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Ed Webb

Admongo, the government video game that teaches kids about the perils of advertising. -... - 5 views

www.slate.com/2253449

gaming game government USG advertising education children kids K12

shared by Ed Webb on 11 May 10 - Cached
  • Admongo.gov, the new Web site from the Federal Trade Commission, seeks to educate kids ages 8 to 12 about the nuances of marketing. In the Admongo video game, players confronts advertisements at every turn—at bus stops, in magazines, on TV, even as part of other video games within the video game. Whenever an ad appears (they're all for fictional products, including a soda, a cereal, a movie, and an acne wash), the player is encouraged to ask three questions: Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do
  • there's no evidence I know of showing that media literacy has an impact on consumer behavior. Ads target emotions, not logic. You can know you're being manipulated but still be manipulated. People talk about how media-savvy kids are these days, but that just means they recognize a lot of brands
  • the most interesting thing about Admongo is its emphasis on the ubiquity of ads. A previous FTC-designed game, called You Are Here, also urged kids to consider where ads come from and to examine the truth of marketing claims. But in Admongo, a major part of playing the game is understanding that ads can be anywhere and can take many different forms. The player encounters text-message ads, ads inside videogames, cross-promotions, and product placements. This element of Admongo is testament to the explosion of new advertising platforms and the fierce intensity of modern marketing. According to Linn, in 2008 American Idol—consistently a top-rated show for 2-11 year-olds—featured 4,151 product placements in its first 38 episodes, averaging 14 minutes of product placement on each show. Kids are now constantly in front of screens of all kinds, and those screens are brimming with ads that pretend they aren't ads. These days, just being able to recognize when you're being marketed to is a useful skill.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • check out the Admongo poster, which the FTC includes with the package of curriculum materials it makes available to teachers. The poster is meant to be hung up in classrooms. It's an illustration that helps kids spot all the different places ads can appear, from cereal boxes to magazines to blimps in the sky. Ironically, in the poster's lower right corner is the logo for Scholastic—which worked with the FTC on the Admongo project, and which sells books and other products through its catalogs to a captive school-kid audience. "The Scholastic name helps in terms of getting our curriculum into classrooms," said one FTC representative I spoke to. "With Scholastic, you're talking about a known commodity for teachers, while they might not be that familiar with the FTC." Behold the power of branding, kids. And consider this a learning opportunity
  • Ed Webb on 11 May 10
     
    Persuasive game about, er, persuasion
Brett Boessen

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

depts.washington.edu/...-rattomorphism-of-gamification

games design production consumption theory criticism

shared by Brett Boessen on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 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
  • Erik Hanson on 23 Nov 11
     
    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

Wizards Productions' Online Multiplayer Arabic Games Experiences Viral Growth - 0 views

arabcrunch.com/...-experiences-viral-growth.html

games gaming middleeast Arab news

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Sep 09
     
    I just like living in a world where this happens: "The startup which specializes in Arabic online multiplayer games..."
Ed Webb

Learning through gaming - and game design - 1 views

edwebb.amplify.com/...through-gaming-and-game-design

education fun games gaming NITLE pedagogy students video game

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 25 Feb 10
     
    Great example of how the process of game design can be powerfully educational. If they've carried out the R&D process well, including beta testing, then the end-product should be educational as well, of course. I hope we'll see more of this kind of project, particularly from liberal arts institutions.
Brett Boessen

What Will They Do? Transmedia Producers as Narrative Architects « Asmedia - 5 views

asmith50.wordpress.com/...ducers-as-narrative-architects

transmedia production liberalarts games

shared by Brett Boessen on 12 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The transmedia producer thus holds a different type of skill set, one that draws connections across media forms and one that involves conceptualizing, analyzing, and designing experiences at the macro-level. It is a person that does not just dive into the transmedia realm with a laundry list of media to explore, but actually has a deep understanding of the relationship between content, context, and culture.
  • transmedia producers must understand the unique storytelling potential behind each media platform. Certain stories lend themselves to particular media and vice versa. And as more narrative complexities threaten to impede comprehension , transmedia producers guard against blatant inconsistencies and contradictions. The narrative structure they design must be durable and organized, all while allowing room for future construction and additions.
  • the transmedia producer will have an incredible knack for activating communities and rewarding collective intelligence.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Transmedia producers possess storytelling talent, yes, but they should also appreciate the complex relationship between story and game, author and audience, openness and closure, art and commodity. They are as well versed in any sector of the entertainment industry as they are in popular culture and fandom as a whole.
  • Brett Boessen on 12 Apr 10
     
    Is there a better description of the concrete skills a liberal arts education offers than the description of what transmedia producers do outlined here?
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Jason Mittell on 13 Apr 10
     
    Brett - Aaron's my former student, so I'll take your compliment once removed! He's a very smart fellow...
  • Brett Boessen on 13 Apr 10
     
    You know, that just makes complete sense now that you say that: it would be hard to imagine someone who was not the product of a solid liberal arts education making such a coherent and persuasive argument for its value in this way.
  • Bryan Alexander on 15 Apr 10
     
    Brett, the liberal arts connection really sings in passages like this: "The best architects draw on a range of influences, disciplines, and perspectives, taking into account history, theory, and criticism to develop innovating concepts. Likewise, I see a similar approach to the emerging field of transmedia studies..."
  • Brett Boessen on 15 Apr 10
     
    Agreed, Bryan. Media Studies has always been deeply interdisciplinary, and transmedia strikes me as pushing it even further in that direction (or perhaps pulling into itself the most interdisciplinary facets of MS).
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

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

BLOG « failbetter - 2 views

about.failbettergames.com/blog

games text storytelling platforms

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 17 Oct 12
     
    I sense possibilities. Maybe it will be a little more user-friendy than Inform 7.
  • Brett Boessen on 17 Oct 12
     
    I've been playing around with it a little bit; had my students look at it briefly last week. It is *more* user friendly in that there are forms and boxes for you to input your story elements (ie, a little more visual than Inform). It is *less* useful in that the product is always in the Fallen London format, ie, cards/decks are "dealt" and story elements are uncovered in a point-based system. So if you're not looking for that particular format to deliver your story, I'm not sure it's as flexible as Inform is. But I think it's pretty neat that they've opened up their process to the public, and their wiki is CHOCK full of ideas, tips, hints, and other useful stuff for producing an engaging story of the Fallen London variety. And, they've got a new game to play in addition to FL called Cabinet Noir which is set in Richelieu/Musketeers France and is fun in a more historically accurate (maybe?) way than FL was/is. Kudos to Failbetter all around, if you're into IF. :)
  • Bryan Alexander on 17 Oct 12
     
    Pretty usable. I quickly generated a French Revolution game/story. Would be fun to do that right.
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.
Brett Boessen

Raph's Website » Rules versus mechanics - 2 views

www.raphkoster.com/...rules-versus-mechanics

games fundamentals production design rules

shared by Brett Boessen on 15 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 15 Dec 11
     
    Nice fine-grained discussion of one designer's distinction between "rules" and "mechanics."
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.
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.
Ed Webb

Google Develops a Facebook Rival - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3292704575393531040685308.html

google facebook casual social games gaming

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • A Facebook spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate about Google's initiative but said the company expected new social-networking efforts by others and "looks forward to seeing what others have to offer."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 28 Jul 10
       
      Translation: "bring it!"
    • Bryan Alexander
      Bryan Alexander on 28 Jul 10
       
      Indeed. I note that Google is seeking gaming assistance in this quest.
  • Many users now rely on their friends on Facebook—not just Google—to discover content and products they can purchase on the Internet. And much of the content generated by users on Facebook is generally kept out of view of Google's search engine.
  • In an interview this week, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt declined to confirm the development of a social-networking service that would incorporate social games, rumored to be called "Google Me." When asked if Google's service might resemble Facebook's, Mr. Schmidt said "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For social-game developers, a successful Google offering would mean they wouldn't be so heavily dependent on Facebook, where the vast majority of users access the games. Consumers' appetite for social games is booming— Zynga's "Farmville" game has more than 60 million active monthly users—and that is attracting bigger players looking to tap new sources of growth. On Tuesday, Walt Disney Co. acquired Playdom for $563.2 million plus up to $200 million more if performance targets are reached. And retailer GameStop Corp. agreed to buy online game distributor Kongregate Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
  • Game developers pay Facebook 30% of the earnings from virtual-good purchases in their games. Google already has an online payment mechanism called Checkout that, in theory, it could use to collect payments for social games on its platform.
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.
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.
  • “oral tradition”
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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

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.
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