Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

RSS readers and slow connections

A quick note: I often work on a slow connection, either dialup at home or Sprint PCS card on the road.  No need for me to sing the horrors of that experience, I'm sure.

But I wanted to praise RSS readers instead.  They save me an awful lot of time, by loading not an entire Web page framework, but just the content nugget nested within.  I can go beyond that microcontent if I need to, with a quick right mouse button click, but don't have to.

I'm reading through BlogLines these days, although I'm increasingly enjoying Google's reader.

Gender and ARGs, the avatar angle

Following up on our earlier thread/post, Andrea has a good post about gender, avatars, and alternate reality games.  She makes a very important point about the openness, even optional nature of avatars for ARG players. 

This reminds me of Scott McCloud's argument about the wide appeal of sparely-drawn comic characters.  Hello Kitty is easier for us to identify with, than a person in a photorealist composition.  We can fill in the gaps, apply ourselves to the wide range of details not described.

Multi-side games?

Speaking of Halo, I gather that one of Halo 2's innovations is its requirement that players play both human and Covenant roles during a campaign. 
Are there any other games requiring players to take multiple sides during a game? 

One course management system to rule them all, mostly

I've noted this elsewhere, but found it striking enough to repeat here: BlackBoard and WebCT, the world's predominant course management systems (CMS) providers, are merging.  That is, BB is devouring WebCT.

What does this mean?  A few first thoughts:
    One business now has the lion's share of the CMS market.  BB is the new Microsoft for this field.
    BB's Incentive to innovate just dropped still further.
    The conflict between proprietary and open source CMSes just deepened.  I expect a BB FUD campaign or two.  Watch for them to paint Sakai as, oh, elitist and overambitious.  And Moodle et al, perhaps too amateurish, or beneath competition.
    What will happen to WebCT courses archived, being run now, planned for spring '06?  Will they persist as WebCT safe havens within the BBverse, or get morphed into the new order?

More internet suicides, another call for crackdown

The Guardian reports on a suicide pact carried out via internet, and the British response.

Ministers have considered outlawing sites which appears to encourage suicide, but were warned that new legislation could also criminalise fictional depictions of suicide and hinder academics and counsellors writing about the subject.

Readers may recall that we've been here before.  Japan led the way, unsurprisingly, with fears of internet-mediated suicides in 2004, and a horror film in 2002. Canada had a scare on this score earlier this year.

(thanks, derb)

Colleges, technology, and treatment effects and selection effects

Malcolm Gladwell has another fine article in the New Yorker this week, reflecting on elite college admissions.  The whole thing is grand.

In terms of teaching and learning with information technology, I was struck by his note on treatment effects and selection effects (about halfway down, comparing the Marines to a modeling agency).  It's a great way to look at admissions in general.  But it also reminds me of the different arguments for increasing the role and extent of information technology in academic life.  There's a separation, even a tension, perhaps, between the line of thinking that technology can help people teach and learn better (the treatment model), versus the idea that ubiquitous computing is what the Net Gen expects (the effects model).

This week's greatest bibliophile

The LA Times reports on a splendid book collector in Brazil.  He has given over his house to books and browsers, all drawn from the very poor local neighborhood.

This reminded me of a great Cortázar story, "Casa tomada" ("A House Taken Over"):

"This is the only space we have to sleep. Please don't mind that it looks so poor," he told a visitor apologetically as he gingerly picked his way past a precariously leaning wardrobe and a low-slung bed. "The books kicked us out. If we're not careful, the books will kick us out of the back room too."

(thanks, Jesse)

Gender and ARGs

Are alternate reality games one of the most women-oriented fields of gaming?

Andrea reflects on the topic of women and ARGs, which spun off of this week's antecedents post:

...women make ARGs. Mind Candy alone was around 40% female staff for a while. Outside the company, we have terrific women like Jane and Krystyn moving the art forward. Compare this to an IGDA report from 2004 stating that 17% of the games industry workforce is female. In some traditional development studios, the number of women employed is practically nil.

I think this difference from traditional console and PC gaming rises from an earlier, more noteworthy development: The ARG playerbase is historically very gender-balanced. Even during our Cloudmaker days, we noticed that our community was about as evenly gendered as was the Internet itself. This has appeared to remain true through today. There's a great photo of the crowd at ARGfest in NYC this year -- you'll notice that just a touch less than half of the attendees are, you've got it, female. And this is the self-selected hard-core playerbase!

I've got a ton of theory on what the magic is in ARGs that invited women to play, fodder for another post. I think it's pretty certain that inviting women to play is what's invited women to create. The electronic games industry as a whole is starting to cotton to the fact that HEY! Girls like fun, too! and haven't quite figure out yet how to cash in, but ARGs...

I agree with all of this.  If we're right, this issue should enter into the discussions about gender and the gaming industry, popular culture depictions of games, game content, and teaching with games.

I wonder if anyone has studied the culture clash dynamics between ARGs and first-person shooters, when Halo players hit the ARGworld through ILoveBees.

Similarly, it might be interesting to compare ARG and casual games players, given that they might have overlapping demographics.  Both have strong puzzle components, and casual games players are apparently mostly women.

Last question: is a platform division by gender coming up?  ARGs are largely played on PCs, while in other games consoles predominate.  Casual games are largely played on... PCs and mobile phones?

Back to the last session in New Haven -

Gaming dialogue at NMC New Haven

Today's the second day of New Media Consortium's New England conference.

We led off with a session on gaming, led by Ruben.   
I began with a blitzkrief presentation on alternate reality games, racing through the genre at top speed.  The audience was intrigued and mystified.  Not terrified, alas, which is probably an artifact of time limitations.  ARGs are still new to education, if this is a good sample.
Marc Prensky spoke to complexity in gaming, using the anticipated Spore as an example.  This is a crucial point for those whose recollection of games is restricted to smaller ones.
Constance Steinkuehler presented on massively multiplayer online games.  She used Lineage as her main example, which is refreshing for an American audience, emphasizing the richness of MMOG worlds, their economic and demographic heft, and functionality.  She undertstood MMOG play as construcivist, and argued for the importance of modding as production, rather than consumption.
Nick Monfort returned us to interactive fiction.

Discussion came next.  One question: what are the demographics of MMOG players?

Antecedents to alternate reality games

While alternate reality games are a fairly new thing, we can find many antecedents to them in other media.
Any additions, after this list?  I will update. 
What a fun syllabus this would be, if we include games!
Very male sequence, though, so far.  Women do create ARGs.  Is that a historical change, or am I missing female-authored antecedents?

Antecedents to alternate reality games

(updated February 17, 2006)

Assassin, also called Killer.  Game played by people usually in some educational institution, where they try to kill each other according to a pre-established scheme.  Assassin must occur within these real, non-game settings. Not too narrative, as Tony notes.

Iain Banks, The Player of Games (1989).  Science fiction novel, focusing on a world where a game structures culture and society. 

Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940).   Short story.  Fictional world created, seeps into our world through encyclopediae.

Carmen Sandiego games (1983-present).  These hunts for a character are built onto real world locations and information.  This is the prototypical search opera.  (thanks to Tony)

Janet Cardiff, Walks (1991-present).  These performance stories are experienced as audio tracks, overlaid upon landscapes the audience walks through.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" (1905).  Short story.  Hero stumbles into someone else's game, run by perhaps the first ARG business in the literature.

Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924).  The game intrudes onto the main character's life, against his will.  Like some games, it's played in a walled garden.   (Thanks, Glen)

David Fincher, The Game (1997).  Film.  Protagonist signs up to play a game which weaves itself into his life, changing him for the better.

John Fowles, The Magus (1965, 1977).  Novel.  Hero becomes subjected to series of games, which pose as real life.  Sort of.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003).  Science fiction novel.  Characters follow The Footage, a mysterious, distributed, film/video microcontent project.  The Footage isn't published to a single venue, but appears through discussion fora.  The reality of what it shows isn't clear.

Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic (1998).  This focuses on US Civil War reenactors in everyday life.  Reenactment in general is good ARGfodder. (thanks, Martha)

How to host a murder parties.

Ray Johnson (1927-1995).  Artist, whose work wove into audiences' minds and lives, unsettling (among other things) the boundary between life and art.  Cf the film How To Draw a Bunny (2002).  Performance art in general is a rich proto-ARG vein.

Live-action role-playing games (LARPs).  Not intrinsically ARGlike, but become so when played within a non-game setting (i.e., a town, school, party).

Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus (1970s).  A mysterious, gorgeous book portraying a fantastic world in a coded language.

Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).  The creation of historical narratives, and their insertion alongside modern life.   (thanks, Andy)

The Sokal hoax (1996).  ProtoARG as political statement.  Alan Sokal creates a scholarly article as prank, gets it accepted to a real journal, then whips back the curtain.  (thanks, Jamie)

(thanks to Andrea, Steven, Tony for feedback)