Slashdot Mirror

Clancy and gaming is an interesting topic.

Much of Red Storm Rising was modeled largely on naval combat simulations using a table-top minatures game that evolved into the Harpoon video game franchise.

The wikipedia article about Red Storm Rising specifically state that the Soviet invasion of Iceland and the huge airborne anti-ship missile attack on the American carrier task force were played out tabletop before being written.

I found this fascinating writeup of the gaming sessions that led up to some of the most interesting naval combat fiction ever written, IMHO.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville

tl;dr: People are social animals and companies are exploiting social obligations(real and invented) to collect data.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville

Cultivated Play: Farmville

by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz -- SUNY Buffalo (Amherst)
March 09, 2010 - 22:44
[This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn's death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.]

"I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing."
-- Howard Zinn

The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their country's history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see.

At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, "Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money...."[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of "escape from responsibility and routine."[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

If games are essential to citizenship, then this could be a promising time for our democracy. According to a recent survey, over half of American adults play video games, and one in five play everyday or almost everyday. Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games.[4] Does this mean they will become more politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential candidate to advertise in video games, when his "Early Voting Has Begun" ads appeared in Madden 2009, Burnout Paradise, and other Electronic Arts video games.[5]

Much has been made of President Obama's sophisticated use of new media technologies. He utilized the internet extensively in organizing and raising funds for his campaign, and has maintained an active presence on popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. To illustrate, he is currently taking questions about last night's State of the Union address via YouTube, and plans to answer those questions next week in a live, online video feed.[6] While it remains unclear how such events are affecting politics, it is clear that ne

Philosopher and media theorist McKenzie "Ken" Wark addresses a large aspect of this issue of gaming as subversive work and mis(re)appropriation of labor in gamespace to the application of capitalist/vectoralist interests in his recent work Gamer Theory (online interactive book).

The Video Game Monologues project does a reasonable job explaining some of this, put to animation.

For those of you too lazy to follow the links, the Aspen Movie Map was a project done in 1978-81 by the MIT Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the Media Lab) to create an interactive map of the town of Aspen Colorado. Similar to Google, they mounted sideways facing cameras on a car, drove around the town collecting "street-view" imagery and loaded it all into an interactive map. They built an interactive videodisk and interface that allowed you to "drive around" the town. Video clip Here. I don't know if they patented any of the ideas, but I expect any patents would have expired by 2007.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/googl e%202084.jpg

Absolute obedience, top-down flow of information, shut up and do what you're told every single time...

Big-time re1igion is making its presence felt in the military like never before. Here's more evidence:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens/ar chives/2006/07/pat_tillman_non.html

i Do agree that the police and everyone overraceted, but at the same time there was a bag left in one of the subway stops that was suspicious, and at the same time they find these weird looking things that look like its possible there is a pipe bomb on the bottom of it...

i am glad that they did overreact because a bomb can look a lot less high tech than that...

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/2007/02/01/hoax01x 200.jpg - athf bomb

http://www.futureofthebook.org/itinplace/pipebomb. jpg - real pipe bomb...

not that they are very similar, but you can see where the concern is...

what can you do... people are right, it was a good publicity stunt, but at the same time it was stupid to do that without letting someone know that you are going to be putting these things all over the city...

im glad they overreacted and im also glad that turner owned up and paid out because it would have just looked stupid if it went to court, and i do think that those 2 idiots should be arrested because they saw what was going on in the news and didnt tell anyone...

Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The Cave(TM). It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you are a gamer in The Cave(TM). You test your skills against other gamers. You have played in The Cave(TM) since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: "Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere." The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave(TM) provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Yours is the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.