The Course of Empire

Update (7 Feb): For a sketch of the Hait­ian infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture, check out Michael Deibert’s post from Slate, Hait­ian Radio Returns to the Air.


Orig­i­nal Post

I won­der how oth­ers feel about this newly-listed MIT Media Lab course (spring 2010). On the one hand, there’s a lot here to be admired: The course is clearly the prod­uct of agile thought. It is problem-based, socially-relevant, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary teach­ing with­out a net. Laudable.

MAS963 | KrikKrak
A project-based class to develop new tech­nolo­gies and edu­ca­tional tools to help rev­o­lu­tion­ize Hait­ian soci­ety. We will explore viable con­texts for pro­mot­ing self-expression, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, lit­er­acy and numer­acy, and dig­i­tal governance, given the chal­lenges within the soci­ety. Top­ics will include sensors, language, music, com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods of teach­ing and learn­ing, civic engage­ment and social media.  “

But then there’s that phrase: “tools to help rev­o­lu­tion­ize Hait­ian soci­ety.” What does that mean, pre­cisely? Rev­o­lu­tion­ize? For whom? At whose behest? I am no expert on Hait­ian his­tory, but I imag­ine that out­siders with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary agenda have always played a big role in Haiti.

Par­tic­i­pants will choose a soci­etal prob­lem, devise a solu­tion, then spend the last week of April in Haiti field test­ing and doc­u­ment­ing their solution.

DessalinesCU.jpg

So maybe Haiti is doomed to have us help. Still, half a semester’s worth of earnest grad school con­ver­sa­tion about Haiti does not an expert make. I’ve no doubt that there will be all sorts of IRB over­sight and so forth, and yet: Maybe we should hold off on exper­i­men­tal tools for dig­i­tal gov­er­nance until we staunch the flow of slaves, intro­duce clean water, and oth­er­wise ease the direst poverty in the West­ern hemi­sphere. So far, we’ve been spec­tac­u­larly unsuc­cess­ful in rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing Haiti.

NB: The course is part of a larger ini­tia­tive within the MIT Media Lab called Krik Krak.

As the world responds to this dis­as­ter, we pause to think about applic­a­ble roles of energy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies in the long nation re-building efforts to come. What began as an IAP work­shop at the Media Lab focus­ing on the Jan­u­ary 12th cri­sis in Haiti will con­tinue as a lec­ture series, a string of projects and con­tin­ued dis­cus­sions on the his­tory, re-construction and nation-building of Haiti.

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Jürgen Habermas (JHabermas) on Twitter

Update: Accord­ing to @JohnathanStray, the Haber­mas account was a ruse. I’ll bet Rhein­gold is rolling his eyes.


So, this is fun.

Jür­gen Haber­mas (JHaber­mas) on Twit­ter.

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Kirschenbaum’s Simulations Course at UMD

Matthew Kirschen­baum, over at UMD, is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and the Asso­ciate Direc­tor of MITH, the Mary­land Insti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in the Human­i­ties. His blog is chock full of inter­est­ing stuff, and his tweets are prolific.

A year ago, he pub­lished a good lit­tle arti­cle in the Chron­i­cle on why human­i­ties stu­dents must be taught to code, an issue that is near to my heart (cf. Ulmer, “Aca­d­e­mic Dis­course in the Age of Tele­vi­sion,” and Moulthroup, “Rethink­ing Schol­ar­ship in the Days of Seri­ous Play.”)

Today, he’s pub­lished his syl­labus for a grad­u­ate course on sim­u­la­tion (PDF down­load). The read­ings are lit­er­ate, diverse, com­pre­hen­sive. It looks like a mar­velous class.

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Thesis Tweetstream

Collegium_Georgetown_seal.gifIn addi­tion to my work on games, play, and vir­tual worlds at The Pro­gram in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Cul­ture, and Tech­nol­ogy, I am for­tu­nate enough to coor­di­nate the under­grad­u­ate senior sem­i­nar in Amer­i­can Stud­ies at George­town. It’s a fan­tas­tic job. One of the goals of my work with these stu­dents is to find novel ways of lever­ag­ing tech­nol­ogy in the pro­duc­tion of their senior theses.

This year, we’re mak­ing daily use of Twit­ter to plot the ups and downs of our research. I call it the The­sis Tweetstream.

You can look in on our progress by vis­it­ing the auto­mated, pub­lic tweet-wall I’ve built (be sure to give it time to load):

twitter.myamericanstudies.com

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A Neophyte Takes on the Command-Line Interface

This has been cov­ered in a few places, includ­ing Hyper­com­pen­dia and East­gate’s use­ful HTLit.com, but it’s worth men­tion­ing again.

Dig­i­tal lit­er­acy scholar Den­nis Jerz set his eleven-year-old child in front of Colosal Cave Adven­ture and — using a piece of soft­ware like Screen­flow — cap­tured both the unfold­ing of the game on-screen and the young gamer’s inter­ac­tion with his father as he played. The exam­ple is rich because it is so raw (even if it is edited). A great schol­arly use of the technology.

Stacey Mason, at HTLit.com, observes

Inter­est­ing to note are Peter’s ques­tions to his father, which are all highly influ­enced by his expe­ri­ence with other soft­ware as he tries to draw cor­re­la­tions to the new form. He asks, “If a word isn’t rec­og­nized, can I add it to the dictionary?”

It is worth point­ing out that the roots of some great schol­ar­ship in play and the ludic come from the first impres­sions of par­ents as they watch their own kids romp about and learn: Piaget comes to mind, for exam­ple; and James Paul Gee has repeat­edly sug­gested that it was his grand­son who ini­tially inter­ested him in the power of video games.

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Syllabus: Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes

Now here is a class from which we could all learn something.

atari logo

Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Spe­cial Top­ics in Game Design and Analy­sis, Spring 2010. Geor­gia Insti­tute of Technology.

Hacks are works pro­duced by mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions to exist­ing games by dis­as­sem­bling bina­ries, ana­lyz­ing the mean­ing and pur­pose of the result­ing source code, iden­ti­fy­ing desir­able changes (whether slight or sig­nif­i­cant) and imple­ment­ing those changes.

Remakes are recre­ations of ear­lier works, irre­spec­tive of the hard­ware plat­form of orig­i­nal cre­ation or recre­ation. Remakes have a long his­tory in other media, par­tic­u­larly in film and tele­vi­sion, as well as in com­mer­cial videogames.

Demakes are retro-inspired reimag­in­ings of mod­ern games, as if they had been cre­ated on ear­lier hard­ware. Demakes are not nec­es­sar­ily cre­ated to run on older machines, but their design and behav­ior are con­strained by the real or per­ceived con­straints of vin­tage systems.

I adore the empha­sis on tech­no­log­i­cal pro­duc­tion. Notice that it is not sub­servient to the­ory, or even dis­tinct from it: Engage­ment with the tech­nol­ogy is, in itself, an act of theo­ria, an act of contemplation.

Review the syl­labus at Bogost’s website.

via Lori Emer­son.

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Now Playing: Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes

What we play as schol­ars is as impor­tant as what we read. Gam­ing is expe­ri­en­tial, and there is no sub­sti­tute for this activ­ity. Many — if not most — of the best thinkers in the field rec­og­nize this, and a wealth of books and arti­cles on the topic of games and dig­i­tal play are sus­tained by myr­iad first-person ref­er­ences to in-game expe­ri­ence. This is not idle boast­ing: This is the digital.

For the sake of con­trast, take a moment and reflect on how fre­quently the aver­age spe­cial­ist in, say, the con­tem­po­rary novel talks about her per­sonal expe­ri­ence as a reader. Or, more point­edly, how often she explic­itly roots her cri­tique in first-hand knowl­edge of the con­struc­tion of fiction.

While this approach may meet with skep­ti­cism in con­ven­tional acad­eme, the most com­pelling con­tem­po­rary schol­ar­ship in fields like game stud­ies comes, in fact, from scholar-hybrids, whose intel­lec­tual pro­duc­tion is not lim­ited to (or by) the writ­ten word. See, e.g., Ian Bogost, DJ Spooky, Nick Mont­fort, Stu­art Moulthrop, Jane McGo­ni­gal, and a host of oth­ers. This blur­ring of con­ven­tion­ally dis­tinct intel­lec­tual cat­e­gories (theo­ria and praxis) is, I think, a demand of dig­i­tal­ity, and mer­its fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion (indeed, it is not unre­lated to the issues raised in my last post).

But I want to use this post to innau­gu­rate a new “fea­ture” of this blog, Now Play­ing. With it, I intend sim­ply to make men­tion of the games in which I am cur­rently invested, and offer per­haps a word or two about them.

MightandMagic_Box.jpgSome­times it is hard to iden­tify a sin­gle game which defines recent expe­ri­ence, but occa­sion­ally it is a sim­ple mat­ter. This week, it is clearly Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes (Ubisoft, 2009). Exclu­sive to the Nin­tendo DS, this is the first game I’ve played on the DS that feels as though it makes use of that platform’s pecu­liar affor­dances (dual screen dis­play, sin­gle touch screen, min­i­mal res­o­lu­tion, sty­lus). An RPG-puzzler hybrid in the tra­di­tion of Puz­zle Quest, Clash of Heroes boasts an amus­ing, even coher­ent, story line, charm­ing graph­ics, and an engag­ing puz­zle form (one loosely based on another offer­ing from one of the devel­op­ers, Crit­ter Crunch).

The low-res graph­ics, tiny sprites, and ambigu­ous puz­zle are well-served by the detailed nar­ra­tive, which works to define and re-define the specifics of the puz­zle in order to keep you engaged, even as you are see­ing (quite lit­er­ally) the same tiny icons on the screen, again and again. I am just over 20% of my way into the game, and it remains a com­pelling play.

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On The Turtlenecked Hairshirt

Pro­fes­sor Bogost, at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, con­tin­ues to be one of my favorite con­tem­po­rary thinkers on mat­ters dig­i­tal. Fol­low­ing close on the end of MLA 09, he has weighed in on recent rumi­na­tions about the direc­tion of the human­i­ties with a brief, sim­mer­ing note. He writes:

Human­ists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the com­mon­est of which is the fetid fes­ter of a hypo­thet­i­cal social­ist dream­world, one that has become far more dis­con­nected with labor and mate­r­ial than the neolib­er­al­ism it claims to replace.

And again,

We are not cen­tral because we have cho­sen to be mar­ginal, for to be cen­tral would be to vio­late the neces­sity of mar­gin­al­ity. We prac­tice the monas­tic wor­ship of a sec­u­lar God we divined in order to kill again, mis­tak­ing our­selves for the mad­men of our fan­tasies. We are masochists in hedo­nists’ cloth­ing. We are tweed demolitionists.

It’s impor­tant to note that the acid­ity of Bogost’s lan­guage is not run-of-the-mill Inter­net hyper­bole: In my esti­mate, at least, it is a cal­cu­lated and care­ful rhetoric. And that makes him wor­thy of our attention.

Read The Turtle­necked Hair­shirt at Ian Bogost’s blog (n.b. that there are sev­eral com­ments worth read­ing, too). Bogost’s asser­tions are timely, but not unprece­dented, and it is impor­tant to reflect on the simul­tane­ity of the rise of the dig­i­tal, the death of The­ory, and recent inter­est in a phi­los­o­phy that exceeds con­ven­tional anthro­pocen­tric bounds. It fol­lows, inevitably, that it is time to ask what all of this means for the uni­ver­sity, and for acad­eme. To my mind, it is Greg Ulmer who has already done some ter­rific — if some­times uncanny — think­ing on the matter.

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