Skip to main content

Home/ Gaming and the liberal arts/ Group items tagged post

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ed Webb

Postings of a Troubled Mind - WSJ.com - 2 views

  • At times, Mr. Loughner seemed to be reaching out to fellow gamers for help and advice, albeit in a disturbing way. Sometimes they offered it, such as giving him pointers about job hunting. At other times, his postings seemed so outrageous that the gamers mocked or ignored him. The online postings, written using pseudonyms, were shared with the Journal by a person who had access to them. Two fellow gamers who participated in the online forums say the author was the accused gunman, and some of the postings discuss incidents from Mr. Loughner's life that others have corroborated.
  •  
    The chat forums associated with games could be mines of information for the right research project. I hope they rarely become newsworthy in this way.
  •  
    Good point. Gaming discussion has grown into a wide field for all kinds of research. I'm waiting for "gaming made him do it" arguments to appear.
Ed Webb

Simulation - 3 views

  •  
    First of several posts by students playing Peacemaker as a way of thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    Are these from that Army College down the road from you guys?
  •  
    These are students in my Int'l Politics of the Middle East Class: https://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/02949324672354748984/bundle/IntPolMidEast Shalom's Conflict Resolution class also recently did an exercise with Peacemaker, and will shortly be invited to comment on this series of blog posts.
  •  
    Oh great!
Brett Boessen

Depression Quest: An Interactive (non)Fiction About Living with Depression - 1 views

  •  
    Found this game after reading about Slavoj Zizek Makes a Game (posted to the Diigo group by Ed Webb).
Brett Boessen

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

  • 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
  •  
    HASTAC has started a forum (a blog post with lots o' comments) to discuss video game studies.
Ed Webb

10 Years Of Civilization II: 1700 Virtual Years Of Hell - 1 views

  •  
    I'm not only amused by the way the author of this post has taken the simulation so clearly as an accurate analog for what could happen in the real world, but am also intrigued at how widely this story is being re-posted and commented on. I've seen it everywhere: blogs in my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. I wonder if that is a function of how widely Civ has been played, how closely the analogy to RL adheres for readers, or something else?
  •  
    Good point, Brett. Perhaps it's a function of the game's horrible outlook, which resonates with our current stresses.
Brett Boessen

On Authorship in Games - Click Nothing - 5 views

  • interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it.
    • Brett Boessen
       
      Well put.
  • Because a game is a complete formal system
    • Brett Boessen
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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:
Ed Webb

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

  • 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.
Ed Webb

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit - 4 views

  • gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway
  • The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.
  • I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing.
  •  
    via Kirk Battle on Buzz
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    Bogost seems to be getting more and more irritated by the gamification pseudo-movement. His response to McGonigal's book was contrary but professional. The exploitationware piece was critical and pointed, but I thought still civil. This is...angry. And that really comes through in his comment to the gamify.com guy's post. I'm mostly in agreement on the substance of his objections to much of gamification. But I wonder why this movement toward such vehemence? Do you suppose he's now fielding more annoying offers to help design game-like systems? Is Cow Clicker kindof backfiring, leading people to him as a designer instead of away from him? I don't know. But he sure is pissed, that's clear.
  •  
    I have no inside knowledge. But I suspect his irritation increases in proportion to the hype. The tone here is caustic, but the content is on the money. If you agree with him, and if you love games and their potential, you can understand the rage, I think.
  •  
    I don't know -- rage, really? Isn't the "games vs. gamification" tack ultimately more of a both/and thing than a conflict? I'm not sure why having gamification exist necessarily entails an undermining of what games are. I suppose there's the question of educating non-gamers on the great potential of actual games, and perhaps policing a boundary between the two concepts. But just as I don't really want the local police to become enraged when I cross a line, I find this kind of response (and again, I've seen Bogost do it far better and with greater restraint elsewhere) off-putting to say the least. One comment on his post referred to Bogost's "war" against gamification; I'm just not sure that's the most productive approach to addressing its rise.
Ed Webb

Gaming the System in a System of Gaming: The Inherent Nature of Games in Pedagogy (aka,... - 4 views

  •  
    NB Roger Travis' remark in Buzz here: https://profiles.google.com/schrmr/posts/S6p2Hknyxez
Ed Webb

A COMPUTERLESS VIDEOGAME MODDING WORKSHOP | Molleindustria - 5 views

  •  
    Thank you, sir: we were *just* talking about not only games and rhetoric/ideology last week but several Molle Industria games in particular in my Persuasive Media class. I'm posting a quick entry on our class blog (http://acpm12.wordpress.com/).
  •  
    Very cool. (Molle has a blog? To the RSS reader!)
Brett Boessen

Playfic - 5 views

  •  
    Someone took Inform 7 and made a webapp out of it!
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    Nice find!
  •  
    Yes indeed. I wonder if it's easier than author in than Inform.
  •  
    Looks like its just a port of Inform to a web interface: same two-part backstage/frontstage formatting of the screen, same language engine running it. The difference, which is pretty awesome, seems to be that you can post your stories to their site so others can read and comment on them. (If I'm reading it correctly.)
Bryan Alexander

What Can a Videogame Tell Us About How Economies Work? - 3 views

  •  
    By Jamin Warren Posted 03.29.2012 at 10:13 am On October 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill into law, delivering $450 billion to failing banks on the premise that it would prevent their collapse and stimulate a faltering economy.
Bryan Alexander

The evolution of the analyst: turning tactical analysts into strategic thinkers - 4 views

  •  
    The post below is courtesy of Tom Fisher of Imagenetic simulations, who writes about his recent work developing a simulation for use in training financial intelligence units in strategic analysis.-RB I knew we were on to someone when, mid-course, a student approached me with a problem. Tom, we've got a problem.
Bryan Alexander

Anthropology of Social Behavior in BioShock - 2 views

  •  
    While playing BioShock, we are conducting an anthropological investigation that has a direct effect on how we interact with the narrative and the choices we make. Similar to Fallout 3, as discussed in Trevor's post, we are given the chance to explore a world, make our interpretations about what it means, and directly apply these to the game.
Brett Boessen

The "Rattomorphism" of Gamification | Critical Gaming Project - 3 views

  • the revelation born out in long term studies is that ultimately it backfires. Over time, people engaged in activities that are structured by and sustained through operant conditioning grow to resent or hate those activities, and their creativity in approach as well as their productivity declines.
  • Ian Bogost has done an excellent job identifying gamification rhetoric as bullshit, and suggesting many of its products are exploitationware. In light of Kohn’s work we are compelled to add that the logic of gamification is the logic of corrosion
  • If the goal is to get users to simply DO something, then the logic of gamification may not read as corrosive – just effective
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But if quality of action, emotional engagement, and development over time matter at all, we should be concerned about the corrosive conditioning the techniques of gamification entail
  • The problem is that there is no such thing as a “game layer,” if we understand “game” to mean something more than an assemblage of techniques we find in games
  • What we are really talking about here is more like a “reward layer,” or more abstractly, an activity “feedback layer” that draws its inspiration from techniques associated with games, and thus evokes expectations of gameplay
  •  
    The final bit is what I said to Bogost when he was in town earlier this year, shortly after his post in the link. If there's an upshot to "gamification" as a movement and idea, it's that our feedback systems are woefully underdesigned. Not everything needs to be made "fun," but clear goals and feedback could make a lot of things less un-fun.
Ed Webb

Assassin's Creed IV, Ubiculturality, and Stede Bonnet: an Invitation | Play The Past - 2 views

  •  
    A fine way to think about history in these games. I like the preceding post as well, http://www.playthepast.org/?p=4260 .
Bryan Alexander

Teaching international relations through popular games, culture and simulations (Part 1) - 4 views

  •  
    PAXsims is pleased to feature a number of blog posts from David Romano (Missouri State University) on teaching International Relations through popular games, culture and simulations. Today he introduces the topic. Stay tuned for parts two, three, four, and five in the near future. * * * Introduction Politics as "the struggle for power" surrounds us.
  •  
    Nice, just sent the general paxsims site to Mike Fratanuano last week.
1 - 20 of 25 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page