Category: Multimedia Theory

Esquire: Future of Video Game Design – Jason Rohrer’s Programming Online Games

Screen of Passage

Esquire has a great story on The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls by Jason Fagone (Nov. 20, 2008) which features “Jason Rohrer’s solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love”. Rohrer created the game Passage about which Clint Hocking of Ubisoft said:

Why can’t we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know? We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here’s a game that made me cry. It did. It really did.

I balk at the idea that a game to mean something has to have “lesson.” This reminds of the tedious pedagogical dialogues of the 18th century which really would have been better presented as lessons. The meaning of works that don’t present explicit opinions lies in the reflection provoked. Thus they are more like questions than answers. Or, to be more accurate, they are like a path of questioning since a game has the time to move questioning.

Thanks to Peter O for this.

State of Science & Technology in Canada

Stan pointed me to the 2006 Council of Canadian Academies | Conseil des académies canadiennes report on The State of Science & Technology in Canada (Summary and Main Findings, PDF 2.6 mb). The report tries to identify Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in the Science & Technology field, though they have a broad understanding of S&T. There is good news for arts and technology.

The ICT field demonstrating the most promise in the view of respondents – i.e., with the highest net upward trend rating – is New Media, Multimedia, Animation and Gaming, where Canada is internationally recognized as a leader, with a number of successful companies as well as a reputation for superb skills training. (p. 9)

They also identify Humanities Computing as a transdisciplinary field of strength,

Survey respondents perceived significant strength in some emerging fields such as nanoscale materials and biotechnologies, quantum informatics and humanities computing. These latter transdisciplinary fields are specialities for which future prospects are seen to be more significant than currently established strength. (p. 10)

Here is a chart from page 39 showing the Humanities and the Arts:

Chart

Information Overload and Clay Shirky

Peter sent me to Clay Shirky’s It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York which starts with a chart from a IDC White Paper showing the growth of digital information. His title summarizes his position on the issue of Information Overload, but on the way he made the point that we have been complaining about overload for a while. To paraphrase Shirky, “if the problem doesn’t go away it is a fact.” Shirky jokes that the issue comes up over an over because “it makes us feel better” about not getting anything done.

I, like others, have used the overload meme to start talks and am now wondering about the meme. Recently I was researching a talk for CaSTA 2008 that started from this issue of excess information and found that Vannevar Bush had used overload as the problem to drive his essay, “As We May Think” in 1945.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think)

If Shirky is right that this is a fact, not a problem, and that we default to using it to leverage ideas as solutions, then we have to look again at the perception of overload. Some of the questions we might ask are:

  1. What is the history of the perception of overload?
  2. Is it something that can be solved or is it a like a philosophical problem that we return to informatics as a ground for discussion?
  3. Have structural changes in how information is produced and consumed affected our perception as Shirky claims? (He talks about FaceBook being a structural change for which our balancing filtering mechanisms haven’t caught up.)
  4. One common response in the academy is to call for less publishing (usually they call for more quality and less pressure on researchers to crank out books to get tenure.) Why doesn’t anyone listen (and stop writing?)
  5. What role do academics play in the long term selection and filtering that shapes the record down to a canon?

Kane Kramer: Inventor of the Digital Audio Player?

Image of DrawingI came across a story that Kane Kramer, and English inventor, invented the digital audio player and patented it in 1979 though he lost the patent. Here is an interview with the Guardian.

No. I like the iPod, but it feels a bit unfair to have to buy one. I could show you my drawings from 1979-82 and there is an iPod – same size, shape. It feels like mine.

Kane apparently testified for Apple when they were being sued by others.

Krazy: Vancouver Art Gallery

Cover to Catalogue

While in Vancouver for the Congress, I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the show Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art which brought together in one exhibit significant works from Anime, Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, Video Games, Animation and Art. The show was better than I had expected reading the article in the Globe and Mail. For each section they got curators with a background in the field. For example, Will Wright (of SIMs fame) did the video game section.

The challenge of such an exhibit is how to show stuff like comics that are meant to be consumed in another form. The video game section was particularly problematic – they had inkjet printouts of Spore (upcoming game by Wright) screens and characters (that weren’t much better than a good screen), but it wasn’t like the comic section where they had original art and sketches. To exhibit in an art gallery the types of work that are consumed in other contexts was more an exercise in legitimation – telling us these should be thought of as art. The selection of what was important was what was really being exhibited – a “best of” list of lists with commentary on the walls.

Kriegspiel: Debord Game

Image from Game

The New Yorker (May 5, 2008, pages 25-6) has a nice short story “War Games” in Talk of the Town about a computer game Kriegspiel based on a game that Guy Debord designed in 1977. The game, “Le Jeu De La Guerre” was published first in a limited edition with metal pieces and then in 1987 it was mass produced. The game has a board of 25 X 20 squares and each side has basic military pieces that can be played according to rules designed to simulate war. The computer implementation, which can be downloaded for free, is by Radical Software Group (RSG) which is associated with NYU.

The New Yorker story talks about how the estate of Debord has been sending cease-and-desist letters to the RSG folk, which is ironic since debord objected to copyright. Debord is author of The Society of Spectacle.

Dreyfus: Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence

Willard in Humanist pointed us towards an interesting RAND Paper by Hubert L. Drefus from 1965, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence which suggests that artificial intelligence research is like alchemy – initial success has led to it being oversold when the fundamental paradigm is wrong.

Alchemists were so successful in distilling quicksilver from what seemed to be diret, that after several hundred years of fruitless effort to convert lead into gold they still refused to believe that on the chemical level one cannot transmute metals. To avoid the fate of the alchemists, it is time we asked where we stand. Now, before we invest more time and money on the information-processing level, we should ask whether the protocols of human subjects suggest that comptuer language is appropriate for analyzing human behaviour. Is an exhaustive analysis of human intelligent behavior into discrete and determinate operations possible? Is an approximate analysis of human intelligent behavior in such digital terms probable? The answer to both these questions seems to be, “No.”

In this paper Dreyfus leverages the lack of progress after people like H. A. Simon in 1957 predicted the extraordinary. Dreyfus does more than make fun of the hype, he uses it to question what AI research might achieve at all and to think about intelligence.

Now that we are 50 years after Simon’s predictions things are more complicated. We do have chess playing machines that are better players than humans. (Drefus points out how the early machines being hyped were really stupid chess players.) We do have machines that can recognize complex patterns and recognize speech. We do have better machine translation. It may be going slowly, but research is moving forward. Perhaps the paradigm of the mind as a machine is wrong, but thinking about it that way and trying to model intelligent behaviour is getting results. What then do we make of the alchemical insult. Is it too easy to call magical thinking those projects that are ambitious and make the mistake of predicting success? Having recently read Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, I’m finding myself more sympathetic of magical projects that promise to transmute data into intelligence. Impossible … probably, but that is no reason not to try.

To paraphrase the third of (recently died) Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

“Any sufficiently magical proposal should be indistinguishable from research.”

This obviously applies to grant proposals.

Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media

Image of Cover Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (translated by Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, c2006) is an unusual book that pokes into the lost histories of media technologies in order to start “toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means” (as the subtitle goes.) Zielinski starts by talking about the usual linear history of media technologies that recovers what predicts what we believe is important. This is the Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson type of history. Zielinski looks away from the well known precursurs towards the magical and tries to recover those moments of diversity of technologies. (He writes about Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium as a model for media technologies – ie. that we have bursts of diversity and then periods of conformity.)

I’m interested in his idea of the magical, because I think it is important to the culture of computing. The magical for Zielinski is not a primitive precursor of science or efficiency. The magical is an attitude towards possibility that finds spectacle in technology. Zielinksi has a series of conclusions that sort of sketch out how to preserve the magical:

Developed media worlds need artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges.  (p. 255)

Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media wolrds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress. (p. 259)

Establishing effective connections with the peripheries, without attempting to integrate these into the centers, can help to maintain the worlds of the media in a state that is open and transformable. (p. 261)

The most important precondition for guaranteeing the continued existence of relatively power-free spaces in media worlds is to refrain from all claims to occupying the center. (p. 269)

The problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analyzing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time. (p. 270)

Kairos poetry in media worlds is potentially an efficacious tool against expropriation of the moment. (p. 272)

Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure. Ist priviledged location are not palaces but open laboratories. (p. 276)