Accommodating students on different time tables can be challenging
Instructor presence is important
They have a MOOC coming up on Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative which I think I’m going to take. This raises the question of how many students of MOOCs are other pros wondering how MOOCs work.
The Economist has a short story about Zyngas woes: The chips are down. The story talks about how Znyga is struggling after being the darling of the casual games industry. Znyga hasn’t adapted to mobile gaming and spent too much money.
From Twitter I learned of Sam Biddle’s article on Fired Zynga Staff Hits Reddit to Talk Life Before the Massacre. This gathers some comments about life and business in Zynga from recently fired staff including a strategy of “fast follow” which means copying the good ideas of others.
At the same time I came across a story on a study Teens, Social Media, and Privacy by the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. They report that teens are turning away from Facebook as adults join. Teens are moving to using different tools for different tasks.
I can’t help wondering if there is a connection? If Facebook use by teens is dropping then Zynga’s Facebook games could run into trouble.
The conference was one of the best I’ve been to in a while. The mix of Japanese and North American scholars and designers coming at the issues from different traditions made for a fascinating confrontation of who games can be studied. At the end I was on a panel that talked about where we are going next. I suggested that we need to think about the following:
How to conduct cross-cultural research so that we avoid the danger of generalizing about Japanese and Western players/designers.
How the academy can engage the stakeholders including business, but only business. For example we should be engaging the doujin community, the indie developers, the journalists and the fans.
Figuring out how to archive games and game related materials for future study is a priority.
Training new researchers should also be a priority.
Alas the campaign and Sarkeesian were attacked systematically; see, for a brutal example, the Amateur game invites player to beat up woman. The obscene and hateful attacks have been documented by columnists like Helen Lewis in the New Statesman article, This is what online harassment looks like. What did Sarkeesian do? Lewis puts it succinctly,
She’s somebody with a big online presence through her website, YouTube channel and social media use. All of that has been targeted by people who – and I can’t say this enough – didn’t like her asking for money to make feminist videos.
So why did all these trolls attack Sarkeesian? 4Chan seems to have been one site where they organized, but what bothered them so much about her campaign? Sarkeesian’s interpretation is that they made a game of harassing her. As she puts it, “in their mind they concocted this grand fiction in which they are the heroic players in a massively multiplayer online game…” She goes on to describe how the players of this “gamified misogyny” were mostly grown men, they used discussion boards as their home base for coordination and bragging, the setting of the game was the whole internet, and the goal was to silence the evil Sarkeesian to save gaming for men. The trolls would go out, harass her, and come back to their boards to show off what they had done. It was a particularly nasty example of an internet flash crowd organizing to silence a woman. It was also an example of how the internet can amplify behaviour and provide haven for misogynist communities.
Sarkeesian’s video essay wasn’t even an attack on men or games. It is clearly the work of someone who likes games but is critical of the repeated use of the “damesel in distress” plot device and other sexist crap. The video essay is, however, effective at challenging the uncritical consumption of cliched tropes in games using a medium commonly used in gamer culture (short video essays that show game play and comment on games.)
Now, back to More than a Damsel in a Dress: A Response which argues that Sarkeesian didn’t look at the evidence with an open mind and that the princess in distress in both the Mario and Zelda series of games should be seen as brave individuals dealing bravely with distress that also represent the peace of their kingdom. While I find Kite Tales’ argument somewhat sophistical and mostly answered already by Sarkeesian, we should probably welcome responses like those of Tale that don’t attack the messager, but try to respond to the argument in some fashion; and there are quite a few responses if you care to work through a lot of poor arguments. It would be nice to say that video essayists are modeling how a conversation on these issues should take place rather than hurl abuse, but the medium doesn’t really lend itself to conversation. Instead we have isolated video essays with lots of comments. Not exactly a dialogue, but better than abuse.
While I’m on this issue of damsel’s in distress like Princess Peach, Ars Technica has a story about how a Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario. Alas, it too got abusive comments, the worst of which have been compiled into YouTube Reacts to Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition. The compilation focuses on the sexist and homophobic comments. If you scroll through the comments now you will find that they are mostly supportive of the Dad. The good news seems to be that the sorts of comments Sarkeesian faced are being shamed down or being reflected back.
As for Anita Sarkeesian, her Kickstarter campaign raised much more than she asked for and she now has the funds and attention to do a whole series. I look forward to the next part on Damsel in Distress that promises to look at more contemporary games.
Victoria led me to this 1966 form for a student computerized dating service called “Cupid Computer.” You can see the form in context in the University of Waterloo student newspaper, Coryphaeus. See 1966-67_v7,n09_Coryphaeus. Click to read and page forward and you will see the two page insert with the questions you have to answer and send in. Here are some examples.
The Cupid Computer service was apparently “run by students” and would, for $3 give you a list of 3 scientifically compatible dates. They mention using an IBM computer and that the Computronics Company is “The Leader by far in Canadian Computer Dating Systems”. The PDF of the insert (and cover page) is here, 1966-67_v7no9_Coryphaeus.
It is worth noting that this was a student developed service. While serious university computer centers were doing other things, students were developing their own social uses of computers … and long before the web.
There are a number of great resources on the web for people who like to collect and restore older machines. Here are some that friends have pointed me to:
Vintage Pachinko is a nice clean site that has lots of information including videos and useful services.
Dan’s Pachinko Data Page has useful information and videos. The machine on his home page is close to the one I bought.
Dr. Amano has put up some scans of a Japanese book on very old machines. See Scrapbook photos.
PachiTalk.com has a forum for Pachinko and Pachislo and a section with playing manuals (that I haven’t looked at)
A question that people have asked me is how a 1970s pachinko machine ended up in an Edmonton antique mall (which is actually more like a flea market)? James King has a good post, Pachinkos in America: Where Are They? on research he has done using analytics (on Pachinko Planet) which suggests it may be been brought over by a serviceman or by a company that imported used ones to the US. Here is part of what he says,
Japanese pachinko parlors for decades only allowed machines to remain in service for about a year before they had to be removed and disposed. This led to huge numbers of used machines available in Japan, and most were simply destroyed. However, it was not unusual for American servicemen to send or bring them back to the states as souvenirs. The numbers that trickled in spread out from our major military installations, but in the 1950’s and 1960’s these numbers were small, somewhere in the thousands. Few of these pachinkos have survived today.
In the early 1970’s a few enterprising gentlemen got a good idea for a use for all of those piles of expired pachinkos. They formed a company called Target Abroad LTD, and started buying them up by the thousands and filling shipping crates with them. They then shipped these crates by the thousands to America, and sold them through major chain stores such as Woolworth, K-Mart, and even Sears. Several other smaller companies quickly formed and opened pachinko specialty stores across the country. Two of the most successful were Pachinko Palace and The Pachinko Factory, and many vintage pachinkos in America today still bear their stickers. Literally millions were sold between 1972 and 1976, but sales began to plummet when video games were invented and then mass- produced. By 1978 nearly all imports of pachinkos to America had ended, and the retailers sold off their inventory and closed their doors forever.
It is possible that collecting and restoring vintage machines is more popular in the USA than in Japan. Dr. Amano tells me that there is little in Japanese to match the restoration manuals and videos available in English. Pachinko may have a charm for people in North America that it doesn’t have in Japan. To us it is an exotic pinball-like game with lovely designs (especially the vintage ones before they got video screens) from the mysterious orient. For the Japanese it is a reminder of noisy smoky pachinko parlours where older men gamble endlessly alone. Given how little Japanese research there is into pachinko (considering the extraordinary amount of money spent on it) it is likely that to many Japanese it is an embarrassment which they wouldn’t want to collect.
A week or so ago I began to follow Mark Sample’s tweets carefully as his tweeted what at first sounded like a nightmare at Dulles when he went to catch a flight. As he tweeted through the days it became more surreal. It seemed he was sequestered and being interrogated. He reported shots and deaths. It was hard to tell what was going on and then it was all over with a link to a YouTube video of him whispering into the phone. Then when you clicked on @samplereality you got “Internal Server Error” and if you tried to find his page you got a “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
Someone had deleted his account.
Fortunately there was an off-site archive of his tweets that he had backed up here. And, as a useful hint, there was an entry on ProfHacker by Sample on how to Keep Your Official Twitter Archive Fresh which the editors introduced with,
this is a draft that Mark Sample uploaded to Profhacker last week. We have been unable to contact Mark for the final revisions, so we are posting it as-is. Our apologies for any errors.
It seemed more and more likely that the dramatic events in Dulles were a work of net fiction or an alternate reality game, something Mark is interested in and claimed to be working on for 2013 in his blog entry From Fish to Print: My 2012 in Review. I was also suspicious that none of his colleagues at George Mason seemed to be that worked up about his experience. And that’s the fun of this sort of alternate reality fiction. You don’t really know if you’re being taken or not and so you start poking around. Like many I was initially sympathetic (who hasn’t been inconvenienced by delays) and then worried. Eventually I decided the stream of posts were a work of fiction, but of course I’m still not sure. When alternate reality fiction is done well you never know whether This Is Not A Game.
I still don’t, but I’ll risk a guess and congratulate Mark … Bravo! If I’m wrong I apologize.
