Narrative rules!

Sorry I’m late posting. I have been incapacitated by some manner of feverish bug since late last week. Hopefully this post isn’t completely apart from what was discussed today in class; if it is, I hope the divergence is productive. Lastly, I had hoped to make this a bit shorter, but this is what I ended up with. Pick and choose where you’d like to engage me, if at all – my thoughts on this are multifarious and scattered.

The slugfest between ludology and narratology (“There was no slugfest!” pipes an indignant Mr. Bogost) now sufficiently abated, we are left with a somewhat more nuanced view of the interplay between systems of rules and narratives in video games. According to Bogost, the torchbearer is not Aarseth, but Juul, who in his earnest syncretism admits that a game can be meaningfully ludic and fictive. What a relief!

As an avid consumer of single-player, story-driven games, it was difficult for me to even humor the idea that video games narratives could be, as Eskelinen reductively has it, “just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games,” “marketing tools” devoid of meaning. I knew this couldn’t be the case. I cut my teeth on Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and Star Ocean—games that exist to immerse the player in a fantastical story. And yet, I also knew that the gameness of games could not reside in traditional narrative. It would have to be a very specific kind of game narrative, or else (as Roger Ebert argues*) the game would simply be a representation of another form.

At the moment, I tend toward the school of thought that says a game is inescapably a kind of narrative. I am not speaking of the sweeping plots of a 100-hour long RPG, but the inherent quality of a game, be it Monopoly or Texas Hold ‘Em or a Halo frag-fest. It begins, it twists, it rises, it climaxes, and it often even settles into a dénouement (that sad realization, some time before the actual end of a game, that someone else has already won). The form and action of each game tells its own story. This is to say nothing of the fact that most classic games (though, to be honest, I’ve done no research at all on the topic) seem to have originated as simulations of warfare—born from narrative.

If I am on the right track, I believe there is an exciting distinction to draw here between the narrative inescapably enacted by the game system and the “story” rendered on top of it. This is difficult to illustrate with a modern game, but take Tetris, for example. As much as someone like Aarseth may decry me for saying so, I believe there is a meaningful (if hardly singular) narrative to Tetris. But what would happen if the creators decided to superimpose a new canonic narrative atop it? What would it mean? And what happens if that new narrative clashes with the existing narrative order? Would it resemble the poetry of an amateur, in which the sounds clash disharmoniously with the themes? I am still working out this idea, but I think it can be effectively demonstrated that there are games that enact one narrative by way of gameplay and another clashing narrative “story.”

Bogost, for his part, wants to blow the whole house down. He applies Levi Bryant’s flat ontology to what he sees as the hierarchized ontology of video games (giving primacy to the rules, privileging the player-game relationship), opening up a vast array of new meaningful connections to explore. To some extent he shares an ideal in common with Steven Jones, who also wants to expand out and away from the ludic model. Jones adopts Genette’s concept of paratext, opening it up to refer to the complete production and reception of the work by players, reviewers, fans, critics, and so on.

Operating from a new textual studies angle, he applies the pivot away from authorial absoluteness and textual authority in books to video games: our studies should “break the hermetic seal of the text” (a phrase he deploys with some frequency) in order “to interpret across the boundary dividing the formal aesthetic object from the social world into which it is received” (93).

His main concern does indeed lie with the social world of the game and the gamer. I will leave you with what I think is the best distillation of Jones’ very valuable work, with just one caution. By placing all his eggs in the basket of social, “threshold” gaming, Jones is doing no small injustice to the immensely successful and innovative field of immersive single-player RPGs. These are not “Where’s the Cheetos?” type experiences—these are head-first dives into fully absorptive worlds. Jones seems aware that he is short-changing certain types of gaming experiences, offering the defense that shallow gaming is the norm. Maybe—but immersion-gaming is no niche.

            “As with the complex verbal texts we study, we need to understand games such as Halo as existing at the center of a kind of spreading possibility space, a multidimensional virtual grid running off in many directions, the imagined vectors of any number of possible moves, performances, or instances of gameplay, all of which are contained, in potential, within the “code” of the object itself, whether or not any particular state of the game or sector of the grid is activated at any particular time.” -S. Jones

*http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Tuition Scholarships

Hi all,

Tuition scholarships for DHSI are still available. Check out this link!

http://dhsi.org/scholarships.php

Demystifying Digital Humanities Workshop Link

If you can't make it to the Demystifying Digital Humanities workshops this quarter,  highlights are posted here:

http://www.paigemorgan.net/demystifyingDH/updates/

The first session was fun, around thirty-five people, free breakfast plus biscuits. But I know, 9:30 AM on Saturday is tricky. Next Saturday is "professionalizing your online social presence".

Appropriation and copyright

Today's discussion reminded me of this video.

"palimpsest of perception"

"Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order. The end product on this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several micro-seconds..."

Appropriating existing work, or the "cut" as Paul Miller calls it, can create something new when the remix comments on the original, when knowledge of the original in its original context informs the new context. The re-appropriation becomes an extension of the original work and the conversation started by the original work. When the original is not acknowledged as being its own unique work with significance in its own right, appropriation seems more like theft and less like reference. In the second case, you are laying claim to the other work's originality. Paul Miller's "Rebirth of a Nation," xtine burrough's "O Browser My Browser", and Kenneth Goldsmith's "Traffic" are all framed in response to another work or conversation. However, do we need to recognize the original in order to understand the remix? I could recognize that "Rebirth of a Nation" contained clips of "Birth of a Nation," but if the music was also sampled from other sources, I couldn't tell. Is the remix significant in its own right?

On a separate note, in the links from Christine Sundt's "Copyright and Art" were descriptions of two court cases involving the copyright of form, Meshworks vs. Toyota and Bridgeman vs. Corel. In both cases the plaintiffs argued that their work was protected by copyright and in both cases the defendants argued, successfully, that the work was not protected by copyright because work expressed no originality. In the first case, the work was the 3D modeling of an existing car (designed by the defendant, Toyota), and in the second case, the work in question was photographic reproductions of 2D fine art. Since the intent of both works was to portray with as much fidelity as possible an existing work, the courts ruled that they did not contain expressiveness or uniqueness, only technical skill. So what does it mean when technical skill, or craft, is completely reproducible without renumeration toward the craftsperson? Does it imply that there is no new contribution in crafts, just execution of existing know-how?

(On a really separate note, reading "Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head" reminded me of The Onion's obituary for J.D. Salinger from 2010: http://www.theonion.com/articles/bunch-of-phonies-mourn-jd-salinger,2901/)

Tanya Auerbach's Alphabetized Bible

An article from SF Gate

Interface and Interface Problems

Hello everyone,

SO, I've lost whatever scrap of paper on which I wrote down what week I was supposed to do the blog.  I think it was this week because of a cryptic scrawl in my notebook... if it is someone else's week, I hope that this isn't a terrible usurpation.  I also apologize for my lengthy and out-of-place post in the first week--I guess I've been confused on multiple counts.  Here's hoping that I know what's going on tonight.

Post Proper:

There’s something delightful about flipping between all the various poetry websites that we were given to investigate.  I’ve seen most of them before (not the Electronic Poetry Center), but never as a complex, in each other’s context.  Looking at them to see their interface reveals a wealth of rhetorical moves—some of which are totally bewildering.  First example from Poets.org:

To me, this was the most interesting for its (for me) incongruities that I know are designed to create and maintain a certain powerful mystique of poetry.  Lorca’s gazing out at me, talking about a pretty girl and olives.  The poem of the day is one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s early pseudocidal nature poems.  Lucile Clifton and Natasha Trethaway are “This Week’s Highlights.”  The banner asks me, “What do you see as the role of the poet in today’s culture?” before I realizes that it is actually asking a bunch of poets—answers they provide are more or less whimsical, more or less useful.  BUT the real payoff, the crème, is when I turned to the drop-down menu I’d never used before (over the search bar, which I had).  I was shocked when the drop down menu began sorting poems for me—what’ll it be, mister?  Nature or Poems for Every Occasion?  It gives the impression that all the poems on the website are shuffled into these broad and cliched categories.  For example:

Nature contains Animals, and Animals: Sharks, Birds, Fish.  The interface is directing me as if the only poems about animals were about sharks, birds, and fish.  No mention that sharks ARE fish.  I did end up figuring out that Poets.org works with Discovery’s “Shark Week.”  Why cats did not make the list is still vague (poor Geoffrey). 

To put Poets.org in conversation with Drucker:

I think it is clear that the page isn’t oriented to the “user” so much as it is oriented to shape the user’s perception of the content of the website.  By suggesting that the user navigate through pre-designed pathways, the site determines the sight.  This troubles me because the American Academy of Poets is in a powerful position of authority and exercises this authority most on the people who show up to the website without necessarily knowing what they are looking for.  It’s less “codependence and contingency, the performative experience of knowing produced in a relationship between environment and subject” and more just codependency: “a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (as in an addiction); and in broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of or control of another.”  The website gives the impression of being designed for the subjectivity of the user, but that’s not really the case.  Like when I got my first collected Millay when I was in high school and the dust jacket had not her picture but a picture of J.D. McClatchy, then head of the Academy (and who wrote the introduction). 

Not that the other websites are little utopias.  The Poetry Foundation’s iphone app adds a playful randomness, but still defines the input categories and the output content.  Penn Sound’s homepage troubles Charles Bernstein’s railing against “official verse culture” at Bothell a few weekends ago by being completely official (and listing him as the no. 1 “Featured resource”). 

 

 

Even further blurring of media boundaries...

Just a little point of interest: I guess this has been out for a little over a month now, but I just came across this blog post about Amazon's linking of Audible audiobooks and Kindle e-books. As the blog post author points out, this could bring some interesting changes for academics, in that it might allow the kinds of note taking practices we normally associate with written text to become associated with audible text. Perhaps that can be related to much older practices of reading and composition that we discussed in class (e.g., having a slave read a book out loud)?

(On an only tangentially related note, I'm also indebted to that original blog post for pointing out to me that most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably totally illiterate. Humorous, of course, but also an interesting train of thought regarding the political implications of the changes we've been discussing.)

"Abstraction is hiding things"

A couple of days ago, I came across David Kaiser's recent review of Turing's Cathedral in the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n18/david-kaiser/boiling-electrons)*. The article snagged my interest because it touches on something we mentioned briefly in the last class: the historical trajectory of the term "computer" as it moved from designating a person to a machine.

Kaiser notes that during WWII, complex calculations "were largely carried out by chains of human operators armed with handheld Marchant calculators," in a process made possible by dividing "the calculations into discrete steps." After this division, "assistants – often the young wives of the laboratory’s technical staff – would crunch the numbers, each one performing the same mathematical operation over and over again. One of them would square any number given to her; another would add two numbers and pass the result to the next down the line."

I mention this tidbit about the origins of computing because it points to something important if we are to think about code in any critical or systematic way: Historically, the instructions for computing precede the hardware for computing.

The LRB article also goes on to talk about one of the first computers, Eniac. Eniac could execute only fixed programs, "which had to be set in advance by physically rewiring components before any calculations could be performed." Rewiring those components "took weeks of swapping cables, alternating switches, checking and rechecking the resulting combinations." In the case of Eniac, software--if it can even be considered as such--is identical with hardware.

The two points--computers as people, and the rigidity of Eniac's instructions--problematize what we might intuitively think of when we hear the term "software." Are instructions themselves alone enough to constitute software? What exactly are we talking about when we talk about code?

In keeping with the arguments we saw in "Indermediation," Hayles seems to count code as a series of layers, each distinguished by increasing complexity. For Halyes, signifiers start as voltages, and signifieds are "the interpretations that other layers of code give these voltages." The strange thing about this scheme, however, is that it is not precisely clear where hardware ends and software/code begins. (This problem even creeps into Marino's CCS, when he notes that attention to hardware issues such a processor speed may be key to CCS.) With these definitions alone, it seems that the rigid programs of Eniac could be software. But if that is the case, what is to differentiate between software and medium? What is the difference between using software to shape output on a screen and using a pencil to shape letters on a page? Can we distinguish varying levels of materiality between the two processes?

If Hayles points to the continuity between hardware and software, Manovich points to the continuity between software and larger, non-computing, human enterprises. For Manovich, cultural software is much more than a metaphor: Software quite literally underlies most--if not all--contemporary production of culture. This is, of course, what makes it worth studying--and yet it is not clear why software should be privileged over the material infrastructure and hardware that enables software in the first place. Is software more crucial to culture than a cobalt mine in central Africa?

Hayles quotes Accelerated C++: "Abstraction is selective ignorance." Abstraction--and selective ignorance--is necessary in defining any object of study. So the question is: Are software/code studies abstracted enough to be useful frames for analysis?


-----------------------------------------------
*I'm afraid that the article is behind a pay wall. I checked if UW has library access to it, and it does... in microfilm. How's that for material constraints?

"Cognition is Recognition"

Hello everyone,

I'm going to return to Hayles for a moment.  I brought up this passage in class because I found it particularly confusing:

What evidence is there that computers can function as cognizers, that is, as agents capable of intensionality, the "aboutness" that makes a subject (or an agent) capable of referring to something outside of itself? Recalling John Searle's Chinese room analogy, we may also add the requirement that in some way the computer must understand what it is about in order to be considered a cognizer in the strong sense.⁸ Here I turn to the research program of Douglas Hofstadter, who in collaboration [End Page 102]with several generations of graduate students has devoted himself to investigating this issue.

 

This passage implies a two-part definition of cognizer: a cognizer is intenSional, capable of referring to something outside of itself.  The second is that it must "understand what it is about."  I followed the "Chinese Room" to Wikipedia, where I found a very relevant/interesting summary of the thought experiement by John Searle, which boils down to: if a person is translating a language they do not know via an analog program, but are translating it in a  way that their translation is understandable by someone who does know the language, does the translator understand?  Searle wants us to say, "of course not!"  It's not a real response.  Others disagree (see page).

The trouble seems to hinge on what differentiates a reaction from a (legitimate) response.  Chemicals can have reactions.  Systems can be stimulated.  When does thinking start? I actually run into this issue a lot in my research on the philosophy the animal-human divide and plant consciousness.  My intuition feels that consciousness must be a sliding scale without a sort of theoretical Rubicon past which something is aware and before which it is a pile of minerals.  Emergence might provide a possible answer... 

One example from my research: in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida examines the history of the philosophy of the animal, and explicitly references the problems of response.  I am still figuring out what he means, but I thought I'd repeat a particularly great example from Porphyry, a Neoplatonist writing about ethical vegetarianism in the Roman Empire:

"It is reported that even some voiceless animals readily respond to their masters, more so than a human friend would.  A lamprey which belonged to the Roman Crassus would come to him when called by name, and had such an effect on him that he mourned when it died, though he had earlier bourne with modertion the loss of three children" (qtd. in Derrida, 85). 

Yep, folks, your parasitic mouthless fish is capable of response. 

We love Crassus!

These thoughts might not hold together as well as I'd hoped they would.  Waiting for the emergent catalysis of my research...

Ben Kicks Things Off

Ben was kind enough to send me his blog posting before class today!  Here it is, an excellent kick-off to a discussion of this week's material:

Katherine Hayles’s observation that “digitality also leaves its mark” (98) seems to resonate with the most recent developments in media delivery and consumer technology.  This is to say, phenomena like identity theft and the mash-up seem to point to some significant incursion into the everyday of digital processes and so surely print, too, should bear some mark of these changes.  Specifically, she points to the increased “vitality” (98) of best-selling novels, and understanding “vitality” in a cognitive frame as evocative of an abundance of images one would have to agree.  What she is asking, however, is whether “computation” has not come to work both metaphorically and literally in the production and consumption of literature.  A similar line of questioning appears in the Ciccoricco article: Is close reading doomed when words and windows tend toward perpetual movement?  Ciccoricco’s call for “new bibliographical units” (7) rings hollow when he claims digital literature doesn’t necessarily require slow reading (only that a text be read again and again – presumably quickly), although the thrust of the claim is sufficiently clear: be they digital or digitalized, such texts seem to significantly enhance the cognitive processes in reading.  

This dynamic is captured in Hayles’s historicized “intermediation.”  Intermediation relies on the perpetually refined tools built into a text that facilitate “fluidity,” with consequences for narrative, orthography, and ultimately the human-text dynamic.  In her words they become “partners in a dynamic heterarchy” (100) in which the partnership intends toward increasingly sophisticated levels of cognition.  In an electronic text, this is performed for the reader – a phenomenon emphasized by Ciccoricco in his discussion of the tendency in electronic texts to enfold within themselves their own paratexts (7).   The question of “performance” in a text, however, still remains.  Ciccoricco writes that a close reading of imagesand sound in relation to a text is possible in print environments but “only to an extent” (8).  Print texts, he suggests, do not execute their code.  What of the hypothetical text that includes passages consisting of code embedded in its prose?  Does he exclude the print textbook that includes images and sound collections on a CD-ROM?  In these cases, isn’t the performance merely a matter of time and space?