Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

More on Poe's head games

Edgar Allan Poe played games with his audience.  This we've known for a while, about that lover of hoaxes and cryptography.  A New Yorker article thinks this was driven by his lifelong poverty, and offers an interesting reading of some of his stories and poems.  Some proto-alternate reality game fodder here:

["The Gold-Bug"] is a kind of hoax. It aspires to popularity by assaulting the very idea of a popular audience.

Once again, I'm reminded of my project to reconsider literary history in terms of games and hoaxes.

Here's a longer, fun passage:

“The Gold-Bug” is a tangle of puns, many of them, as the literary scholar Marc Shell has pointed out, having to do with currency. Legrand has found a bug the color of gold. “De bug is a goole bug,” Jupiter says. In other words, a ghoul bug. It looks as if it were made of gold. It is not. “Dey aint no tin in him, Massa,” Jupiter says. There’s nothing in him—no tin, and no gold, either. Legrand has also found a parchment, made of goatskin, kidskin. It contains a map showing where a treasure was buried on the island by the pirate Captain Kidd. This pun Legrand himself has to figure out, in order to find the buried treasure. (Kidd’s map, in this sense, is itself a guide to Poe’s tales. Is Poe kidding or not? Are the tales a joke, and worthless, or brilliant, and priceless?) The parchment is covered with invisible ink, which, as Legrand discovers, conceals a cryptogram. After decoding the cipher, Legrand takes Jupiter, the dog, and the befuddled narrator on a hunt for the treasure, which turns out to be a chest containing jewels and gold coins.

Mystery monument in Georgia

A mysterious public art work still stands in a remote corner of the American south, almost 30 years after their completion.  There is Gothic grandeur in the Georgia Guidestones, immense stone slabs covered in cryptic inscriptions.

(image from LEOURSA)

But there's a second layer of mystery, beyond this experiential sublime.  The Wired story goes into the weird background of the thing's construction, starting with its designer.  "Mr. Christian" (generally accepted as a pseudonym) brought designs, a huge amount of money, the claim of representing a shadowy group, and the following explanation to an Elbert County quarry in 1979:

[he] claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument...

Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself.

It's like the world's greatest rabbit hole, or a stupendous art project, or an offshoot of American Christian public art.  Read the full story. 

Infocult needs to meet there.

(via Todd Bryant and the horde)

Sneaking storytelling by mountweazel

What do you call the storytelling trick of smuggling fiction into nonfiction references? 

Mountweazel is one term.  That's the name of a character, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, described by a fake biography (mailbox artist, died by an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine).  She ended up in the 1974 New Columbia Encyclopedia.  The New Yorker explains this as a deliberate trick, aimed at foiling copyright pirates.  "“If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

That's actually a genre, the copyright trap.  Think about that, a surreptitious literary genre based on hoaxing, and going back some time.  Also from the New Yorker:

 “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day.

Copyright traps have a sibling in cartography, the trap street.  Along with the copyright angle, Cecil Adams notes at least one map prank. 

Has anyone written a history of these?  When was the first - did Diderot's crew do it, or Mercator?

There are examples of mountweazeling fiction in fiction.  The Borges story, for example, and Grant Morrison's comic riff on it.

This historical practice is clearly fine alternate reality game (ARG) antecedent fodder.

(via Meine Kleine Fabrik, which everyone should read)

Computer games as cigarettes: one Congresscreature has a warning label idea

Let's put a cigarette-style warning on computer games, suggests one Congressman.  Along the lines of the classic Surgeon General's admonition, Joe Baca (D-California) asks for this:

WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

One of the powers of passive voice is hereby displayed - see, it's actually true.  Some people have linked games to violence. And isn't that collapse of violence and media entertaining?  Not "media containing violence" or "media portraying violence" but "violent media."  One imagines a chainsaw-wielding DVD.

I'm waiting for some retcon sequels:

WARNING: Excessive exposure to novels and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent religious texts and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

(via Raph Koster)

A pedagogical heist

An expensive sculpture vanishes from one of Bernie Madoff's houses.  But this is no ordinary theft.  Instead, it's an exercise in teaching, and in politics:

[S]ome pesticide workers found the statue on December 31, unharmed, in the shrubbery near a local bike trail. And dig this, it had a note attached:

"Bernie the Swindler, Lesson: Return stolen property to rightful owners. Signed by - The Educators."

Ah yes, participatory art in the age of economic crisis.

(via the Cranky Professor)

Gothic browser game: Hidden

A new browser game offers some nice Gothic gameplay: Hidden, of which only Chapter 1 - "Primitive Essence" is available.

(via Jay Is Games)

Torturing the World of Warcraft

In the recent World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, players have an unusual opportunity: to torture a character for information.

Clive Thomson argues that we should see more and better-designed torture in gaming.  Good point - like so:

Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?

Or how about this: What if you got blowback from torturing the sorcerer? What if other non-player characters got more aggro, attacking you more often because of your reputation as a torturer? And maybe some Alliance NPCs would simply refuse to give you further quests.

On the other hand, what if becoming a torturer made the game easier to play? What if it burnished your rep as a dangerous character, making future quest opponents so scared of you that some battles became simpler? After all, that's one of the neoconservative arguments about torture: You show the world who's boss. Blizzard could have programmed not only the consequences that would be predicted by a bleeding-heart liberal, but those posited by a neocon.

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)

Break of day in the browsers

Warfare 1917 is a browser-based WWI simulation.  A grim yet playable take on the western front.


(via Jay Is Games)

New distributed storytelling technique: cameramail

An unusual combination of photography and mail art: cameramail!

On November 30th, 2003, an oversized postcard holding one disposable camera and a roll of 800 ASA, 27 exposure film was mailed from Lafayette, IN to Santa Monica, CA. A few days later, the postman knocked on the door of my friend and found him answering in his underwear. He did not understand the statement: "The Post Master wants to know why you are mailing cameras."

So many storytelling ideas come from this.  Chain mail - send a camera with a couple of images, ask the next to take a couple more and send it on.  Horror story - one could share spooky images, in a collaborative, unsettling riff on "I Found A Digital Camera..."

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

More bad news for cyberfear: most European gamer "addicts" aren't

Ninety percent of gamers who turned themselves in to a European gaming addiction clinic aren't actually addicted, according to a BBC story.

"This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today," Mr Bakker told BBC News. "Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated...
For Mr Bakker the root cause of the huge growth in excessive gaming lies with parents who have failed in their duty of care.

So it's not games which are to blame, but authorities and bullies?  Let's see if this story remains in popular awareness for long.