From Alan Liu I learned about the Transverse Reading Gallery , a project mapping interactive narratives from the Demian Katz Gamebook Collection led by Jeremy Douglass. In an background paper on the project titled, Graphing Branching Narrative Douglass starts by asking,
What are the different forms of interactive stories? Which are the biggest and smallest, the simplest and most complex? What are the most typical and the most unusual? When we consider the structures of interactive narratives, are there local features or overall shapes that correspond to particular genres, authors, languages, time periods, or media forms?
The project web site is simple and informative. It includes a blog with short essays by research assistants. What you can see is the different topologies of these gamebooks from the tall ones with lots of choices but little narrative to the wide ones with lots of story, but little branching.
One of the oddest Ethereum projects in operation, CryptoKitties is a three-way cross between Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies and animal husbandry. Users can buy, sell and breed the eponymous cats, with traits inherited down the generations.
It is abundantly clear why we see so much bad process with this item: because the fix was already in. There is no real mention of the thousands of net neutrality complaints filed by consumers. Why? The majority has refused to put them in the record while maintaining the rhetoric that there have been no real violations. Record evidence of the massive incentives and abilities of broadband providers to act in anti-competitive ways are missing from the docket? Why? Because they have refused to use the data and knowledge the agency does have, and has relied upon in the past to inform our merger reviews. As the majority has shown again and again, the views of individuals do not matter, including the views of those who care deeply about the substance, but are not Washington insiders.
This directory contains 450 novels that appeared between 1770 and 1930 in German, French and English. It is designed for us in teaching and research.
Andrew Piper mentioned a corpus that he put together, txtlab Multilingual Novels. This corpus is of some 450 novels from the late 18th century to the early 20th (1920s). It has a gender mix and is not only English novels. This corpus was supported by SSHRC through the Text Mining the Novel project.
From a Humanist note I came across the fine essay on virtual reality, The Promise and Disappointment of Virtual Reality. It starts and ends with Plato’s cave and the responsibility of those freed from the cave to go back in and help others. Alas the state of VR technology doesn’t yet seem good enough to free us from reality and in this case the reality of VR is the commercialism of it.
But Plato’s Cave presupposes that those freeing the prisoner from their chains to reveal the true nature of “reality” are altruistic in their intent—that the world being shown the freed prisoners is indeed the truth. It is an allegory that does not allow for the world as it is today, or the pervasive desire to escape it.
The continued commercial failure of VR may represent an unconscious resistance to jettisoning our connection to the real. Maybe we are waiting for that blockbuster game to drive mass-market appeal. Perhaps the technology simply is not good enough yet to simulate a truly authentic—and profitable—experience. In this sense we are trapped. We crave authenticity of experience but, despite the efforts of philosophers, authors and auteurs, our imaginations appear limited to what we can individually consume and identify with. While capitalism lumbers on, we cannot see anything but the shadows on the wall.
What is nice about this essay by Mark Riboldi is the tour of the history of virtual reality technologies and dreams. What he doesn’t talk about is the sense of disappointment when the first generation of VR didn’t live up to the hype. I remember in the 1990s believing in VR (and lecturing on it.) When it proved clunky and nausea-inducing I felt let down by technology. Perhaps I and others had dreamed too much into VR led on by novels like Neuromancer. I was convinced VR was the logical next thing after the GUI. We had gone from a one-dimensional calligraphic screen to a two-dimensional desktop … wasn’t the three-dimensional virtual world next?
It is also worth mentioning that there have been a number of people writing about gender differences in how VR technology affects us. See Closing the Gender Gap in Virtual Reality. The technology seems to have been designed for men and calibrated to the male experience of reality.
Will the arrival and popularity of Oculus Go and other VR systems make us think differently about alternative realities and so-called alternative facts?
Matthew Flisfeder from the University of Winnipeg has penned a nice essay for the The Conversation on Oculus and our troubles with (virtual) reality.He starts with the new Oculus Go that brings virtual reality hardware down in cost to US $199. He then goes on to talk about fake news and alternative facts and how the portrayal of VR in popular media (Neuromancer, Matrix) has generally questioned the impact of the new media as it creates an alternative or fake reality. He also makes an interesting connection between fake news, social media and VR. Much of the discussion of the distorting power of fake news has focused on social media like Facebook and Twitter and how they seem to have manipulated the political reality for many. Facebook has become the site of internet reality for so many that when it distorts things it is people’s news of the world that is distorted. Facebook has ceased to be just one web site among many for the many becoming the platform for reality that frames what can be reality. Which raises the question of what they will do the VR hardware they control? How does the Oculus Go fit with Facebook? Could Facebook become the operating system a social reality you experience virtually? Could it become so immersive you don’t bother with alternatives?
Stanford has put up a video of a talk on why you should Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Humanities Ph.D.. The talk is by Dr. Damon Horowitz who did just that. He quit doing AI and got a Ph.D. in philosophy. He argues that it has given him perspective on what AI can and can’t do, in addition to helping him think about his life and some of the things that make him uncomfortable about the tech world. It isn’t a ground breaking talk, but it is delivered with humour and addresses technology folk where it matters. Are you really that happy with your job and the hype around what you do?
In response to the US president, Wolfenstein’s marketing used his own words to market the game: “Make America Nazi Free Again”, “There is only one side”, “These are not ‘fine people’”, and so on. Many of his supporters have taken exception to this, decrying the notion that Nazis support the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unfortunately, the fact that white supremacists and actual Nazis support Trump and march openly in America doesn’t help their claims.
The Guardian and others have stories about how the marketing of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has angered Trump supporters: Nazis as the bad guys in videogames? How is that controversial? The issue is partly how Wolfenstein adapted Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” Alt-Right gamers would like games to not be political, but they always have been; it’s just that certain demographics weren’t bothered by the politics before.
It is also worth noting the reference in the game title to the poem by Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty titled The New Colossus. I knew the famous line about “Give me your tired, your poor …”, but not the whole poem that starts:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. …
The larger story is how the gamergate community began to affiliate with the alt-right. Motherboard has a story about the shift in the r/KotakuInAction (KiA) subreddit.
So where does that leave Gamergate? Some people within the community are embracing the alt-right, others are peeling off in disgust, and most, it seems, continue to deny the link vehemently while paradoxically allowing that ideology to supplant Gamergate’s identity.
Cross, who even some Gamergaters would now agree was right about the nature of the movement from the very beginning, thinks that it’s going to be completely absorbed by the greater alt-right, and that this process has already begun with KiA essentially becoming a sub forum of r/The_Donald. The standard around which Gamergate organized—fighting for video games—is no longer the driving force behind KiA.
The Atlantic has a good article on What Facebook Did to American Democracy by Alexis C. Madrigal (Oct. 12, 2017). What is interesting is how we assumed that the net and social media could affect things and that is would naturally benefit the left.
The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America’s electoral-college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome. And the pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media.
The story of networked politics seems to be that of tactics being developed by the left and promoted as democratizing and inclusive that are then reused by the right. It is also the story of how Facebook decided to own news and fake news. They created filter bubbles so that none of knew what the other was thinking.
