That's how I feel to... despite the salivation for more GoW, I can't stomach that PS3 pricepoint (and have spent the entire morning searching local stores for a 249$ Nintendo Wii).
But if any game series can get me to want a PS3, its GoW.
I've gone back and forth on the non-linearity of SMB3 as well. It does seem like, if this is a concern, that King's Quest / Space Quest should be on the list, or, as many others have noted, Ultima.
I'm also surprised that FF doesn't make an appearance. Final Fantasy VII ranks up there as my favorite story of all time, regardless of media... but, again, this seems to be an informal list collected by individuals so I don't think there was deliberation on a metric scale.
Good thread though, occupied a few hours of thought!
I was in college when Doom emerged--and I must say it took over my life. Doom 2 was even worse (so let's count Doom like War Craft, as a series). Wolfenstein was a cool game, but like many players I discovered it only after Doom (well, actually, in Doom). And Doom did something that no other first-person shooter had ever done: scared the crap out of me. The deep, disturbing breathing of monsters that I could hear but not see was terrifying--and awesome.
Nothing against shooting Nazis, that's good clean, fun. But Doom delivered a three-dimensional FPS to the "people." And, for its time, it was a beautiful and compelling game. I completely understand why it made the list.
lose and loose? seriously, you can engage concepts such as net neutrality but can't untangle the semantics of lose and loose in passing? I find it hard to believe that lose and loose is draining brain power...
I think most people have seen some version of the phenonmenal power of the human mind demonstration. Sure, too many mistakes make something unreadable and destroy an author's ethos, but think claiming that switching "lose" and "loose" signifies a "not-thinking-clearly" problem is taking this to extreme. Did anyone read the first post and not recognize the author's intention?
As an English prof, I'd say that every second you spend worrying about grammar is a second you aren't worrying about the depth / development / support of an idea. Sure, I appreciate revision and proofing, but these are the final stages of polished documents, and probably not necessary for forum posts.
The difference here is that it is within the realm of possibility to prove you don't have a blue puppy. I could go to your house.
Of course, the day I arrived at your house, you could tell me the puppy was at your sister's house. Or only comes out on February 29th. Whatever, the puppy example begins from the premise that a claimant could verify the existence of this intriuging puppy.
The very question of God (or Otherness or metaphysics) begins with the possibility that there is something/one/place/energy/possibility beyond empirical observation. Which, of course, as you point out, is a non-logical position. Metaphysics, however, begins by advancing from the limitations of logic...
I would also point out that the idea that the only "tenable positions to hold are logical" is itself predicated on a faith in Reason as the operating principle of the universe. This belief in logic can itself have no logically-demonstrabe origin or foundation--it too eminates from an initially non-logical belief. Ultimately, the problem is that, when discussing metaphysics, no one can claim to hold the logically tenable position; we can only hope to live among the differences in equally non-rational positions.
I work a lot with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who attempts to articulate a relationship to what lies beyond reason. Levinas refers to this as the transcendental Other--beyond the limitations of human perception, cognition, and signification.
What separates Levinas' investigation into the Other from traditional theology is that he doesn't accept that we can know anything about the Other, only posit the (im)possibility of the Other's existence. So, the first person approaching you and claiming to speak "God's word" is suspect, since the first act of sacrilege is to reduce the infinity of the Other into human terms (since language always fails to capture the entirety of what it would signify). Rather than act empowered by our knowledge of God, Levinas suggests we act with hesitancy out of our ignorance of the Other. Such hesitancy should lead to hospitality (rather than hostility) for those different than us.
So, while not religious in any traditional sense, I do believe that their are limitations to human knowledge. For instance, in response to several posts above, will science ever be able to tell the origin of randomness? Or will knowledge of this type always belong solely to the Other? Certainly science and rationality have made considerable contributions to our understanding of what "human" is, where "human" comes from, how "humans" behave, etc. But it cannot, and perhaps never will, be able to address what it means to be a human being--that question belongs to the realm of metaphysics.
Yeah, more common because its more legal.
Best Buys return policy sucks too (I know this has nothing to do with the thread, but I can't stand this store...)
But here's the question: why isn't those hours of gaming "work"? I think you begin to take apart your own metaphor: why isn't WoW a tool in the same way that SL or Flash is? The "content" of WoW is level advancement, mix and match, months of play.
If you read Iskold's article, then I think you can make a case that this is the direction we are moving--another manifestation of a "hyperreal" or "post-production" economy. We know that Fordist models of material production are outdated, and that labor no longer translates strictly into material goods. My point was to suggest that without players investing those "trival" months of gaming, Blizzard makes NO money. Not a dime. And those players' investment of time works exponentially--here I'm thinking of Mark C. Taylor's work on complexity theory(and, of course, many others), that every node added to a network exponentially increases the power/value of that network. The more people investing time, the better the gaming universe, the better the gaming universe, the more people investing time. Rinse, repeat.
I am not suggesting that Blizzard "reward" players (although perhaps revenue sharing for top performers would be justified) . But I would suggest that in a user economy, user's should have more control over their "work/play" labor, even if it is not directly related to creating material content (game code).
But, buried under the "game" talk is a considerable legal issue--one which I'm surprised has gone silent. Can Blizzard claim to "own" all character data? Yes, yes, we sign away our lives when we "sign" user agreements; but doesn't the shift into a "web2.0" (and here I'm using this term to signify: distributed, information-based, user-oriented economy, pulling my definition from Tim O'Reilly's article) economy place a tremendous value on user information?
This is the argument made by Alex Iskold in his recent article "The Attention Economy" and is the kind of argument at the heart of Lessig's work. And this is why, in my opinion (as someone who has never played WoW but played Socom rather religiously for a couple years), this is a "rights" issue. Or at least it should be.
Some games in the Resident Evil series had the "get-hurt-and-watch-your-leg-drag-behind-you." Though it is still a HP based game, it was neat to have a game directly affect gameplay based on damage.
I put up a blog post on my new blogger site wading through some of the bullshit. For those who care. The site is supposed to be strictly for me to practice image manipulation, and now its soiled with psychoanalysis. Sigh. Won't anything maintain order for more than five days?
If you read the transcripts from the Supreme Court Grokster appeal, you can isolate the exact moment when Justice Scalia realizes what Grokster does. And you can taste the immediacy of his determining that it was very, very illegal.
Fortunately, Grokster's advertising campaign, which featured the ability to get new releases for free, kept the justices from rendering a ruling that affected all P2P sharing. While a big supporter of P2P file sharing, I fear for its future.
I've never played the Soul Reaver series (though I played the original Kain on PS1!); though the act of sacrificing oneself could likely be read pyschoanalytically... of course, one would want to ask, why sacrifice? Is the goal to save a glorified sense of self? Or is the only option to sacrifice the self, since to be "whole" would negate exisitence? Does the hero sacrifice himself as a return to the mother? In defiance of a father? Does his sacrifice castrate the father's power (thus making it an Oedipal act)?
What makes your example interesting, especially if you are a fan of Slavoj Zizek, is the reference to the vampire--an undead, but, unlike zombies, one that has consciousness. Thus, the vampire is a (non)-being outside of the symbolic order, yet still able to participate within it. Furthermore, the vampire does not have the big Other, death, to worry about. Must be nice. I don't know how much of this stuff you read, but a great introduction to Lacan is Zizek's thoroughly readable Looking Awry (its a must for any Hitchcock fan). Zizek does a particularly admirable job of explicating postmodern theorists' interest in the undead.
I haven't done any writing on other games--I was working on a paper on Socom and online gaming, but had to drop the project. That investigation wasn't psychoanalytic--it was ethnographic, I'm interested in the kinds of ethics that take place in virtual communities and am torn reflecting on my own experiences with Socom (a thoroughly addicted clan member who had to quit playing in order to get a degree!). Socom does encourage ethical interaction between players, but I also witnessed some seriously questionable behavior. Anywho, that's another paper for another day.
I wasn't aware of the mathematical reference--I'll have to look into that. Mark C. Taylor's recent book on Complexity Theory is an excellent book--a work that not only summarizes postmodern theory, but integrates it with recent developments in the sciences and with technological changes (in a sense, he puts technology, science, and philosophy in a feedback loop within which it is impossible to identify what leads to what). Taylor is an exceptional Derrida scholar (though I disagree with him on a few points), and his work not only highlights the keys to postmodern theory, but also suggests what might come next.
Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is a short, dense, and extremely important book--probably the book in terms of postmodernism. Lyotard compactly summarizes the central arguments of the pomo crew and articulates their impact on rational epistemology. Essentially, Lyotard maintains that rationality cannot be its own foundations, and once untethered from its historic "certain" status, no longer can operate at the center of Western metaphysics (or as the center of western Universities).
Bill Reading's University in Ruins further explores the impact of Lyotard and postmodernism on university education. Although some people find it slow, Reading's book is very readable, and the problems that it addresses (in terms of proving the "excellence" of education without a foundation for what "excellent" means) problems that are very present today (see No Child Left Behind).
What's important to recognize is that for Taylor, Lyotard, and Readings, leaving Platonic rationality in ruins is a postive thing--it opens the possibilty for plurality, since knowledge ceases to be singular, and learning the search for the one truth. This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no truth. Just no truth can be considered final. We still need rationality, but we must recognize its limitations, and learn to dwell in the ruins.
Anyways, thanks for the reference and the positive comments. It sounds like Taylor's book would probably be a good read.
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I think one of the things holding back more academic discussions of games is that it is very hard to get anything "different" to a mass audience--hence, there is little in the way of an "avant-garde," especially in the world of console gaming. Of course, there are exceptions (Final Fantasy X and MGS II come to mind), but most games follow traditional storylines and are more concerned with saving humanity than investigating what it feels to be(becoming) human.
Silent Hill, we believe, is one of the exceptions--they are doing some crazy stuff in those games. The scene in Silent Hill III, when Vincent suggest that we haven't been killing monsters but rather real people ("they look like monsters to you?"), was without question one of the most powerful narrative moments of my life. No exxageration. It was great to have the opportunity first to speak on the topic, and then to publish.
And the passage you reproduced on your blog is critical--that's essentially our main point. RE is a conservative game (in several meanings of the world)--it never calls into question the distance between player and game. Silent Hill is an incredible frickin' mind game that constantly questions this distance--and the reality of our realities.
Another barrier to understanding, at least on my part, is the fact that this type of thinking has its roots in the humanities, not in the sciences. As a result, it is unconstrained by experiment, fact, or logic. In fact, postmodern philosophy is far more interested in the "metanarrative", the stories we tell ourselves, rather than logic. Some even claim that logic should not have a privileged position over the narrative. A cynic would say that proposition is some extremely self-serving logic, coming from literary professors.
Touche. But let me say that the basis of postmodern philosophy, and its interests in metanarratives, stems from a primary postulate: that not everything "true" is empirically verifiable, that many things (but especially desire), never can be constrained by experiment, fact, or logic. The postmodernist begins (and this is not meant to be a dig) by questioning the desire for fact and logic, and the seeming stability they offer.
I wanted to respond because I appreciated the quality of your response--and confirm most of your suspicions. This article was first a conference presentation at last year's Popular Culture Association annual conference--it was intended for a narrower academic audience, and aims more at introducing academics to videogames than introducing a mass audience to postmodern psychoanalytic literary theory.
Thank you to those who enjoyed the article, I enjoyed writing it (and researching it too, of course). Seeing a link to the article on Slash.dot was quite cool.
I do not pretend to understand all the depths of psychology as a field--as a rhetorician, I borrow critical theories as way of seeing and explaining the ways humans interact with each other. At the time I co-wrote the article, I was particularly drawn to Lacan because of the way he defines humans as lacking something. Now I'm not so happy of thinking of human beings as operating from lack--or of difference as essentially a negative; I'm reading a lot of Levinas and Derrida and understanding that our difference, or lack in Lacanian sense, is a postive condition for existence--if we weren't missing something, something infinitely beyond our grasp, then, well, we would all be the same / static / nothing.
To those who think we read too much into RE, of course we did! But we don't take our analysis as a revelation of the game maker's intentions--rather we are hoping to demonstrate that RE's narrative (and this could be said of all narratives) reflects some of our basic human problems, things we encounter in the day to day. And our point was that RE was simple-minded when compared to Silent Hill--in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysis is conservative in comparision with Lacanian psychoanalysis (from a postmodern persepctive). I wouldn't say Freud is simple--his writings were extremely progressive, and his development/popularization of the unconscious forever changed not only psychology, but also western metaphysics.
To whose who can't stand the academic-ese, sorry. But I'm a professional academic, and that's time consuming. I enjoy playing games, and would like to see academia pay legitimate respect to video games. For that to happen, academics have to receive recognition for the work they do. And the only way we get that recognition is if we write in the social language of our field.
When we began working on our first article, we wanted to explicitly argue that games were worthy of academic analysis. Instead, we simply treated video games as objects of analysis, and allowed the "should they" argument to remain implicit.
Again, thank you to those who enjoyed the article. Apologies to those who didn't.
...but it is a great program. It is also nice to see open source getting distributed on a mass scale; I would like to see American schools take advantage of open source software rather than license traditional commercial softwares.
More important than software, however, is training how to use the software. Since I know nothing of the French education system, I have no idea what kind of curricular plans go with this distribution. Throwing computers, software, or even computer software on a stick is not going to solve any problems without some human assistance.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how I feel to... despite the salivation for more GoW, I can't stomach that PS3 pricepoint (and have spent the entire morning searching local stores for a 249$ Nintendo Wii). But if any game series can get me to want a PS3, its GoW.
I've gone back and forth on the non-linearity of SMB3 as well. It does seem like, if this is a concern, that King's Quest / Space Quest should be on the list, or, as many others have noted, Ultima. I'm also surprised that FF doesn't make an appearance. Final Fantasy VII ranks up there as my favorite story of all time, regardless of media... but, again, this seems to be an informal list collected by individuals so I don't think there was deliberation on a metric scale. Good thread though, occupied a few hours of thought!
I was in college when Doom emerged--and I must say it took over my life. Doom 2 was even worse (so let's count Doom like War Craft, as a series). Wolfenstein was a cool game, but like many players I discovered it only after Doom (well, actually, in Doom). And Doom did something that no other first-person shooter had ever done: scared the crap out of me. The deep, disturbing breathing of monsters that I could hear but not see was terrifying--and awesome. Nothing against shooting Nazis, that's good clean, fun. But Doom delivered a three-dimensional FPS to the "people." And, for its time, it was a beautiful and compelling game. I completely understand why it made the list.
lose and loose? seriously, you can engage concepts such as net neutrality but can't untangle the semantics of lose and loose in passing? I find it hard to believe that lose and loose is draining brain power...
I think most people have seen some version of the phenonmenal power of the human mind demonstration. Sure, too many mistakes make something unreadable and destroy an author's ethos, but think claiming that switching "lose" and "loose" signifies a "not-thinking-clearly" problem is taking this to extreme. Did anyone read the first post and not recognize the author's intention?
As an English prof, I'd say that every second you spend worrying about grammar is a second you aren't worrying about the depth / development / support of an idea. Sure, I appreciate revision and proofing, but these are the final stages of polished documents, and probably not necessary for forum posts.
The difference here is that it is within the realm of possibility to prove you don't have a blue puppy. I could go to your house. Of course, the day I arrived at your house, you could tell me the puppy was at your sister's house. Or only comes out on February 29th. Whatever, the puppy example begins from the premise that a claimant could verify the existence of this intriuging puppy. The very question of God (or Otherness or metaphysics) begins with the possibility that there is something/one/place/energy/possibility beyond empirical observation. Which, of course, as you point out, is a non-logical position. Metaphysics, however, begins by advancing from the limitations of logic... I would also point out that the idea that the only "tenable positions to hold are logical" is itself predicated on a faith in Reason as the operating principle of the universe. This belief in logic can itself have no logically-demonstrabe origin or foundation--it too eminates from an initially non-logical belief. Ultimately, the problem is that, when discussing metaphysics, no one can claim to hold the logically tenable position; we can only hope to live among the differences in equally non-rational positions.
I work a lot with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who attempts to articulate a relationship to what lies beyond reason. Levinas refers to this as the transcendental Other--beyond the limitations of human perception, cognition, and signification.
What separates Levinas' investigation into the Other from traditional theology is that he doesn't accept that we can know anything about the Other, only posit the (im)possibility of the Other's existence. So, the first person approaching you and claiming to speak "God's word" is suspect, since the first act of sacrilege is to reduce the infinity of the Other into human terms (since language always fails to capture the entirety of what it would signify). Rather than act empowered by our knowledge of God, Levinas suggests we act with hesitancy out of our ignorance of the Other. Such hesitancy should lead to hospitality (rather than hostility) for those different than us.
So, while not religious in any traditional sense, I do believe that their are limitations to human knowledge. For instance, in response to several posts above, will science ever be able to tell the origin of randomness? Or will knowledge of this type always belong solely to the Other? Certainly science and rationality have made considerable contributions to our understanding of what "human" is, where "human" comes from, how "humans" behave, etc. But it cannot, and perhaps never will, be able to address what it means to be a human being--that question belongs to the realm of metaphysics.
Yeah, more common because its more legal. Best Buys return policy sucks too (I know this has nothing to do with the thread, but I can't stand this store...)
But here's the question: why isn't those hours of gaming "work"? I think you begin to take apart your own metaphor: why isn't WoW a tool in the same way that SL or Flash is? The "content" of WoW is level advancement, mix and match, months of play.
If you read Iskold's article, then I think you can make a case that this is the direction we are moving--another manifestation of a "hyperreal" or "post-production" economy. We know that Fordist models of material production are outdated, and that labor no longer translates strictly into material goods. My point was to suggest that without players investing those "trival" months of gaming, Blizzard makes NO money. Not a dime. And those players' investment of time works exponentially--here I'm thinking of Mark C. Taylor's work on complexity theory(and, of course, many others), that every node added to a network exponentially increases the power/value of that network. The more people investing time, the better the gaming universe, the better the gaming universe, the more people investing time. Rinse, repeat.
I am not suggesting that Blizzard "reward" players (although perhaps revenue sharing for top performers would be justified) . But I would suggest that in a user economy, user's should have more control over their "work/play" labor, even if it is not directly related to creating material content (game code).
But, buried under the "game" talk is a considerable legal issue--one which I'm surprised has gone silent. Can Blizzard claim to "own" all character data? Yes, yes, we sign away our lives when we "sign" user agreements; but doesn't the shift into a "web2.0" (and here I'm using this term to signify: distributed, information-based, user-oriented economy, pulling my definition from Tim O'Reilly's article) economy place a tremendous value on user information? This is the argument made by Alex Iskold in his recent article "The Attention Economy" and is the kind of argument at the heart of Lessig's work. And this is why, in my opinion (as someone who has never played WoW but played Socom rather religiously for a couple years), this is a "rights" issue. Or at least it should be.
"Damn you Plato, put that parchment down, I'm talking here!"
As a former Bostonian I would only say that you might see why Boston is a bit touchy after 9/11, since Logan airport, well, you know...
Some games in the Resident Evil series had the "get-hurt-and-watch-your-leg-drag-behind-you." Though it is still a HP based game, it was neat to have a game directly affect gameplay based on damage.
I put up a blog post on my new blogger site wading through some of the bullshit. For those who care. The site is supposed to be strictly for me to practice image manipulation, and now its soiled with psychoanalysis. Sigh. Won't anything maintain order for more than five days?
If you read the transcripts from the Supreme Court Grokster appeal, you can isolate the exact moment when Justice Scalia realizes what Grokster does. And you can taste the immediacy of his determining that it was very, very illegal.
Fortunately, Grokster's advertising campaign, which featured the ability to get new releases for free, kept the justices from rendering a ruling that affected all P2P sharing. While a big supporter of P2P file sharing, I fear for its future.
I've never played the Soul Reaver series (though I played the original Kain on PS1!); though the act of sacrificing oneself could likely be read pyschoanalytically... of course, one would want to ask, why sacrifice? Is the goal to save a glorified sense of self? Or is the only option to sacrifice the self, since to be "whole" would negate exisitence? Does the hero sacrifice himself as a return to the mother? In defiance of a father? Does his sacrifice castrate the father's power (thus making it an Oedipal act)?
What makes your example interesting, especially if you are a fan of Slavoj Zizek, is the reference to the vampire--an undead, but, unlike zombies, one that has consciousness. Thus, the vampire is a (non)-being outside of the symbolic order, yet still able to participate within it. Furthermore, the vampire does not have the big Other, death, to worry about. Must be nice. I don't know how much of this stuff you read, but a great introduction to Lacan is Zizek's thoroughly readable Looking Awry (its a must for any Hitchcock fan). Zizek does a particularly admirable job of explicating postmodern theorists' interest in the undead.
I haven't done any writing on other games--I was working on a paper on Socom and online gaming, but had to drop the project. That investigation wasn't psychoanalytic--it was ethnographic, I'm interested in the kinds of ethics that take place in virtual communities and am torn reflecting on my own experiences with Socom (a thoroughly addicted clan member who had to quit playing in order to get a degree!). Socom does encourage ethical interaction between players, but I also witnessed some seriously questionable behavior. Anywho, that's another paper for another day.
I wasn't aware of the mathematical reference--I'll have to look into that. Mark C. Taylor's recent book on Complexity Theory is an excellent book--a work that not only summarizes postmodern theory, but integrates it with recent developments in the sciences and with technological changes (in a sense, he puts technology, science, and philosophy in a feedback loop within which it is impossible to identify what leads to what). Taylor is an exceptional Derrida scholar (though I disagree with him on a few points), and his work not only highlights the keys to postmodern theory, but also suggests what might come next.
Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is a short, dense, and extremely important book--probably the book in terms of postmodernism. Lyotard compactly summarizes the central arguments of the pomo crew and articulates their impact on rational epistemology. Essentially, Lyotard maintains that rationality cannot be its own foundations, and once untethered from its historic "certain" status, no longer can operate at the center of Western metaphysics (or as the center of western Universities).
Bill Reading's University in Ruins further explores the impact of Lyotard and postmodernism on university education. Although some people find it slow, Reading's book is very readable, and the problems that it addresses (in terms of proving the "excellence" of education without a foundation for what "excellent" means) problems that are very present today (see No Child Left Behind).
What's important to recognize is that for Taylor, Lyotard, and Readings, leaving Platonic rationality in ruins is a postive thing--it opens the possibilty for plurality, since knowledge ceases to be singular, and learning the search for the one truth. This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no truth. Just no truth can be considered final. We still need rationality, but we must recognize its limitations, and learn to dwell in the ruins.
Anyways, thanks for the reference and the positive comments. It sounds like Taylor's book would probably be a good read.
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I think one of the things holding back more academic discussions of games is that it is very hard to get anything "different" to a mass audience--hence, there is little in the way of an "avant-garde," especially in the world of console gaming. Of course, there are exceptions (Final Fantasy X and MGS II come to mind), but most games follow traditional storylines and are more concerned with saving humanity than investigating what it feels to be(becoming) human. Silent Hill, we believe, is one of the exceptions--they are doing some crazy stuff in those games. The scene in Silent Hill III, when Vincent suggest that we haven't been killing monsters but rather real people ("they look like monsters to you?"), was without question one of the most powerful narrative moments of my life. No exxageration. It was great to have the opportunity first to speak on the topic, and then to publish. And the passage you reproduced on your blog is critical--that's essentially our main point. RE is a conservative game (in several meanings of the world)--it never calls into question the distance between player and game. Silent Hill is an incredible frickin' mind game that constantly questions this distance--and the reality of our realities.
Touche. But let me say that the basis of postmodern philosophy, and its interests in metanarratives, stems from a primary postulate: that not everything "true" is empirically verifiable, that many things (but especially desire), never can be constrained by experiment, fact, or logic. The postmodernist begins (and this is not meant to be a dig) by questioning the desire for fact and logic, and the seeming stability they offer.
I wanted to respond because I appreciated the quality of your response--and confirm most of your suspicions. This article was first a conference presentation at last year's Popular Culture Association annual conference--it was intended for a narrower academic audience, and aims more at introducing academics to videogames than introducing a mass audience to postmodern psychoanalytic literary theory.
Thank you to those who enjoyed the article, I enjoyed writing it (and researching it too, of course). Seeing a link to the article on Slash.dot was quite cool. I do not pretend to understand all the depths of psychology as a field--as a rhetorician, I borrow critical theories as way of seeing and explaining the ways humans interact with each other. At the time I co-wrote the article, I was particularly drawn to Lacan because of the way he defines humans as lacking something. Now I'm not so happy of thinking of human beings as operating from lack--or of difference as essentially a negative; I'm reading a lot of Levinas and Derrida and understanding that our difference, or lack in Lacanian sense, is a postive condition for existence--if we weren't missing something, something infinitely beyond our grasp, then, well, we would all be the same / static / nothing. To those who think we read too much into RE, of course we did! But we don't take our analysis as a revelation of the game maker's intentions--rather we are hoping to demonstrate that RE's narrative (and this could be said of all narratives) reflects some of our basic human problems, things we encounter in the day to day. And our point was that RE was simple-minded when compared to Silent Hill--in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysis is conservative in comparision with Lacanian psychoanalysis (from a postmodern persepctive). I wouldn't say Freud is simple--his writings were extremely progressive, and his development/popularization of the unconscious forever changed not only psychology, but also western metaphysics. To whose who can't stand the academic-ese, sorry. But I'm a professional academic, and that's time consuming. I enjoy playing games, and would like to see academia pay legitimate respect to video games. For that to happen, academics have to receive recognition for the work they do. And the only way we get that recognition is if we write in the social language of our field. When we began working on our first article, we wanted to explicitly argue that games were worthy of academic analysis. Instead, we simply treated video games as objects of analysis, and allowed the "should they" argument to remain implicit. Again, thank you to those who enjoyed the article. Apologies to those who didn't.
...but it is a great program. It is also nice to see open source getting distributed on a mass scale; I would like to see American schools take advantage of open source software rather than license traditional commercial softwares.
More important than software, however, is training how to use the software. Since I know nothing of the French education system, I have no idea what kind of curricular plans go with this distribution. Throwing computers, software, or even computer software on a stick is not going to solve any problems without some human assistance.