THE CRITICAL MASS is a “sustainable dance club” which uses the kinetic energy of the visitors to power the club itself. The project is framed by its designers as a solution to the wastefulness of the traditional dance club; I see it as a kind of capture of surplus energy which is then transformed into a feedback system, creating game-able loops of information, particularly if – and this isn’t clear – visitors can understand their collective agency, or even their contributive agency, to the ecosystem of the club.

A comparable project is the Google Image Labeler, a game which generates labor – specifically, the task of meta-tagging – as a by-product of a game of semantic coordination between strangers. Players get to accumulate points, Google gets thousands of images tagged without paying a dime for the labor. The labeler seems to have been targeted for abuse, however, perhaps sabotaging its value as a method of producing meta-data. One wonders whether the motivation is to game the system for more in-game points (intrinsic motivation), or if it is an attempt to engineer AdSense traffic results, as certain keywords may cause certain ads to be more likely to appear (extrinsic motivation.) Google is well-equipped to filter out the noise of the latter, of course; if the motivation is the former, however, and the enthusiasm of players who could produce “honest” results is dampened by their inability to compete with a tribe of keyword-sharers, then they may actually see a decline in benefit.

So, apparently, this is what Wii have to look forward to…

I can’t help but think of Ian Bogost’s airport (in)security games and wonder about the Wii version.

So, apparently, this is what Wii have to look forward to…

I can’t help but think of Ian Bogost’s airport (in)security games and wonder about the Wii version.

Way outside the charter of this blog – but hey, it’s my blog, and if I want make the charter include paeons to my late grandfather’s love for his wife (which I have) or observations about how big a pain in the ass it is to travel into the US, I can.

US is most unfriendly country to visitors – survey

I have too many anecdotes about this: my cousin, a successful lawyer and business exec in Peru, waited years for a simple tourist visa to visit his brother, a naturalized citizen living in San Diego.

I wonder how many conferences are being hosted outside the US due to problems with foreign scholars entering the country?

I’m now a participant in the Transliteracies project, which researches the practice of reading online. In particular, I’ve been asked to examine MMOs as reading interfaces. I’ll be studying both Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft.

One facet of MMO textuality that has caught my interest is role-playing, and the affordances and challenges that the MMO interface creates for role-players. I have opened up a dialogue with a group of role-players in FFXI to hear how they use the interface to perform their own narratives and fictions. The conversation has begun to veer to broader questions of the relationship between role-playing (in the conventional sense of dramatic enactment) and MMOs: despite the fact that MMOs are often described as “role-playing games,” the roles proffered by them are usually constrained, in tension with both the mechanics and the authored fictions of the games.

Transliteracies � Research Project

Amputees’ phantom limbs return in virtual reality – Crave at CNET.co.uk

This may be an exercise in multi-modal embodied cognition: the virtual/phantom limb is perceived visually in virtual space. Can one say it is “represented?” It stands for an “actual” limb that doesn’t exit., and the rest of the body is unrepresented.

One wonders what would happen if the virtual limb were connected to the amputated region’s nerve endings, and if the “virtual space” could also become a 3d representation of a 2d interface. Would that limb develop interface fluencies of its own? Would it be experienced as being in the same or a different space?

Self-reflexive claims that a blog is “back,” and vaguely guilty/anxious declamations about absence, are staples of the blogging form. I’ll try to nuance my indulgence in those reflexes, then, and state that I’ll be posting some more material here over the next couple of weeks, at least. Possibly the next few months: I’ll try.

I’ve migrated (most of) the material from my older blog, which was running on the Blosxom engine. While I liked the aesthetics of that older blog, in practice, it was too much trouble to produce content and administer the substructure myself. I’ll focus on the former and let Blogger/Google handle the latter.

I purchased a buddhamachine last weekend.

Created by FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian), this anti-ipod not only puts generates ambient loops (Brian Eno grabbed a bunch of them), it has a little Buddha in the machine. And it has another feature that I discovered this morning, by accident:

When a cellphone is ringing nearby, the drones become loud, distorted, and frenetic. I had plugged mine into the speakers in my bedroom into which I usually plug my iRiver I let the loops run, and then, as I was coming out of my shower, I heard something that sounded more like Autechre than like Eno. Sure enough, my cellphone was ringing. Likewise, when a text message is incoming, the unit buzzes.

I’m trying to put some sort of interpretive spin on it, but really, it’s just kind of cool.

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One of the most engaging works I’ve ever lingered in front of was Mark Hansen and Ben Ruben’s Listening Post, which I saw at the Skirball Center about a year and a half ago (it was first shown in December 2001.) Hansen is a statistician; Ruben is an artist who works with sound and installations. The work organizes data culled from a range of chat channels throughout the internet onto a grid of index-card sized LCD screens, parsing them semantically in a fugue of investigations of simple phrases, run through a voice synthesizer and algorithmically generated into a composition. This sounds dry and experimental: however, when the system looks for every instance of a phrase that begins “i love” or “i am” and stitches them together, the effect is profoundly moving, an exploration of the mass sub-conscious of the Internet. I have rarely been as shaken by a new media work.

It reminds me somewhat of the opera of Robert Ashley, but I find it less solipsistic than Ashley’s work.

In their statement they elaborate on the process that they used. There are some videos that give a sense of the delicacy of feeling of the work.

I hope that it gets shown again soon – it deserves a permanent home.

From the 2005 Digra conference, a paper that I wish that I’d heared on a topic I wish I could have researched:  Kenji Ito writes about amateur-designed RPGs in Japan. (Both the abstract and the paper are available online.) Some of the amateur-designed games sound very compelling: stories about divorce, abuse, suicide and sexism created by amateurs using a commercially available game-design toolkit to describe their experiences.

These tools need to be use more – engines for narrative systems, embedding the economies of secrecy and revelation, of alliance and betrayal, of irrevocability and consequence, into narratives in a way that only a game system really can. (A game system contains the possible worlds of narrative – while it smuggles its own fictions in, it allows one to step back from novelistic fatalism and see a network of contingencies instead. “If this, then that – it need not have been this way, it could have been that way.”) This is the Boalian possibility of games that Gonzalo Frasca talks about.

This is only possible, however, among a community of amateur player-artists who are already literate with the techniques, methods and conventions of the computer RPG. The genre is already advanced and well-established in Japan (it could almost be called a national genre) – a developed syntax exists. It is from these fan-based practices, outside of the industry but derived from it, that many real aesthetic advances will come.

I met Professor Ito in Vancouver, and he told me that there was too little reading of the game-as-text or artifact in Japan; most analyses were either sociological or industry-focused. The games described in his paper are, apparently, available online.

Yes, it’s time to study some more kanji.

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