Month: August 2010

Erector Set – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just finished Bruce Watson’s book on A. C. Gilbert, the invetor of the Erector Set titled The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made. The book doesn’t quite work as either biography or as social history, but it ends by asking why the Erector sets and other construction toys from Gilbert Toys failed in the late 60s. Watson suggests three changes:

  • From Edison to Einstein. The first shift was a shift in paradigm from science being about invention (with Edison as the hero) to science being about theory (with Einstein as paradigm.)
  • After the A-Bomb. The second shift was the change in how we perceive science after the Atom Bomb. Science was no longer a unquestioned good. Watson suggests that Frankenstein’s Monster (the film with Boris Karloff) also contributed to a changing in attitude towards science.
  • The Cool. The final nail was the emergence of teen culture in the 60s – a culture concerned with the cool. Kids who constructed things with Erector sets were seen not as boys, but as nerds.

Toys like Erector, which in its time was very successful, aimed to appeal to boys. They avoided presenting themselves as “educational” as that would be the kiss of death. Instead they were for tinkering and playing engineer. They appealed to parents as a solution to the “boy problem” of energetic boys getting into trouble (something we solve with drugs today.) With time, playing with Erector sets making bridges ceased to appeal to boys as a manly thing to do. It ceased to be cool and boys began to be seen less as a problem than as a market for which entertainment could be designed. Why solve the boy problem when you could feed the cool boys with rock and roll, television and movies. Toys are now sold in conjunction with TV shows (cartoons or other).

Watson ends the book by pointing out that the videogame industry now sells much more than the toy industry – especially the educational toy industry. Videogames are this generation’s boy toys. What will be next? I can’t help wonder if there is a return to construction with all the interest in Arduino’s, fabrication, and robotics.

Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad – The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail today had a story in the Focus section titled, Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad (Poplak, Richard, Aug. 27, 2010). The story looks at the controversy raised by the forthcoming Medal of Honor game that takes place in Afghanistan and which allows players to play a Taliban fighter. The story quotes MacKay (our minister of defense),

“The men and women of the Canadian Forces, our allies, aid workers and innocent Afghans are being shot at, and sometimes killed, by the Taliban. This is reality,” Mr. MacKay’s statement said. “I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban. I’m sure most Canadians are uncomfortable and angry about this.”

Poplak dismisses (in my mind too quickly) the argument that there is danger in imitating disreputable characters.

Speaking from the position of a frequent playground ersatz robber, I can confirm that role-playing doesn’t necessarily imply empathy and attachment. There is, after all, no appreciable evidence suggesting that children who play Indians are likely to grow up as advocates for Indians’ rights.

The argument from imitation is not that in playing Indians we would sympthize with them; it is that in repeatedly playing and practicing certain activities we would become conditioned by the activities.

What I like about the story is how it engages and quickly surveys the relationship between games and war. Games can be about all sorts of things, but an extraordinary number of them are about war and fighting. Why is it war that we want to play?

Hoppala! Augments

Lucio introduced me to a cool authoring environment from Layar called Hoppala!. Hoppala! Augmentation lets you author a Layar game on a map on the web. You can attach icons, media and text to the mapped points. We are using this as part of an authoring environment for PicoSafari (soon to be called fAR-Play). PicoSafari is a augmented reality game platform that humanities computing and computing science students created. It has been extended so that we can create adventures with questions you have to answer before you can see the next location. Our goal is to make it easy for people to author games and Hoppala! looks like a great tool.

WEME: Witches in Early Modern England

I’m at the Methods Commons workshop and Kirsten Uszkalo presented the WEME project (Witches in Early Modern England.) She showed (for the first time) the Throwing Bones interface which allows one to search the database and survey results as small decks of cards. Each deck has a different set of cards depending on the features of the hit. (See an example below.) You can use these sets to explore the hits. Very neat!

Three sets of cards

Towards a Methods Commons

Well my vacation is over and I’m facilitating a retreat on text methods across disciplines. (See Towards a Methods Commons.) With support from the ITST program at SSHRC we brought together 15 linguists, philosophers, historians, and literary scholars to discuss methods in a structured way. The goal is to sketch a commons that gathers “recipes” that show people how to do research things with electronic texts. Stay tuned for a draft web site in about 6 months.