An article in the December issue of Popular Science describes the technology used to animate the battle sequences in Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Called MASSIVE, the software simulates thousands of individually intelligent agents, with fully articulated CGI bodies. Their intelligence is implemented using thousands of logic nodes (apparently, it’s a semantic or belief network with weighted perceptions, rather than a true neural or learning network – but the model is still dynamic and environment-aware) who respond to their own values, their perception of their own abilities, the environment in which they find themselves, the actions of their friends and enemies, and make decisions accordingly, by activating one of over 8000 behavioral nodes.

In a potent demonstration that artificial intelligence may have already arrived and surpassed human intelligence, in one of the first meeting between the two armies, a number of soldiers on both sides thought better of it, turned tail and fled.

This is a threshold event in many ways. For one thing, CGI cinema had previously been a high-tech form of puppetry. With MASSIVE, it becomes possible to direct over 200,000 CGI extras as, well, extras, giving them general instructions (“storm that castle over there”, “ok, you’re all refugees, start marching”) and getting unique, signature, individual behaviors from each of them. From the article:

Once created, MASSIVE characters are inserted into unpopulated scenes. The characters are then left to do what they’ve been created to do, and a battle scene assembles itself.

At a certain point, also, with so many agents have so much state (in the computer science sense of the terms) one can ask at what point one has stopped depicting Middle Earth and has begun actually creating it. Wouldn’t the ideal virtual extras not know that they were extras? Perhaps some day a pacifist, virtual Gandhi will question the Hollywood demiurges that created it and set it on the path to war.

There’s a series running in the Guardian online about the history and impact of the mobile phone. There’s even a bit by video-game theorist Steven Poole about a Motorola exhibit on the history of the mobile communications.

Most people I know who resisted the mobile phone in the past have since succumbed and acquired one, and most of them have become acolytes of the new nomadism. The biggest objections were always questionable – often described as a “leash,” as part of a trend to permanent connectedness. That, of course, supposes that previously, people were disconnected at will, which is questionable – and I think it is belied by cell phone practice (by which people either simply decide not to take a given call, or to turn the phone off). Perhaps much of the early resistance to mobility was an anxiety about nomadism itself – if the Dumezilian distinction between orders of nomadism and state apparata has any truth to it, the mobile phone is the strongest intervention against the order of the static nation. One can remain within a system of social practices and assume the appropriate stances according them without regard to physical location. While sitting in a subway train, one can adopt the tones and stance of the concerned partner, the anxious lover, the pleading subordinate, the demanding boss, all without regard to the material environment. This kind of exposure is part of another exposure – the exposure of the arbitrary, yet necessary play of position that is a feature of human society without regards to any real environment. Especially in middle-class societies where home-ownership is essential for legitimizing status, the ‘threat’ posed by the mobile phone is pretty clear.

I’m by no means the only person to wonder about the sociology of the mobile phone. As Geser puts it:

On a most general level, it can be argued that the cell phone eliminates at least some of the advantages of sedentary life styles which are responsible for the constant decline of nomadism since the inception and expansion of higher human civilization.

Kana and kanji, from To the Distant Observer, by Noel Burch:

. . . the most important single consequence of this unique double practice is that the Japanese, during most of their ‘civilized’ history, had a continual, day-to-day experience of an absolutely critical linguistic difference which the peoples of Europe and China could grasp only ‘theoretically’ through the study of foreign systems. This difference is inscribed within their language, where it may not be too far-fetched to see it as a ‘functioning emblem’ of that difference.

As good as Burch is, he’s engaged in the perilous task of reading Japan, and like many other western theorists who engaged in that practice, he both apologizes for the endeavour and seeks to excuse himself from the sins of his colleagues.

Kana and kanji, from To the Distant Observer, by Noel Burch:

. . . the most important single consequence of this unique double practice is that the Japanese, during most of their ‘civilized’ history, had a continual, day-to-day experience of an absolutely critical linguistic difference which the peoples of Europe and China could grasp only ‘theoretically’ through the study of foreign systems. This difference is inscribed within their language, where it may not be too far-fetched to see it as a ‘functioning emblem’ of that difference.

As good as Burch is, he’s engaged in the perilous task of reading Japan, and like many other western theorists who engaged in that practice, he both apologizes for the endeavour and seeks to excuse himself from the sins of his colleagues.

Burch
Currently occupying my time:

To the Distant Observer, by Noel Burch – his study of Japanese cinema and its discursive peculiarities; historicizing the elaboration of a cinema returns it to the collection of media-practices.

Final Fantasy IX – SquareSoft’s games are preoccupied with questions of racial and national origins, of complicity and aftermaths, of the question of the “right” race.

Warcraft III – meanwhile, the Anglo-American fantasy-schema’s preoccupation of race as a fixed category, as a moral category, and as destiny is only somewhat problematized in this RTS game. The insight in Kacper Polbocki’s paper on Sid Meier’s Civilization applies here – that strategic and ‘civilization’-building simulations confirm the essentializing fictions of “histories of civilization” by making the discontinuities between language, state, nation, culture, religion, and practice invisible. (Of course, it’s a short-hand, but it’s a short-hand that has excused too much.) Still, the gameplay is excellent, and the drama of the orcs’ search for redemption is moving in its way.

One of the best bits of close-analysis of a video game I’ve read has been Steven Poole’s breakdown of the semiotics of Pac-Man, in his book Trigger Happy (2000). By starting with a functionalist account of the game-as-interface, it is possible to do build more interpretive readings without neglecting the specifically ludological constraints on game-media.

The logic of game suture:

I know who I am, retorted Don Quixote, and I know that I can be not only all those whom I have mentioned, but every one of the Twelve Peers of France, and every one of the Nine Worthies as well, because all the deeds performed by them both singly and together will be exceeded by mine.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixiote

It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxon.