Update: According to @JohnathanStray, the Habermas account was a ruse. I’ll bet Rheingold is rolling his eyes.
So, this is fun.
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.
In 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):
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.
Now here is a class from which we could all learn something.
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.
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.
Sometimes 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.