Slashdot Mirror
Taking Games Seriously
"The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to each other." -- Janet Murray, Hamlet On The Holodeck
What will it take, wondered MIT Professor Murray in her classic 1997 book, for authors to create rich, satisfying stories that exploit the charactertistic properties of digital environments and deliver the aesthetic pleasures that cyberspace seems to promise?
For Murray, one of the first academics to take seriously the evolving digital world as culture, there's no doubt that the next Shakespeare will come from cyberspace.
Her prediction was especially bold at a time when the Net had already become almost synonymous with obsession, addiction, bomb-making, gun-buying, and porn. But day by day, it's clearer that she was right. Culture isn't being destroyed online, but re-invented. The next Shakespeare is probably clacking away on some Weblog or messaging system. In our time, the Net is where smart, curious, freedom-seeking and restlessly creative minds go to express themselves, experiment, and create a new kind of culture.
Wherever he or she is, her work will probably pop on a Web site something like MyVideoGames.com, launched a few months ago by Neil Morton and Steve Park, two former editors of the culture-savvy Canadian magazine Shift.
MyVideoGames is already an important site, just by dint of its existence. It acknowledges, implicitly and explicitly, that games are no longer simple forms of entertainment, but increasingly creative, complex -- even political -- expressions of the new culture forming online. It's the gaming equivalent of the newsmagazine in the media world of yore - stylish, literate, interesting.
The site offers breaking vid news, reviews, profiles of game heroes and heroines, and essays. One recent edition featured reports on the sleazy days of gaming, and the controversial "tits-and-ass game" Panty Raider, as well as ruminations on the sometimes-addictive nature of creative games. Such a site, almost inconceivable even five years ago, now seems a benchmark of the way new media evolve to recognize and shape new culture. The mainstream press, as usual, gets left behind, clucking about the new world like Temperance Ladies outside a bar.
It makes sense that this new kind of medium is forming around a complex community of gamers who seek not only amusement but intellectual challenge, stimulation, role-playing and community. Gaming is becoming a bigger part of the cultural lives of more and more people all the time. On eBay, some game characters are auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars. Barely recognized off-line at all, gamers number in the tens of millions, a following as large or larger than that which follows many traditional forms of culture -- opera, classical music. Gaming, given the storytelling inherent in video and computer games, is perhaps the most vital new cultural form emanating from cyberspace. Many games have evolved far beyond mind games like chess and Scrabble. Their characters, storylines and intellectual challenges are demanding and highly evolved.
This isn't by accident. The formulaic nature of storytelling, Murray points out, makes it especially suitable for the computer, so skilled at modeling and reproducing patterns of all kinds.
The idea of cyberspace as culture is a particularly bitter pill for many of the shapers of thought and opinion -- educators, academics, journalists, writers, members of the clergy, the so-called intelligentsia -- to stomach. In fact, Murray still has few colleagues supporting her contention that networked computing is re-shaping culture in diverse and highly creative ways.
Undaunted, Murray began teaching a course in electronic fiction in l992. "These stories cover every range and style, from oral histories to adventure tales, from the exploits of comic book heroes to domestic dramas." She is, she writes in her book, drawn more and more each year to imagining "a cyberdrama of the future ... I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. Just as the computer promises to re-shape knowledge in ways that sometimes complement and sometimes supercede the work of the book and the lecture hall, so too does it promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework."
Murray's idea will remain bitterly controversial for some time, especially among the guardians of conventional culture. But that's exactly the sensibility that pervades MyVideoGames.com, from Sean Monkman's essay on the physical challenges of videogames on the hands to Jonathan Kay's heartfelt -- and very truthful -- essay on how vid-games became the "ultimate scapegoat" after the Columbine High School massacre in l999.
Morton and Parks got the idea for MyVideoGame last October after they noticed half the workers in the Shift offices playing and talking constantly about games, and organizing get-togethers to play after work.
"So, I thought, heck, I gotta start a site that focuses on nothing but that," he e-mailed. "Videogames are a new mass medium. So let's do real videogame journalism like [Jann] Wenner did with music when he started Rolling Stone." Morton and Parks noticed that while a number of sites were devoted to cheats and reviews, hardly any focused on gaming's growing importance as a cultural force. "So we made a quick adjustment ... Let's focus on implications, not just applications of gaming." The site began soliciting contributions from academics and journalists, game addicts, designers and players.
With the result, Norton and Parks have made a bit of media history, once again demonstrating how mainstream journalism has napped through many significant, if less sensational, parts of the digital revolution. MyVideoGame.com recognizes precisely what Janet Murray describes so convincingly in Hamlet On The Holodeck, now out in paperback from MIT Press.
One of the most vigorous, rapidly expanding forms of popular culture, games are growing astonishingly inventive, creative, challenging and complex. Some, without question, are works of art both graphically and conceptually. For growing numbers of Americans and people elsewhere in the world, gaming is intrinsically conected to story-telling, mental stimulation and recreation, for all that school administrators, politicians and many parents still don't get it -- or fear it.
Murray's notion of the transformative power of computing as an advance in the history of narrative also is reflected on the discussions and editorial agenda of myvideogames.com.
"Computers offer us countless ways of shape-shifting," writes Murray. "Using 'morphing' software, we can transform faces so seamlessly that a grinning teenage boy melts into a haggard old woman, as if under a magic spell. The transformative power of the computer is particularly seductive in narrative environments. It makes us eager for masquerade, eager to pick up the joystick and become a cowboy or a space fighter, eager to log onto the MUD and become ElfGirl or BlackDagger."
I have taken Jon's article, run it through Microsoft Word 97's Autosummarize feature, and posted the results here, so thatyou may enjoy, pure, distilled if you will JonKatz, in one-tenth of the normal time. The faint of heart and pregnant women should probably avoid this summary. Lets see what happens...
Culture isn't being destroyed online, but re-invented. The site offers breaking vid news, reviews, profiles of game heroes and heroines, and essays. Gaming, given the storytelling inherent in video and computer games, is perhaps the most vital new cultural form emanating from cyberspace. Many games have evolved far beyond mind games like chess and Scrabble. Murray's idea will remain bitterly controversial for some time, especially among the guardians of conventional culture. One of the most vigorous, rapidly expanding forms of popular culture, games are growing astonishingly inventive, creative, challenging and complex.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Now am I the only exception, or is this an unjustified generalization? I mean, there's lots of other stuff "we" do in our free time...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Culture is not static. It is dynamic. It changes with the times and the people. That should be obvious. However, it is my belief that apart from culture changing, in itself, we are becoming generally more acultural. As we graduate to a global community, large cultures will be broken along more specialized lines. E.g., some of us may associate with Geek culture more than we do with the culture of our nation. We might feel more at home in a foreign culture, if surrounded by geeks. Culture is changing from the bland one-size-fits-all, into individual and peculiar flavors, in small niches. E.g., people who like anime have a culture to themselves, which breaks nationality borders. We should take care that the free market of ideas leads to cultural diversity, not aculture stagnation.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Games have always been a defining and shaping force of culture since ancient times. Notable examples would include the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece (and modern times), the gladitorial games of Rome, and chess and pachisi(sp?) among the nobility of europe and india.
Until recently, most games in our culture (I live in the US) were played outdoors by groups of people. Baseball, football, soccer, etc... However today, few people have the time or outdoor space to engage in these activities, and there are very few adult leagues set up on a purely recreational (ie not very competitive) level. As a replacement for these, online gaming has developed.
I both play and administer muds and have come to know people from literally all across the globe through my play and work on these. Much of what used to occur on street corners and ball fields now happens over computer screens, simply because that is what we all have free or relatively free and easy access to.
As Kirk observed (rough quote) "The more advanced the culture, the greater the need for the simplicity of play"
Games will continue to develop and become more a part of our culture, just as chat-rooms, messanging, and email have become.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge
I don't think its the medium that will distingiush the next great minds. Its the content. Porn aside, we have yet to create somthing online that captures the soul of the everyman. We play to the desires of the many. The next great thing has to entice the everyman with somthing innovative that could only have existed through this new meduim. Not simply rehashing old ideas. From what I have seen we have yet to concieve this.
Some games have always been mainstream (at least to game players) - the fighters, the first person shooters, the sports games, etc. And it's these mainstream games that most of the non-videogame audience looks at when they don't take games seriously. What's serious about a sports game, after all? It's just a diversion - a fighter isn't likely to spark creative minds to make new things, it's likely to let someone vent some steam :)
:)
Recently, though, other types of games have made it to the forefront. Final Fantasy VII was one of the first RPGs to have its own commercial - suddenly, RPGs were mainstream. It's games like these that the non-videogaming populace could look at and think (possibly) that they're worthwhile. Something with plot, depth, and artistic merit. Something that could spark a creative mind to make new things.
I'm not bashing any of the other genres. There's nothing like a good quakefest, after all - but to the folks who aren't really into videogaming, it's the games that seem to have more depth which are leading to greater acceptance of games.
Now, if I could only convince my parents
-Denor
This is a very interesting view of the way gaming works - I like it. I have first noticed something like that years ago, when I got myself really interacting with people during a Quake match - that was interesting. The possibilities are endless, now that there are more and more games, some very specific, some with nothing but gun-shooting and noise, and really clever ones, like Warcraft, Simcity, The Sims, C&C... /.). Anyway, gaming is more and more close to a real life experience - I hope to be expanding my knowledge and my icq list more and more from now on, as games keep going better and better (which is kinda bad, because my computer is sooo slow :P). :)
The meaning of gaming is not clear to most people not into computers. They mostly think games are for geeks, and that only nerds like videogames (or teenagers). A guy was arrested in my country, after shooting more than 5 people in a theatre at his town (Sao Paulo), and the accusation blamed it on influence coming from Duke Nukem (I even think there is an article about that right here at
Quake anyone?
I thought it was a very interesting piece. I'd never heard of Panty Raider....
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Excuse me, but isn't formulaic the last thing a good story should be?
Personally, I think that games of any sort are not fit for storytelling. You can't really have "interactive" stories because you'd quickly run out of place if you made everything possible. At their heart, all adventure and roleplaying games are linear, it's just that some disguise the lack of choice you have better than others. And in the end, solving (often frustratingly arbitrary) puzzles is not something that really makes you enjoy the story better.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Not that most of them do anything useful with it.
Perhaps, but for those who can make good, productive use of it, the technology is available sooner and less expensively than it would be, and that's a Good Thing. The users of our CAD program have certainly benefited from the march of 3-D technology.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Neil Morton and Steve Park, two former Shift editors, have launched Myvideogames.com, a webzine that promises to offer literate commentary on game-culture and storytelling. They claim they want to do for video game reporting what Rolling Stone did for music journalism.
I'm not usually a Katz-basher, but this one really seems to be stretching its content past the breaking point. And he didn't even get URL right!
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Far be it from me to challenge the many months of historical perspective behind this statement, but gaming with storytelling elements was old when the VIC-20 was new.
Gaming != Computer Gaming, folks.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You are right in that it does seem to be an unfounded steriotype. I know pleanty of admins, programmers, etc. that either have no interesting in First Person Shooters or no interest in almost any games! Now, that doesn't nessisarily apply to me and most of my closest friends - we used to do the LAN-party thing quite often with Quake II, and then later Unreal Tournament.
There are quite a few steriotypes that are applied to geeks in general - can't get women (I'm engaged to a beautiful red head who's studying to become a Dr.), play games (hell, I've been spending too much time having fun writing games these days to actually play many other people's games! And I still really prefer a good strategy or thinking game to most FPS games), never see the sun (well, I am alergic to sunlight, so I suppose this one applies), etc. I know I don't fit the profile, and to tell you the truth - most of the geeks that I know don't fit the steriotype either. Strange how steriotypes work...
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I think that $CURRENT_TREND is forcing us to re-examine our entire culture.
With my vast imagination, I predict a time when these developments could lead to $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION.
Other clueless liberal-arts majors in my field scoff at the notion, because they don't "get it" like I do.
Technical experts tell me that all this is currently impossible, but that will all change once $FAR_OFF_BREAKTHROUGH happens, and we should be ready.
I have no idea what it will take to make this a reality, but that's because I'm a big-picture person, not a detail person.
You geeks, who clearly never would have thought of this without me, should all get behind my vision so we can make $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION happen someday.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Funnily enough, I think it's because of the medium's relative youth that these 'tasteless elements' are not yet found in computer games. It won't be long before someone does it... And I don't even think it needs to be such a bad thing either.
The difference with movies is, of course, interaction. I hope I can live with computer games (18+?) in which the bad guy spouts racist crap (happens all the time in movies/novels), but it all becomes a bit more poignant if the game allows you to somehow influence what's happening (e.g. save your girlfriend from being raped?).
Things might even go further. When in a movie someone 'plays' the bad guy, we know this is only pretending on the part of the actor. How does playing a rapist reflect on the actor's character? Not badly I hope. And does this translate to someone playing a rapist in an online RPG?
Great games
To say that "the Net" redefines culture is like saying that FTP redefines a computer program.
Sorry, but that's so much carp, and I think you know it. (At least, I hope you do!) Trying to pump up the Internet (calling it the Net makes it sound so... ...pop trash) is not only foolish but, IMHO, counter-productive.
A latter-day Shakespere is unlikely to care about someone ranting about the Freedom Of The Net, or Libertarian Codswallop. They'll be too busy DOING to care about such stuff, and too busy BEING to worry if someone thinks their culture is post-techno-hyper-counter-revolutionary.
The secret of success is not fanatical obsession with preaching an ideal. The secret of success is simply being. Let yourself exist. If humanity needed propoganda chiefs THAT badly, we'd be born with a newspaper in one hand and a stock ticker in the other.
Forget blind obsession and trying to look good. If you try to look good, you won't and you aren't. Get on with your life, and if you don't have one, then get one. The Internet is simply one more part of that life, the same way the dishwasher is. I don't see people shouting from the steepletop about the amazing Cultural Revolution that caused, although it was arguably a lot more extensive and pervasive than the Internet has been, to date.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Honor doesn't take much, other than true skill. It's teaching the cheating bastard a lesson. It's taking on the guy attempting to rape the newbie as opposed to the newbie. It's sticking for the ideals of "That's just not fair, it's not right."
You're not often going to get the chance to do it in real life, I'd wager. I mean.. if you're truly pious and good you'll stick up for what's right. You'll probably get the shit kicked out of you a number of times too. As much as we'd like to be truly honorable all the time, we also have this thing about saving our own asses sometimes.
Online gaming culture has the chance to be different from this, to actually have some honor in it. Sadly this doesn't seem to be happening. More people become obsessed with being Ultimate Rambo, or winning at all costs, or taking down the easy ones. Online gaming is becoming more popular. I hate to sound nostalgic, but I'm dead sure the two are linked.
Anyway, I guess my point is online gaming appeals to me because I have the chance to cultivate a (albeit small) culture akin to Arthur's Knights. Sounds stupid, but feels cool. Whatever keeps me happy?...
Is it just me, or anybody else has the feeling that this, ahem, "article" is shameless plug for a neither-original-nor-particularly-interesting web site?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm always amazed at the naivete the so-called media critic, JonKatz.
...") or asserts the prominence of an general idea in the broadest, most non-specific way ("Not since the invention of the first printing press over 500 years ago did ...")
...
Gotta give the guy credit: he's as earnest as college freshman writing his or her first term-paper.
In fact, Katz's articles usually read like freshman, 5-paragraph paper material.
For example, the typical freshman paper always contains that first paragraph which either quotes the dictionary ("Webster's dictionary defines the word 'geek' as
As for the 'body' of the paper?
Well, Katz, like most college freshmen, relies on broad, sweeping assertions to drive home a point that hasn't been properly (or even 'clearly') specified. We know we're reading something -- the author is certainly making a lot of assertions -- but we aren't convinced why the author so adament in his or her assertions.
The persuasive power of the text is lost in what I've come to understand is the typical Katzian sentence.
For example: "...there's no doubt that the next Shakespeare will come from cyberspace."
Are we to believe this literally? Does Katz even himself believe this? Is this a quote? A paraphrase?
Or is this just rhetorical flourish? Or, worse yet, rhetorical "filler" to bridge the paragraph previous to the paragraph following?
Or, another example:
"Culture isn't being destroyed online, but re-invented. The next Shakespeare is probably clacking away on some weblog or messaging system."
Katz is fixated on the notion of the next Shakespeare. It's an interesting idea: but he's using Shakespeare -- or his *notion* of Shakespeare -- for a specific rhetorical purpose.
As I read this, he's not meaning the "next Shakespeare" literally -- he's apparently using the name "Shakespeare" to imply "a good writer." Or perhaps "a famous writer". Or, wait -- is a "good" *and* "famous" writer?
Or, better yet: "a writer who creates enduring work?"
But Katz's Shakespeare is "clacking away on some weblog or messaging system."
WTF?
First, why would anyone "clack away on a weblog?" And is clacking on a weblog really similar to clacking on a "messaging system"?
Second, why would Katz's Shakespeare -- one who creates enduring art -- clack away at a message system? Is Katz implying the cultural shift from creating theater (the first "Shakespeare") to creating applications (Katz's new Shakespeare)?
If this is the case, it's an interesting thesis: perhaps, this new "eCulture" has made some gradual shift in its notion of the imagination -- creative works now include stuff like "weblogs" and "messaging system" and if Shakespeare is to be found, he (or she) will be located not by examing plays, novels, or stories, but instead web-based applications like "weblogs" or "messaging systems."
This, as I say, is pretty damn interesting. Katz is no fool -- he just writes like one. Why not pursue this notion?
Well, because that's not what the article is about. The article is really about gaming. And, um, this (apprently) new idea: a gaming site.
WTF?
I could go on, but I won't.
Instead, I'll make a plea: Katz, please don't underestimate your audience here. Please tell me that you really don't think we're as naive as your writing makes us sound.
Tell me that it's all done for a rhetorical purpose. You think Slashdot readers aren't as savvy as they really are.
If that's the case, I can forgive you. You've made a mistaken assumption about your audience -- and, well, in the future, you'll crank your rhetoric and analysis up a notch.
You don't actually write this sort of simplistic analysis: you just write it because, well, that's the sort of quick analysis you think Slashdot readers want.
If all this is a rhetorical mistake, you're forgiven. But, if not
There are always those who decry any evolution of a given culture as equivalent to destroying it. Likewise -- as in this case -- any new culture to emerge is often viewed as having the effect of marginalizing current cultures. The reality is that new cultures emerge, others fall by the wayside, and still others evolve to reflect changes in the views of their members.
One of the earlier examples of this would be the spread of music outside of the church. This was resisted vigorously from the idea of anything other than monophonic unison chanting through harmony, polyphony, accompaniment, etc. Especially interesting is that before that time, relatively complex quasi-orchestral music had been the norm before culture altered its course toward the "music is religious" idea.
Follow the pattern through radio destroying books, movies destroying radio. Television destroying a culture of children going outside to play. At the end of the day, all we have is a richer society with more options for entertainment, more lifestyle choices, and more culture than at any other time in history. And the pattern shows no signs of letting up.
When the next shift in culture appears, will those who are comfortable with this one cry out, "You're destroying our culture! What will happen to the Internet?"
Nerd Rock In Progress
This is beyond parody. Classic Katz :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I am often considered part of the much maligned "intelligentsia"; I'm
a professor at the most famous Ivy League University (along with being
a partner at a software startup). And I for one *do* think that video
games *may* become the central artform of the 21st century. At the
beginning of the 20th century, film was a used for little more than
silly experiments and peep-shows that people who could not afford the
theater attended. But by any reasonable measure film became (along
with the novel) the great artform of the 20th century: Kurosawa,
Bergman, Kubrick etc.
But greatness is just the promise of video games. No video game has
achieved anywhere near the sublime greatness of ``Wild Strawberries''
(a better example for this audience would probably be ``2001''). I do
think, however, that video games may achieve greatness sometime in
this century. Such video games will almost certainly look vastly
different than they do today.
I usually don't bash J. Katz, but this post was aggressively stupid.
Katz often rants about the stereotyped, oppressed geek. But I guess
stereotyping the ``intelligentsia'' is fair game. Nowhere does he
present the arguments that *SOME* in the ``intelligentsia'' would make
against video games---arguments with which I do not agree. He just
bashes them for their conclusions.
Moreover, I would welcome the next ``Shakespeare''. But given that we
haven't had one since the original, I'm not holding my breath. We've
had great, fantastic wonderful writers and artists, but no one with
the overwhelming culture transforming power which was Shakespeare. I
refer Katz to Harold Bloom's masterpiece ``Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human''. But wait, offer a reference? That's just what
someone who's part of the ``intelligentsia'' would do! Never mind
that Harold Bloom (who is a professor at Yale) is much hated by many
members of the literary establishment. Does that still qualify him as
a member of the ``intelligentsia''? I thought only geeks were allowed
to disagree and have the right not to be stereotyped. Then again,
many members of the ``intelligentsia'' are geeks, one would say most
members if one follows Katz's very expansive definition of geek. MR.
Katz you are full of contradictions. I wish that were the only
problem that the post had.
How many companies/web sites have a "My (insert thingy here) ?!"
The only people who understand what that refers to use Windez.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
right. Because we all know that serious programmers don't write in VB, despite the fact that it is the most-used development environment on the planet.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Er, no. The hippies, the beats, the flappers all did just fine without computers.
Subcultures -- that is what we're talking about -- have been around for a long time. Much longer than computers. Computers do indeed facilitate it by accreting minorities, but merely having a highly mobile culture (lots of cars or trains) is already a big help.
IMHO subcultures are a natural result of the fact people are different -- are born different -- in very fundamental ways. Subcultures arise from people sharing certain personality traits, often rarer traits, banding together for mutual support. Subcultures are inexorable. They may be hindered by lack of mobility or free flow of information, but even in the worst situations of information flow (say, heretics trying to find each other in 12th century France) humans manage. They're amazing that way.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
This article is baffling, especially to those of us that have made a living taking gaming "seriously" for the last, oh, 10 years or so. This smacks of a savvy PR fim alerting a journalist of their hot new website. There's nothing at myvideogames.com that isn't served up at other gaming websites that cover the videgame industry. Surely Katz isn't ignorant of the thousands of websites covering the videogame industry; reading this article, it appears Katz is guilty of that which he rails against, assuming other sites are intellectually vacant. (Well, most are.) Sorry kids, myvideogames.com is hardly an important site; it's a late-arriver. It offers nothing that isn't offered elsewhere (wow, news, reviews, profiles and essays!).
---
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"My life is a patio of fun."
God, sometimes it just so hard tell if people are just stupid or if they are excellent trolls.
Such a site, almost inconceivable even five years ago, now seems a benchmark of the way new media evolve to recognize and shape new culture.
Huh? Really?!
I wish I would have known this 5 years ago, when I built my first site in college, the focus of which was on computer gaming and table-top role-playing. Where I wrote about my characters and their trials, tribulations, and triumphs. Where I wrote about the computer games I was playing, those I wanted to play, and those I'd soon play. Where I wrote about my own experiences in gaming, both computer gaming and table-top. Where I wrote about how I thought gaming shaped me, in part, into who and what I am today (or was at the time... though it tends to carry through the years in it's own funny way).
Katz, where were you five years ago to tell me that I couldn't put that old site up? You could have saved me a lot of time...
] D
Does Rob or anyone at Slashdot even read what Katz submits before posting it? It appears that Katz can submit whatever he wants to Slashdot and they publish it without question.
I don't know, but not necessarily. See how it says "Posted by JonKatz" and not "Posted by CmdrTaco"? JonKatz is one of the authors on Slashdot, so he has the ability to post whatever he wants on the main page (he can also go through the submissions and post things people submit, but it doesn't look like he ever does.)
--
A serious gaming site has existed for quite a while, focusing on developers, called Gamasutra. Though perhaps Gamasutra focuses on developers, not players, it's still solewhat serious and askes very broad questions about gaming from time to time.
Video Violence
Bloody Birthday
Violence Schmiolence
Let's Play Pretend!
And, probably the most ironic, hilarious, and appropriate one:
The Longest Line
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
Freshman? Funny, I always think of Katz as sophomoric.
And just to indulge you, Webster's dictionary defines the word 'sophomoric' as "conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature." Bull's-eye.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
The amiga had a keyboard, there were professional development environments available for it, professional quality art packages. Almost everyone had Deluxe Paint, a fairly large number had AMOS if not DevPAC or SAS/C. Lots had octamed. All creative tools. Unlike the brain rotting consoles of today, the amiga afforded you the opportunity to *learn* about the system. Like Linux does today. I think this is where Windows does the most harm -
If you've ever read Windows documentation, MS does it's best to stop you getting past a certain level of expertise. With Linux you get the feeling you could keep learning until you know everything there is to know about the system, even if that would take you forever in real terms. In windows, you just don't get that feeling, and games consoles are even worse.
A complete newbie sitting down in front of a windows box has a high probability of turning into a drooling idiot, in computing terms. He'll get "stuck in a rut" of MS-isms.
A complete newbie [NOTE: Not someone who has ever used windows before - they are not computing newbies. To use linux you have to unlearn some of your windows habits, such as multiple filesystem roots C: D: E: etc, and continual effective root access] sitting down in front of a modern linux box (a)won't find it any harder to use than windows (I've had the opportunity of testing this with a cousin, who used linux first, and subsequently found windows clunky and illogical...), and (b) can keep learning about the system, and never gets the feelng the computer is acting randomly.
There's a famous line about BASIC damaging the minds of aspiring computer programmers forever. A similar line applies to Windows - After learning windows, bad habits become engrained, making it harder to move to a different platform than for a complete newbie. I'm sure MS does this deliberately.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Have you ever travelled to a country vastly different than your own... e.g. from North America to India? Culture is not nearly as global as we sometimes think online. There's a reason the term "Culture Shock" exists... because attitudes and behaviours vary widely among different countries. While neighbouring countries might have only subtle differences, globally we still are very culturally diverse. We may be exposed to more ideas through computers, and have a better idea of what a different culture is like, but when it comes down to it, we are still largely defined by the country we live in. (This is obviously a generalisation, and not always true)
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
damn straight.
I'm a geek and an intellectual, and I don't see any contradiction. Surely these are just words for the same thing?
But this isn't Katz's mistake, it started when romantic poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century, horrified by the dehumanizing work conditions of the industrial revolution, turned their back on science, rationality and the enlightenment in favour of worshipping nature without understanding it.
Since then we've been living through almost two centuries of a bogus division between technical and humanistic cultures, mainly propagated by the humanists - scientists have always read (and written) good novels, appreciated great art and music etc.
Finally, now, we might, if we're lucky, manage to get through the prejudices of the humanities educated administrarchy and put together a society where technical knowledge and its associated culture are an acknowledged part of mainstream culture.
Don't knock Katz. We need people like him to spell this out in thought sof one sylable.
Shakespeare this, Shakespeare that. I am fscking tired of this inane, vapid culture fostering its own delusions of literary grandeur by rehashing a small subset of the classics. How many people who talk about how Shakespeare is the acme of literature have even heard of Ben Jonson? I personally think that Alexander Pope and John Milton could whup Shakespeare any day of the week and twice on Sundays, but that's just my personal opinion.
But to pay all this lip service to 'high culture' or what-have-you... grow up! The man, like Steven Spielberg, does not shit gold! There are other things worth your time! Pick up something new, different, daring, something that other people may have overlooked. Remember, most people that we consider artistic geniuses today were overlooked in their own day and age -- what has changed? We're incapable of judging for ourselves, we need a cultural consensus! Bah!
I repeat, for those in the cheap seats -- Bah!
See, now you've gotten me all worked up.
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Looking at games with a literary eye is on par with teaching a college course in Saturday morning cartoons. For the longest time, there has been the notion that video and computer games will advance into a form of art. But after years of this, games are a weird juvenile form of entertainment. There's been a constant notion of a certain type of games being for the kiddies, and then a "mature" type of games for people who are beyond that. "Mature" seems to be equated with top-heavy bikini babes, an obsession with blood and gore and weapons, and a fixation on dark futures. In short, fifteen year olds who want to separate themselves from the happy-go-lucky days of their youth.
At the same time, game design creativity has stagnated in a horrible way. Authors of fiction create worlds and tell stories and the results end up in bookstores. Typical authors don't start off a project by saying "Okay, that last Stephen King novel sold really well. I'm going to write the same book, only better." Yet this is what game developers always do. A game design starts out with "like Everquest, but..." or "Quake with a fantasy RPG element..." and we get the same old stuff. Yet we have no subversive element, just people writing more versions of old arcade games (but now they're Open Source).
Rather than discussing the current crop of games in an adult way, perhaps a better approach would be to try to foster a generation of game creators who can think for themselves and want to distance themselves from what's expected of the so-called game "industry." After all, it's common for writers and musicians to start out in a subversive way and grow into mainstream: Kerouac, REM, Hunter S. Thompson, Smashing Pumpkins.
This is modern computing. To even get to the point where you can create skilled works you often spend years learning mechanical programming skills in a structured environment. Worse yet, in every age prior to our own excess productivity resulted in a class of people who devoted their lives to nothing but the arts and philosophy. Today we watch TV, play videogames and browse porn on the web.
I think to move any further we must develop the tools to make the internet a natural extension of our creativity instead of becoming mechanics. At the same time we must be enticed to want to express ourselves in ways that create greater things.
most writers do get paid by the word, but the problem is usually compensated for by editors with standards. Katz is his own editor, and so far as I can tell, does not hold himself to very high standards.
And the sad thing is, in all that space that he took up with fluff, he could have been actually making a point. Tell us about a specific game which requires creativity. Interview a MUD player about how long they worked to design the charecter and whether they worry about staying within their created "personality". Show its true, REPORT for the love of bagels, don't get make assertions, mention one web page in passing and fill the rest in with fluff!
You know, if I had an editor ask me to write a feature about creativity and culture in the modern computer gaming world, I'd have a lot of research to do. And it could be a really good story. Maybe Katz should just offer his broad generalization and then let someone who actually cares about good writing make an interesting feature out of it.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
The MA RMV! Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt to avoid triggering PTS flashbacks.
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Hamlet is not a Toffler-esque "The Future is coming!" screed. Katz, like the folks he started out with seems to think everything written about New Media must point to a transformative future with miraculous developments like jet cars, eternal life, and libertarianism. (Actually, to be fair, he didn't say as much in his article. Maybe I'm reading the futurist schlock into his article, but whatever, it's fun.)
Hamlet on the Holodeck is actually a fairly modest book that was written for people who care about writing, storytelling, and art. It's a book not about society, but about narrative and storytelling. I happen to ardently love good RPGs, digital or dice-based or whatever. I happen to have a near-religious belief in the impossible dream of collective authoring enabling all of us to be social, creative, and thus fulfilled. No jet cars necessary. I am a freak. This is a great book for me. It is not a book for everyone.
That said, the book does offer a lot of really cool background on narrative and storytelling in a lot of genres--including fiction writing and video games--that might be interesting to a lot of folks. In the way it offers a great overview of broad themes across art forms it is a lot like Scott McCloud's dazzlingly outstanding book Understanding Comics, which focusses on comic books but also contains the best 15-minute gloss on art history that I've ever encountered.
As for the site that Katz rhapsodizes about: please!
Just my $.02.
goodmike
Jon--
;-) is there somebody really making a case that games aren't ever artistic?
You actually bungled your post by not including a single example of somebody who disagrees with you. I'm serious--I have no idea who this Intelligensia is that disagrees with your arguments; most of what I've heard which decries online culture seems to focus on the ephemeral nature of it--small emails, lousy grammar, everything archived temporarily, nothing archived permanently. Gaming itself has nothing to do with this cultural loss, though online gaming does introduce interpersonal communication and thus these worries. But you didn't really disagree with these cultural concerns, did you?
Outside of people screaming that games are too violent(Joe Leiberman's campaign comes to mind, and he's a congressman--not particularly intelligensia
Besides not including any reference to somebody who diagrees with you, you also posted this the day after Game Over magazine--pretty much the highest quality review site out there--put up Decency in Multiplayer Gaming--amazingly enough, a pragmatically harsh view of what you're talking about. They also gave a singularly awful rating to Panty Raider, which is more of a commentary on the paucity of pornography in games than anything else. Supply and demand is about the only reason we've paid an ounce of attention to that game.
Games should be taken seriously, and they have become a fascinating art form--what else so intrinisically bridges mathematics, computer science, physics, art, game theory, self-optimizing systems/AI, and mythological structure? The problem with your post is that you never really identified anyone who actively disagrees. I hate to say it, Jon, because overall you've avoided this problem...but ascribing opinions to a group without a single shred of evidence that such opinions are generally held by any individual ostensibly within the group(let alone by the group as a whole!) is, unfortunately, unprofessional. Such is the domain of demogogues and propagandists--I'd like to think we're better than that.
After all, as Weasel Boy pointed out, we are the intelligentsia.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
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