(That is, yet another change of blogging platform.)

I started this blog in Blogger, switched to Blosxom as Blogger was in a disordered, unsupported state, and as Google has whipped Blogger back into shape (and integrated it stunningly with Picasa), I’ve come back to Blogger. Yes, it has less of the open-source wizardry, Perl acrobatics, and rugged DIY individualism, but it has a lot less comment spam.

So, look forward to another fitful spurt of updates. Older posts available through their archives. And now, more visuals. Many more visuals.

Mike Hawley may be the most successful small game designer ever. And you may hate him for it. It seems he hates himself for it, too. Like Wario Ware, his work is about compulsivity and interaction: the interface that demands closure and exploits our acculteration as interface-literate readers.

Check out this engaging quasi-game about the semiotics of class in America. The work is actually an interesing blending of game and blog/wiki. A “chutes and ladders” metaphor about the way that taste, consumption, and values indicate and, in some cases, can determine class membership is joined with a thematically organized blog, in which the artist, self-identified as being of working class origins, writes letters of advice to his younger brother on the nuances of class migration.

The blog cites a number of writers about class in America, including Paul Fussell (whose 1983 classic, Class is a lively, if arch, tour-de-force and neo-con David Brooks, who inadvertantly skewered the very class that Fussell naively described as an “escape” from class, his “X class”, in his book, Bobos in Paradise.

Conspicuous in his absence is Pierre Bourdieu, the most formidible thinker on questions of class, taste, and consumption. This may have something to do withe Reading Class’s focus on the cultural mechanics of class in America, or perhaps he’s more interested in the concrete writing of more recent, accessible writers. The letters to the artist’s younger brother, Cody, resemble in tone and structure C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters,” epistles of avuncular advice from a senior demon to his nephew on the techniques of corruption.

If there is something that doesn’t quite work in this piece, it’s the game-component. It’s a promising idea that could use development: the chutes and ladders metaphor isn’t exploited (choices that would lead to a loss of class standing do not, in fact, change the position of the player – the avatar advances no matter what. The socio-economic consequences of class-position, such as access to resources, marriage and family options, financial considerations, health consequences, access to careers, political sway, etc. are not explored. The artist could deepen the game element of the piece and make its impact much stronger. Incorporating data about the structural implications of the class system and its dependencies could turn this into a very articulate work of game rhetoric. The game mechanics as they are actually implemented are broken; the avatar eventually climbs off the screen, and the interface between the player and the work fizzles out. This should be fixable.

Some time ago, I remarked that I intended to “do theory after Sokal.” By this, I meant a commitment to certain principles of discourse. It wasn’t meant as an enthusiastic endorsement of Sokal’s project–not only are there certain weaknesses in his hoax (that Social Text was not truly peer reviewed being one, and that he was, indeed, actings as a representative of a ‘guest discipline’ being another), as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies, and the hoax took a lot of its rhetorical power from this sense of real intellectual vulnerabilities in the constellation of ideas against which his prank worked. (As a note, any physicist who took his hoax as some sort of vindication should be directed to the even more-damning Bogdanov Affair which continues to vex physics; this hoax, if it is a hoax–the “perps” have not called their hand if it is–has divided professional opinion, and gone far beyond one case publication in an extra-disciplinary journal.)

Since then, I’ve learned a bit more about some of the more recent tendencies in theory. I have a phrase to place on these premises: critical realism, a critique of both hermeneutic and positivist traditions that has its origins in the work of Roy Bhaskar. (Bhaskar has since had a religious turn, but the critical realist idea has an independent trajectory.)

To date, Bhaskar’s effect is mostly felt in social sciences and the philosophy of science/science studies. To the extent I can, I’m going to see how I can inform my work in the humanities (specifically, exegetical and interpretive work with texts, particularly games) with the same commitment to questions of efficacy and fallabilism.

Some of the key elements of Bhaskar’s work may not actually migrate into the humanities very smoothly. But I think I’ve found a cluster of ideas from which I can build a container-theory which allows me to position my own work in a coherent relationship with that others. (Since many of my colleagues are still working largely with post-structuralist models, it is pretty important that I have some footing for my work which is often outside those models.)

OK, I’m a little late to this party. Sony Japan has Turntable software for the PS/2. Been out for about a year now, no US release on the horizon. Rather than thinking of this as convergence, I think it’s more of a cross-interface passage. An experienced gamer has a rich vocubluarly of gestures and reactions that they can simultaneously channel through the game controller. It may make more sense to turn the controller into a musical instrument than a keyboard.

Nice send-up of Bemania games in this video made by Keith Schofield for DJ Format et al. Not only do they swim upstream from the performance-to-play gesture, but they also get in a couple digs at some of the more routinized cliches of hip-hop performance.

Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky have completed Soft Cinema, a work at the intersection of database forms and film, which generates films algorithmically from a database of narrative elements, visuals, sounds, etc. The “upstream” motion from newer forms to older ones – the remediation of vidoegame tropes back into film, for example – had largely been worked along the surface of the texts, by evoking the experiential logics of the new media into onto the experience of film (e.g., repetition and learning in Run Lola Run).

And of course, video games have drawn on cinematic methods (often problematically, sometimes well); to redraw cinema on the material basis of new media – on algorithms and databases – is another matter.

MIT Press is releasing the book + DVD; also, this Saturday, at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhatten, the release presentation (execution?) of the work will be accompanied by a panel. I’m not going to be able to go, unfortunately, but it looks intriguing..

There’s more information at the soft cinema site.

While keeping up on the response to Michael Crichton’s recent book on RealClimate, I caught a reference to a literary feature known as “the Mary Sue.” Identified initially in fan fiction, it is the overweeningly self-indulgent placement of an author-surrogate in a text, particularly on a text which is derived from someone else’s diegesis.

The phenomenon is rendered with loving viciousness on Making Light.

Postscript: the worst of fanfic Mary Sues are being policed by this LJ community.

From Slashdot games, a report about New Game Journalism. It’s sad that decent writing requires a manifesto to achieve what is taken for granted elsewhere.

A great example cited is the piece Bow, Nigger from Alwaysblack.com. The personalization of game-play, the fluid movement of the report from the ludological to the interpersonal to the critical – hopefully, it’s prescient. When we’ve seen this kind of conscientious writing about games in the past, it’s often been about writers and journalists approaching games from the outside, and giving us boring first-person accounts of their fumbling with the interface. In this case, the writer has enough mastery of the ludic regime to write and work through the game, instead of just hacking at it from outside. My FFXI play has hammered home to me just how central the mechanics and logistics of fighting together, levelling, solving missions etc. is to the experience of supposely “non-game” elements, like sociability and aesthetics – in the MMO environment, immersion is not necessarily created by versimilitude, but by multimodal engagement in tasks with shared meaning, and the mutual expectations and obligations therein. But, of course, writing about the game and not the session of play is also the boring route taken by traditional game journalism. It’s good to see the evolution of the form – and of the reception of the form – at work.

This article on technology in Asia isn’t exactly novel, but it does touch a couple of my favorite bases: gender and techno-culture, the effect of big-box retailers in homogenizing consumption and diminishing novelty in the US, and high-tech toilets. Really, the toilets are amazing.