I wish I were, I wish I might…

I wish I were, I wish I might…

 

I wish I were, I wish I might, I wish I were an orc tonight. Maybe some of the hundreds of thousands of World of Warcraft (WoW) players occasionally have this thought before they log in to level up their newest character. I say this because I think avatars in that game ring true to the original definition of “avatara” in Sanskrit, that is, incarnation. When people play games such as WoW one of the funnest parts is developing, changing, and building the identity of a character.

 

Through that character the player gets an easy chance to project a fantasized image of themselves in a quick and easy way. However, there is a difference between an avatar and a character from a book or a play, and that is that it is usually also contains characteristics that players acquire or “build-up” during the game. So in addition to representing the player’s identity, her avatar also represents her accomplishments. The best example of this is Sims Online where the players you meet and interact see not only a physical representation of you but also how skilled you are in a certain area, such as the player’s job.

 

Comparing that game to WoW reveals some striking similarities, but some key differences too. The most fascinating similarity to me is that in both games there is a wide variety of faces, hair, and skin tones to choose from, but the number of avatars possible is still reasonably finite. Presumably this is because it would be too complicated and hard-disk-space consuming to allow players to design their own unique avatars. This difference is not trivial because it means that with a finite number of avatars, players will try to appear as unique as possible to stand out. In both games this leads to an online avatar fashion world, where a player may see a rare or interesting looking avatar and then create a new character with similar or identical qualities.

 

But there is a crucial difference between the two games as well, and that is that the avatar in WoW actually matters in the sense that the race and class you choose defines your characters possible roles and niches, whereas in Sims Online a red-haired woman can be exactly identical to an elderly Asian man. For me, this increases the importance of avatars in WoW because avatars directly lead to the build-up of an online culture or society in a certain group. This is solid evidence, I think, for the eventual future of avatars: as they get better, they will allow a virtual society so real that it will resemble one ways we can’t even imagine; but it will be virtual because the avatars within will always fill in the sentence “I wish I were, I wish I might…”

Video- vs. board- Who gets the game?

What does the word game mean anyway? The standard response is of course that it depends on who you ask, and to make life interesting I am writing about two completely different points of view. The difference is night and day.

The first is a pseudo-academic one from Steven Poole. He begins his book Trigger Happy with a slightly dissonant analogy, where he compares the beginning of videogames to the beginnings of life on Earth. What caught my attention though was how he started off writing “video games” and then several pages later was just talking about “games”; it is implicit that he is using it for the sake of convenience, but he never does properly define game as far as I can tell.

Though Ren Reynolds would certainly agree with the statement “videogames, among people all over the world, are a social pleasure” (Poole 2000, 3). So what we have so far from Poole are that games are nebulous in their definition (hard to define and large in scope) and that they are fun. He then goes on to classify and analyze them, so it’s also clear that he believes they can be subdivided into categories like Sports Games and Fighting Games. If you asked Steven Poole ‘what’s your favourite game?’ he would no doubt answer something like ‘Tekken, Grand Theft Auto, and the Sims’ or something like that.

A friend of mine who studies economics would answer ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. If you prompted and said ‘oh you mean the computer version?’ he would say ‘if it needs electricity, it’s not a real game’. He’s got a bias in completely the other direction from Poole: he organizes board game nights, has an impressive collection of board games in that niche of ‘more complex than monopoly but still playable in 1 hour’ (Settlers of Catan is a great example), and he designs his own games. I’ve played them and their pretty good.

I’ve also played lots of computer games and I think I fall somewhere in the middle of the two experts’ definitions. The one thing I am skeptical about when it comes to Poole is his obsession with classification; games, unlike movies, do not want to be classified because part of the fun of playing a videogame is engaging in unexpected and different contests. Some of the funnest action games I played growing up had problem solving, fighting, driving and sports all rolled into one. Mario Party springs to mind, a game which ironically resembles a board game in its design. Thus we have conclusion #1 for me (albeit a rejection of somebody else’s): games don’t fit well into categories.

Board games, except among some serious circles, also resist classification. What type of game is Monopoly or Risk? I don’t think most people would come to an agreement, not in the same way that they such that Mission Impossible is an action film or Titanic is a Drama (subtype: romance). But one thing that Poole emphasizes in later chapters is that videogames are becoming every more physical (virutal reality, good graphics, rumbling controllers) and interactive (online games). Those two qualities are what boardgames still have over videogames – it’s fun just to roll the dice and move the token around the board – but according to Poole that’s changing.

It seems I don’t have a complete definition of what a game is, but that’s a task I will leave to people who chose that as their paper topic. There are, however, three mains points I became convinced of:

1) Games have to be fun or pleasurable

2) Games do not want to be categorized

3) On the whole, both boardgames and videogames count equally well as “games”. At least for now…

Comments about comments

Welcome to my other presence on the internet, my blog Les jeux sont faits for Humanistic Informatics 206: Technology and Society. It’s something very different from Brad in Bergen but I think in this post I’ve found a way of bridging them.

(HUIN 206 folk, the reintroduction is for those who came here for the first time via a link on my personal homepage).

Brad in Bergen, I keep insisting, is not really a blog – but since most people call it a blog I plead truce on semantic grounds. There’s more to be said though, because we have read a book about online diaries (which are “blogs” too? I’m not sure) which offers some clear analysis. Briefly, here’s some key points of Vivian Serfaty’s from The Mirror and the Veil:

1. “[Weblogs are] a dialogical space […] created within what is supposed to be an intensely personal space” (53).
2. A paraphrase of page 63: readers of a blog actually manipulate the content and the way the writer writes.
3. “Appealing to a large number of readers and having them respond, meets a deep-seated need for love and recognition” (55).

1. So much for point 1. When I chose googlepages as the host of Brad in Bergen I did so partly because I wanted to try something new and partly because I liked being on the outside of the mainstream blog community sites like Blogger and WordPress. I decided not to have a comments feature, so scratch the dialogical aspect.

2. Well, Serfaty hit the nail on the head. If you read my early entries, they are written with a clear Toronto-nuanced audience in mind. But then people I had never met started reading it. The funniest anecdote from a European friend: “Brad, my parents think it’s cool you keep a website because they can see what it’s like to live in Norway. They asked me why I didn’t do the same thing”. I started writing with a more global audience in mind (though stubbornly kept my long-winded and verbose style).

3. Whoa. My deep-seated need for love is going unfulfilled. Actually, I am quite content with the limited online feedback I get for Brad in Bergen because it may mean that when I do get a response (an e-mail, phone call, or letter) it is meaningful and heartfelt. Also, the lack of point 3 is partly to combat point 2 as I don’t want my readers to influence me too much.

From feedback I’ve got, I think most people would prefer comments, tags, search, and RSS on Brad in Bergen. Do you think I should have comments? Do you call Brad in Bergen a blog? I welcome any and all comments, especially since it may provide more building blocks for further posts connecting the two… entities. Just type in the “Leave a Reply” window below.

Instapukit

Oops, blogs are prone to have spelling mistakes – this entry should be titled Instapundit, the name of the political blog our group reviewed. Here is the Technorati link for the blog, which is written by a law professor at the University of Tennesse.

He posts extremely frequently, on the order of several times a day, but he is able to do this because his posts are extremely short; they generally consist only of a link or two to a pertinent political article. It’s one of the most popular political “blogs” in the world, with 23 000 other blogs linking to it. Including this one, sadly. There is no comments feature (see above post for my own take on that) and the writing style is succinct verging on shorthand.

Why do I dislike this blog? Well, it has a very conservative bias without opening up grounds for debate or revealing too much about the author’s possible conflict of interest.  Too much of it seems fishy: very little analysis on the source, links mostly to online content, and no personal voice of the author.  The whole thing seems like a spew of online links – hence the title of this entry – or an overload, said politely.

Moreover, one of the first links I explored was to a report about drug dealers in inner city America. It mentions an economist. Right away I knew who it was – Sudhir Venkatesh, who pops up in the third chapter of Steven Levitt‘s bestseller Freakonomics. I believe it to be physically impossible that Glenn Reynolds has not heard of this book. About 5 seconds more research into the link he posted would have revealed its presence in this quirky but groundbreaking book to him – why did he not mention it? What’s he up to?

You could counter back that Instapundit’s popularity counts for something; but I think Reynolds has merely made himself into an intelligent news-crawler similar to but more intelligent than Google News. That, and America does love its punditry.

Two j-bloggers and a news blogger

When Jill suggested that we write about some blogs that might be considered journalistic (her italics) I thought to myself ‘æsj, I don’t read any blogs that have news’. Only it turns out that I do, and once I had read Singer’s chapter on Journalists and News blogger, I realized I knew of two journalists who blogged and that I regularly read one news blogger’s blog. In fact an RSS feed to his blog on public transit in Toronto is on the left of this blog (put there when experimenting with how RSS feeds work.)

Steve passes the test of Singer’s qualifications of a good journalist (blogger) with flying colours: he’s a good writer with a sharp wit; he does his own fieldwork, well, by riding in the field on Toronto’s buses, subways (T-bane), and streetcars (trikk); he knows the legal setup of the system because he has long been active in the transit community; and he is independent and so has minimal conflicts of interest. These are actually qualities that Singer hypes up that journalists have as advantages over bloggers, but she says that of course a news blogger can do all of these things – and Steve does, though he has a day job too.

He also “fills holes in traditional media” (Brun & Jaobs, 23) because journalists and the public tend to be pretty ignorant about public transit. Steve has a heavy bias because streetcars (“LRT”, or Light Rapid Transit, in the industry) are his darling. But he admits his bias and always publishes comments from all viewpoints, even the gas-guzzling, build-more-roads bullsh-, errr, stuff, he gets.

But what of the mainstream media? Or halfway-mainstream, for å si det sånn. I watch a gay Canadian comedian/satirist’s weekly show where he interviews politicians in a comic but semi-serious way. He also blogs (but is it really him? I should ask) and oddly enough his blog posts are actually quite serious, as is his show from time to time. He had a lengthy post about how he spent Christmas with the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. His name is Rick Mercer, here is his Mercer Report Blog.

His blog’s link is featured prominently on the website with a banner “Get into his head” and from the little I’ve read it seems fairly well-researched if somewhat rant-like in its tone and length.

Then there is a blog that merges the jouranlistic, academic, and political spheres: Free Exchange, the Economist‘s blog. The Economist, a weekly magazine based in Britain, is very intellectual, verging on the academic, and has that unique dry British wit. I’m basically a sycophant (a HUGE fan). Sadly, though the voice is the same quality and the subject matter the same, the blog feels too much like a free-for-all arena for superfluous content (it takes hours to read the full issue of the Economist.) It’s also really obscure, as I had to use the site search engine to find it.

What I do read though are the weekly correspondent’s diaries. Every week, a different reporter reports from a different part of the world while on the job for the Economist. Except they report about the mundane: dinner parties they went to, language anecdotes, and books they have read. These are far more interesting and insightful to me, probably because they include some “corporeity” (Serfaty 102; passim) in the sense that there’s a lot of talk about food, safety, the discomfort of travel and such that journalists experience. I suppose I want to hear about the basic human needs and wants after all, at a near animal level. And it seems also that a plethora of what I read in the blogging world is actually journalism, though I will wait to read some of the class’ papers before deciding on that.

This post is gargantuan: time to open it to conversation. Do you think it would work as split into three posts? Is the part about the Economist eyelid-droopingly dull (as sometimes the Economist itself is)? Takk!

Epic2015: Aux armes, citoyens!

I thought the video Epic2015 we watched today in class was amazing – crisp, clever, cool. It made some very plausible predictions although I had to suppress a giggle at the word “Googlezon”. Google chooses its puns or portmanteaux (or whatever) more carefully.

I like little nuggets such as that pun, and so I was excited to share with Jill the subtle allusions (meaning hidden little references or quotes from another work) that I caught in the video today. Hence the title of the post, which includes a line from the chorus of France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise. The first words in the video we watched were “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” which is the opening to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

That’s not all, the film chooses August 4th, 2010 as the day that the Supreme Court will rule in favour of Googlezon(tee-hee) in The New York Times vs. Googlezon case over copyright infringment. This is the same date that the National Assembly in France in 1789 swore an oath against feudalism, such that everyone had equal rights (that was the idea anyway). Could the parallel be that there will soon be no media aristocracy, and everyone will be born equally, in terms of being a journalist/broadcaster/publisher? Maybe that’s stretching it a bit but in some realms and for some things it’s already happened.

The film also chooses March 9th, 2014 as the day for which EPIC or Evolving Personalised Information Construct is launched. I had trouble finding some definite allusion there, the best I could come up with being the day that Louis XVI dissolved his bourgois government and replaced it with Jacobins in 1792.

Regardless of the depth and number of allusions in Epic2015 it’s clear that the video expects the content and production to occur from the ground up, a grass-roots movement if you will, where people get what people want. Morevoer, it will be personalized. Serfaty makes the exact same point about communities of bloggers and readers, where “familiarity and informality are key to the development” and that this development happens “autonomously”. Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s up to us to provide the content etc. I wrote a big star in my notebook to posit the question: ‘does this mean blogs are themselves the hubs of a social network?’ An anecdote or two from Jill seem to imply so, even if a social network around a blog is less formal and structured than, say, Facebook.

That’s a question I’ll return to later once I’ve finished reading The Mirror and the Veil. That quote above badly needs a better segue because it looks like I just put it there to look academic. That may be true, but nonetheless Serfaty is actually creepily relevant to Epic2015, because on the next page she writes “[there is] a reader-to-reader relationship […] in Greg’s diary where, after asking readers to consult his Amazon wishlist and to post theirs, no less than thirty-eight responses were posted” (64). You can read about that here or, if you want to stalk Greg just click here. What’s fascinating/scary is that I now know this man wanted an espresso machine, the Godfather DVD set, and a pair of nunchuks. (Yes, Amazon.com sells nunchucks. Epic2015 wasn’t kidding about the “selling everything”vision).

In the end though what makes Epic2015 so great is that it refuses to judge, such that the audience is left with two possibilities: the web becoming something informative and visionary, or trivial and overwhelming. I’m a cautious optimist: I hope for the former, but think it will only happen if we have designers and programmers who are as crisp, clever, and cool as the ones who made Epic2015.

Blog post 3: Facebook anecdotes

[An anecdote is a nice little story that often helps to illustrate or support your point. Hence the term ‘anecdotal evidence’ although that phrase is usually used in a negative way.]

I am going to invert the question order for blog post three because I have an anecdote that involves both mixing private and public lives and actually inverting the two spheres!

Without details and not knowing really how true this story is, I still think you’ll find it very funny. On Facebook one of the things you (may choose to) display in your profile is your relationship status, e.g. whom you’re dating. Fine and dandy for my friend John Doe, until he got “dear John’ed” on Facebook. That’s right, his girlfriend broke up with him on Facebook by changing her relationship status from “In a relationship with John Doe” to “Single”. John claims this was something of a shock – both the break-up and the singular method employed.

It’s probably not much consolation to my friend John to say “well, that’s Transcendentalism for you, you’ve got Emerson to thank for your woes”. Yet John’s shock hearkens to Serfaty’s reference to the frontier spirit of American culture; which is something which provides “freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society” and, dare I continue, “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” (48). She took something that is a very private event – breaking up – and made it completely public using Facebook.

But when you think about it anouncing a breaking-up on a social networking site is the most public way to do it. Remember that the information was probably spread among all John’s friends within a few hours or a day at most, so it was also extremely efficient. In terms of passing along information à la signal-theory-applied-to-social-networking-sites in Boyd and Donath, John Doe’s ex fits right into the pigeonhole. She makes use of her social network to break up with John and does so at no cost. She avoids what she probably feared, the “John, we need to talk” talk. Even more subtly – and this is the golden point I found in this article – is that in these types of groups you almost never get people flaming one another or judging. On Facebook even outright lies are interpreted as a joke. I doubt anyone posted on her wall “you broke up with John? That was mean”. Anything said in public can be read by hundreds of friends, so people avoid saying controversial things because there is almost no benefit but a very high risk of “did you know that so-and-so said such-and-such?”

I also wanted to address something that I think Facebook diverges from in terms of the articles predictions, namely that when using something like Facebook, “the number of weak ties one can form and maintain may increase substantially”. Firstly, when Facebook became available to everyone there was a backlash among college students who wanted to keep Facebook’s exclusivity and “feel” separate from the gargantuan titan that is My Space. Secondly, the people I know who actively expand their friend list do it as a form of competition (which the article does discuss) or more worringly to achieve a status symbol. I think it was Derek who said that he doesn’t use Facebook to meet new people, and I think most people don’t actually. Friends of friends often don’t become friends until they are met in person, anymore than you would go and introduce yourself to everyone in a room full of strangers. The benefits of the nth hundred weak tie is almost nil, and it may come at a significant cost because on Facebook sometimes you don’t want to have to write on 20 people’s walls each day just because they wrote on yours or you may not want Johnny’s little sister’s cousin’s next door neighbour’s water polo teammate to see that picture of you in a toga. [And as far as I can tell the privacy settings are designed specifically not to “tier” different groups of friends, so deciding who can see that embarrassing picture within one network has to be done individually.]

More reflections on blog-style

I think it was Bolter, in his article Writing as Technology who emphasises the importance of recpaitulation in technologies over time. What he means is that while there may be a radical technology change, a strong undercurrent of continuity comes with it. I’ll add a specific example when I have the article and my notes on it in front of me.

But the point is I like the idea of recapitulating older writing technologies in this blog; perhaps that’s why I like the white, paper-resembling template. I don’t see it as being “old-fashioned”, rather that the elegant and subtle combining of the best of new features between old and new is what makes a new technology truly great. Take the digital camera as an example – some of the best and most artistic digital photos I’ve seen are black and white.

Why the white?

Blog Post 2: discuss templates & add-ons, relate to Chandler’s article on technological determinism.

I hate the name of the template for my blog – “milky white” – but I was excited to find the template itself. In additionl to being plain, minimalist even, it’s also unoriginal in the sense that it is an imitation. Can you guess which very popular site I am trying to mimick with this template?

If you guessed Google you’re right. Google has 1 graphic, 2 buttons, 4 search categories, 3 links to search tools, 3 Google related links, and a couple of buttons for logging into your personal Google site.

Legend has it that periodically Google would receive an anonymous e-mail with some gobbledeegook message with exactly 57 words. But sometimes they didn’t receive it. Finally somebody bright at Google figured out that they got the e-mail every time the number of words on the homepage exceeded 57. Google’s power lies in its simplicity and lack of distraction. Widgets, gadgets, graphics, and the rest are great but only, IMHO, if they serve a purpose. The largest complaint about corporate / organisational websites is that they are too complicated. The average time somebody spends searching on a website for something they want is 10 seconds. Then they search on another site.

This minimialist template fits my style. And I suppose my philosophy as well – since I lean towards voluntarism both as a theory and as an approach, at least insofar as Chandler discusses it. I also like the idea of me being in control of my blog, not the other way around – i.e. no technological autonomy for me. It’s not that I fear it, just that I dislike irrelevancy in the things I create and it’s possible for something to “get out of control” if not kept within certain bounds. Now I’m sounding highfalutin (“complicated” or “pretentious”) so I’ll give a clarifying example.

My university program’s student website has a simple chat forum, but it’s anonymous and has no clear mandate. As a technology it was created just to chat, but it frequently becomes a battle-ground for controversial subjects, hurtful ad-hominen attacks (made possible because of the anonymity of posts), and borderline inappropriate material, like pornagraphy or outright slander. Not that I am worried this will happen to my blog, but I think that by using the KISS strategy (keep it simple, stupid) I’ll be on track. When I do experiment or add something jazzy, it will have more meaning for me and be less likely to add clutter or annoyance.

The widgets I added are geared towards my interests (the Economist, for instance) and also to see what this RSS thing is. Some of my friends keep insisting that I RSSize my website but I have not looked into it a lot. This is a good place to experiment and if I like what I see I will “syndicate” my website. In fact being able to say “My website is now syndicated” makes me want to syndicate it. Perhaps I am more frivolous than I admit.

Pic

A picture from Spain from my other website… hope this works.

… it didn’t at first because it was about six sizes too large. However I discovered that you can actually make the picture smaller by dragging the corners in once you’ve linked the image.