MetroStar is targeting, born between 1981 and 2000.
  • Manouchehri is looking at deploying his mobile games in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in nations with more mature telecom networks, such as Egypt, Indonesia and Lebanon.
Brett Boessen

On Authorship in Games - Click Nothing - 5 views

clicknothing.typepad.com/...on-authorship-i.html

ebert games art criticism blog post

shared by Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Well put.
  • Because a game is a complete formal system
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Is he implicitly arguing here that games with emergent elements -- especially MMO's and games with heavy player-vs-player interactions -- are not games, or is he arguing that they also represent "complete formal system(s)"? Or did he simply misspeak? Because I don't see emergence as falling within any kind of closed system.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Aug 10
       
      I take him to be talking about elements that belong to the game proper, not to things that might emerge within and through the game as a result of player interactions. So in-game actions are part of the game. Forums for player discussion, clans etc are not part of the game, at least not part of the authored game. But I agree, it's very ambiguous and should be debated.
  • The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Woops -- I thought he was going to address my points above, but he went in a different direction here. (I'm enjoying the point-by-point-rebuttal structure of the post immensely, though. I'd love more of my students to write this way. :)
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Aug 10
       
      I agree. The noise point is quite good. And careful comparisons with other media are useful.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The Argument from Legitimacy
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      He rocks this entire section -- well done.
  • “I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Agreed. Ebert probably should have read Bogost's Persuasive Games before he started all of this.
  • the audience must always interact with a work on some level
  • The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions
  • Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.
  • GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.
  • while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself
  • There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise
  • Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately
  • Ebert is wrong for two important reasons
  • there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate
  • I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship
  • Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
  • how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’
  • I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly
  • The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me
  • The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems
  • Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”
  • The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:
Todd Bryant

Cold War - Berlin - 5 views

technolog.msnbc.msn.com/...r-shooting-game-angers-germans

Germany

shared by Todd Bryant on 05 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    What a great story! 1) The Cold War lives on. 2) Nice case of fearsome media. 3) Good example of political game. 4) " " " teaching game.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    I love the music, too.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Oct 10
     
    Isn't it an academic game?
Ed Webb

YouTube - BBC Panorama: ADDICTED TO GAMES? - Part 1 of 2 - 2 views

www.youtube.com/watch

games gaming addiction

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 07 Dec 10
     
    See Part 2 also
  • Brett Boessen on 08 Dec 10
     
    Goodness. Love how they use WoW's own music against it...game addiction jujitsu!
  • Bryan Alexander on 15 Dec 10
     
    I gather that Panorama has gone downhill. And did have some fun poking at this on Infocult.
Ed Webb

Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...20655

games gaming liberal arts music composition Berklee

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Berklee first offered a course exclusively on game audio about four years ago
  • Mr. Sweet, a 1990 Berklee graduate, told the Globe that video games were popular when he was a student but not considered a career possibility. "Now, it's a juggernaut," he said. The quality of artwork and production values are "dramatically higher," he told the newspaper, "and so is the orchestral work."
  • Ed Webb on 20 Jan 10
     
    The World of Goo score is available as mp3 download, and is quite listenable.
Ed Webb

Minarett Attack - 1 views

www.minarett-attack.ch

game casual racism xenophobia Islamophobia Switzerland

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 30 Nov 09
     
    Frankly, the call to prayer sounds better to me than the cheesy Swiss accordian music. Note also that very few of Switzerland's mosques actually have minarets, even before the ridiculous referendum.
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