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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.
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).
Victoria Pullen

Participation Nation - 2 views

interactive.usc.edu/...20090327-participat.php

3GSummit games education

shared by Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Victoria Pullen on 17 Aug 10
     
    Tracy Fullerton's project with USC's Interactive Media Division. "The prototype focuses on the constitutional crisis surrounding school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. A set of webisodes and a graphic novel provide the background story of this crisis, while the central "Debate Game" asks players to use the people, laws and values from the era to support two out of three points of the argument for or against school integration, addressing questions like "Should the federal government intervene?", "Is Media coverage swaying public opinion?", and "Are civil rights woth risking a constitutional crisis?" Players can take the side of the "Forces of Change" or the "Status Quo" in debate over the constitutional issues that shaped the country."
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.
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.
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

Watching violent TV or video games desensitizes teenagers and may promote more aggressive behavior, new study finds - 4 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...101018211820.htm

gaming games violence K12 adolescents

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10
     
    Hmmm. I'd like some expert opinion on this...
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 19 Oct 10
     
    Well I wouldn't call myself an expert, although I _have_ looked at this issue several times before with students. The usual elements are here: very small sample size, heavily controlled experiment, undefined categories ("low," "mild"), and murky description of the results (although that could definitely be the fault of the journalist reporting the findings, too). However, these are all possible issues with any social science experiment. There are some other things that often come with media effects specifically. If you haven't seen David Gauntlett's "Ten Things Wrong with media Effects Research," it's worth a look: concise but packed with criticism (and easy to use in class). http://www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm Otherwise, to me this sounds like the same research that occasionally comes out about games and violence, and has been so for at least a decade. The new wrinkle here could be the MRI readings, and I'll admit I'm no expert there either. But given the limited degree to which science really understands the relationships between thought, behavior, and brain activity, I'm not sure the correlations they're showing in the evidence are all that helpful either.
  • Bryan Alexander on 19 Oct 10
     
    I don't have much to add to Brett's fine comment. Yeah, this is part of a kind of study which shows that well-produced media tends to elicit emotions. Er, yes. There are some hilarious stories about porn like this. But yes, the big deal is MRI, over time. I don't know if the rest of the boys' experience has been successfully gapped out.
  • Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10
     
    MRI will maybe change things. Not for the better, I fear. I'm watching the emerging field here: http://www.diigo.com/user/edwebb/neurocinematics
Bryan Alexander

Breakaway Game-free online football/soccer game - 1 views

breakawaygame.com

games liberaleducation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 25 May 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 May 12
     
    A free internet game about football/soccer designed by Champlain College students at the Emergent Media Center with the UNFPA and Population Media Center
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

Controversial Videogame on the Battle of Fallujah | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/200861

Ethics Iraq Fallujah War

shared by Todd Bryant on 12 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Todd Bryant on 12 Jun 09
     
    Game being created about Battle of Fallujah. Touches on comparison to documentary, and history of backlash against new media and portrayal of war.
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

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:
Ed Webb

Admongo, the government video game that teaches kids about the perils of advertising. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine - 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
Todd Bryant

Fate of the World - 2 views

fateoftheworld.net

shared by Todd Bryant on 05 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Todd Bryant on 05 Sep 11
     
    Climate Change Sim
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Sep 11
     
    I've been playing it for a while. Very interesting on several levels. First, it's very media-intensive. Lots of art, sound, big-screen design, many media assets. Second, the interface is... odd. It's anchored on cards, which might work better offline. Third, it's not easy! Things fall apart quickly.
  • Todd Bryant on 06 Sep 11
     
    What are the principal factors under your control? Is it more of an environmental science or political science game?
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Sep 11
     
    Grand strategy, with several domains at a very macro-level: economics, energy, organization.
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.
Ed Webb

Denmark's TV2 Uses Assassin's Creed Game Image For Syria Report - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...v2-syria-report_n_2853875.html

games media Syria Denmark television

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 12 Mar 13
     
    Check your sources and always give attribution!
  • Bryan Alexander on 15 Mar 13
     
    And what a fun, lovely game it is.
Ed Webb

A COMPUTERLESS VIDEOGAME MODDING WORKSHOP | Molleindustria - 5 views

www.molleindustria.org/...ess-videogame-modding-workshop

games gaming modding

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12
     
    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/).
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Oct 12
     
    Very cool. (Molle has a blog? To the RSS reader!)
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