Oops...

Well, here I am rampaging towards the end of the semester - so much for my blogging plans to keep track of the course! The whole thing fell apart at the point where my job turned into a living nightmare... but both courses have been fantastic, and I still intend (hmm... but possibly one of those intentions that I never seem to getting around to carrying through) to review the weeks I didn't cover here at the time at a later date, when the discussions from class and subsequent readings have settled in a little. But don't hold your breath...

Oh well. Back to the essay. The topic - by the way is "Significant repetitions: The place of the loop in new media" If it turns out any good, it'll probably end up being posted here, or maybe (with revisions) on Erik Satie's Crystal Ball

Playability 1b

I borrowed a small pile of books from the library and am now engaged in reading the first couple of chapters of Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling by (oddly enough) one Chris Crawford. The first section was an interesting discussion of the development of storytelling and the story - how they first evolved as a way of communicating complex sequences of knowledge to impart the whole of a macro concept, rather than having to explain each bit, then how they link together in an individual way.

In the chapter called 'Story', he reviews a few vital elements of stories (he doesn't necessarily be differentiating between narrative and game, but between story and game - I'm not sure whether/how there's a difference here - the other readings seem to think there's a pretty big difference, but he seems to be tackling them as essentially the same thing - but where narrative is a formalised version of a story - such as literature.

Anyway, I felt some of Mr Crawford's comments were useful and comprehensible, so here's a summary:

• Strong structure: Stories are complex structures that must meet many hard-to-specify requirements
• People: Stories are about people (not necessarily human people)
• Puzzles: Not a necessary component of stories but may appear in certain genres, such as crime novels. Possibly OuLiPo literature falls into this category - but very much in the minority and not a defining trait, although it probably is for games (is this debatable??)
• Choices: Both stories and games concern the choices made by characters
• Spectacle and visual thinking: Not a requirement. Tends to take over modern movie-making and is very important in games (as a means of creating more and more realistic and interesting game environments, drawing the user more and more into a make-believe world) - Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling
• Spatial thinking - Stories take place on stages, not maps - stories don't need to be too specifc about interaction with spaces - a vaguish "he went from here to there" suffices, without need for explanation of where here and there are in relation to each other and to other places. Distances, orientation etc. are optional
• Temporal discontinuity: Time in stories gets crumpled up and stretched out at will - years leapt in a single bound, slow seconds taking minutes to read about. Game time still largely deals in set increments, although this probably isn't really necessary, and some games allow players to monkey with (a) the overall speed of time passing and (b) to leap ahead in the game to a point in the future.

His definition of interactivity is pretty good too:

A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listens, thinks and speaks.

He also makes a nice point about the limitations of interactive storytelling:

Movies aren't interactive, and interactive storytelling will never have the highly polished internal structure that movies have.

That is, it would be pretty much impossible to devise a really 'tight' structure for an interactive narrative because there are so many paths it could take - you don't know what's gone before, or what's gone after. The only way to achieve this would be to hugely limit a user's options at each stage and map out every possible variation, which would be time-consuming to the point of idiocy.

Ewwwwww! He's got it all wrong re: "second-person insight" - he claims that every artist worries about how an expression will be perceived by the audience. What complete and utter rubbish. Using his terms, entertainers worry about this - they have to or they starve; artists don't give 2 figs for the audience - only the work matters. What the work is and the style of it may be influenced by decisions relating to popularity, but an artist focuses on the work, its structure and how to make it right not how to make it popular.

Last bit for this book - losing my respect for this author (my respect for his proofreader went about an hour ago). His definition "for videogames as they are actually played"

A form of interactive entertainment involving simple and/or violent themes, relying heavily on cosmetic factors, in which players must exercise precise hand-eye co-ordination, puzzle solution, and resource management skills

This seems to me simplistic and somewhat naiive - certainly it may describe some games, but given the huge diversity of game types and complexity, I think this falls short of the mark for a genre definition.

*sigh* Think I'll hurl this book at the wall and go back to the "official" readings.

Playability 1

Well, it's been a chaotic couple of weeks - a wedding in Melbourne, Easter, birthday. I've barely been getting through the readings, let alone trying to work out what I really think about them.

But this week coming up, however, I am to lead the discussion on the topic Playability 1: Hypertext, net narratives and computer games.

Most of this week's readings however, seem to focus primarily on computer games. I haven't yet got on to readings three and four on the list, but so far the focus is squarely on the computer game and the questions being raised seem to largely concern trying to pin down what it really is. It seems that just calling something "a game" isn't really enough for the theorists, who are also trying to determine whether there are any links with narrative theory, and with other theories applied to more traditional story-telling such as literature, film and theatre. So I guess the first question is "is a game really about a story, or is the story just a means to make the gameplay more interesting because of its context?" - would the same game be just as interesting to someone regardless of whether its backstory involved, say, Chinese warlords or the Second World War? I guess a second question one could ask is "Does it really matter?". Do gamers spend their time discussing the plot of a game or strategies to reach their goal, to win the game?

I have my own questions too: starting with "what the hell is narrative theory?". So I guess I'd better go forth and google...

OK. So I've found a book chapter on the University of Cologne's website (Narratology: A guide to the theory of narrative, Manfred Jahn)which seems to make it pretty clear - in a basic sort of way anyway:

What are the main ingredients of a narrative? What must a narrative have to count it as a narrative? For a simple answer, let us say that all narratives have a story. But let us immediately add two additional requirements: (1) any kind of story is not enough; let us stipulate that a story must have an action which involves characters; and (2) let us also assume that all stories come with a story-teller... [or] narrator. A narrative has a story based on an action caused and experienced by characters, and a narrator who tells it

I guess the first part of this is applicable to some games - some have characters, others do not, some have sort-of characters such as Myst which appears to have a presence for the player, but no actual character with a name, history, etc. (Please forgive me if I get this massively wrong - I've never played Myst). However, it seems to me that for the most part, games tend to lack a narrator - the point of most games is to experience (and influence) the story - to be within it, not being told it by someone else. So they have a story, but don't qualify as a narrative.

Ah. apparently this basic narrative definition is derived from Gerald Prince and Gérard Genette. So now you know.

At any rate, "a backstory or plot is not enough. A sequence of events enacted constitutes a drama, a sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events recounted a narrative, and perhaps a sequence of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game." Hmmm. Sounds a bit to me like games are a combo of most of the preceding ones - events are enacted, performed (user action), and the backstory kicks in, often in quite a narrative sense. But I could be wrong...

Next statement: "In games, the dominant temporal relation is the one between user time and event time and not the narrative one between story time and discourse time". This seems to be a little less defensible than the narrative statement. It seems to me that user time and discourse time are going to be pretty much the same thing - stuff is happening to someone right now, whether that is being told a story or participating in a game. So then there's story time and event time which as I interpret them could also be pretty similar - stories have a tendency to fold up time into smaller parcels as required ("Ten years later..."); games do tend to follow a more contextually realistic timeframe, but there's nothing to prevent the user from tinkering with the event time, speeding it up or slowing it down to allow more or fewer actions within a space, allowing time to, for example, build up troops ready for an imminent invasion, or complete the construction of a building without having to wait around for it.

Sorry - that previous paragraph I think may have contradicted itself. Will come back to the idea of event/story time later.

"Formal games are systems of means and ends" - does this mean that a narrative is a type of system? It doesn't seem so to me. In which case, are we being fooled into even attempting to establish a link between games and any kind of narrative theory? Perhaps we should accept that computer games are more of a meta-artform - a system comprising elements of a bunch of other artforms, including narrative, cinema, music, sound design, all held together by a bunch of logic (which has little required place in other artforms) - perhaps the logic is the key????

Following this thread through, there doesn't seem to be any need for logic in other meta-artforms such as cinema - if a film isn't logical, you just sit back and let it wash over you and it generally gets called "arty"; do the same thing with a game though, and people would probably stop playing it - if you can't in some way predict the reaction that accompanies an action, how are you going to achieve the game's goal? If the game has no real goal, then is it actually a game? Would it not instead be some sort of immersive environment instead? Games imply rules; rules imply logic.

Dirt and noise - lo-fi and low-tech

Started in on the readings for week 3 today - on the topic "Dirt and noise - lo-fi and low-tech".

Unlike last week, the first reading was blessedly straightforward - unless I'm missing something. The basic premise of "The double logic of remediation" seems to be that while we are heading towards an ideal of a multitude of media, we are also increasingly wanting to break down the *way* we receive information, so that the medium itself is more or less invisible. The intersection of so many media - e.g a CNN news broadcast where the user not only sees the filmed footage, but scrolling headlines and an assortment of other media might also be mixed in - is termed "hypermediacy".

The reading apparently was published in 2000, although it seems like (and felt like to me) it had been written a bit earlier - all the example screensnaps are from 1998, and the focus on webcams (SO 1990s) and "pages whose graphic design principles recall the psychedelic 1960s or dad in the 1910s and 1920s" (from what I can see in the photocopy-mushed images, these are very much a "my first webpage" kind of look - the CNN homepage is hilarious, when you compare to the style of news sites today - it's got about 3 things on it!

Things are starting to get a bit more hands-on with Audio Production now - I've booked a DAT machine and microphone for the weekend cos I suddenly realised that I need to record my interview assignment this weekend because of being in Melbourne for David's wedding next week. We also have to record sounds in a studio - John found a broken lightbulb he was going to throw out, so I've nabbed it to see if I can manage to capture the sound on tape.

What do cyborgs eat?

OK. Starting in on my second time round with Margaret Morse's "What do cyborgs eat? Oral logic in an information society" It's a long article and I got a bit confused the first time round, so I thought it might be helpful (or perhaps just very very dull) to put down key points as I understand them as I go along. If it doesn't help, I'll know not to do it again :-)

to start: first impressions
After reading the article for the first time the other day, I came away a bit confused - I think my confusion has largely to do with Morse's term "oral logic". It wasn't clear to me exactly what she meant by this and some of the article seemed to do with actual culinary matters ("meat", "nonfood"), more of it seemed to do with the connection of the human and the technical, with forays into the subconscious of childhood, "cannibalistic fantasies", body-image realities and vs ideals, real food vs the genetically modified or purely synthetic "food" what might be termed "better living through science" - smart drugs and their effects, and finally excremental art. While some of what Morse said within these sections made a lot of sense, I've not quite been able to capture the direction of the whole.

so... on to take 2...

• "growing desire to disengage from the human condition"
• 2 bodies - the physical and the electronic avatar - suggestion that the physical has more disadvantages than advantages, whereas the avatar "has superpowers, albeit virtually, and is immortal" (capable of enduring endless deaths)
• definition of a cyborg: "a human individual who has some of its vital bodily processes controlled by cybernetically operated devices"
• Acknowledgement that the cyborg may not necessarily be considered as a literal being, but could be merely a fantasy - or a metaphor.
• "Willing the cyborg into being appears to be the equivalent of wishing the problems of organic life away"
• "The contemporary fantasy is... if the organic body cannot be abandoned, it might be fused with electronic culture in what amounts to an oral logic of incorporation"
• "context of body loathing and machine desire"
• Intro splits article into three sections:
  1. Oral logic of incorporation into the electronic machine (eating/being eaten or being covered by a second skin) - I take this to mean that our desire for technology leads naturally towards a desire to become one with it - by consuming it, being consumed by it or completely wrapping ourselves up in it.
  2. Famine vs abundance, fast vs fresh food - "in this cultureal context of ideological failure and the desire to become (not merely to have) electronic machines that food per se can be - at least symbolically - refused" (OK. haven't quite got this one even initially sorted yet...)
  3. Culinary and corporeal negation - virtual reality, fat-free fat, smart drugs, etc. So this I take to mean technologically-enabled ways of eating that negate the concept of eating to a certain extent.

Oral logic: The dialectics of incorporation
Not really getting this - too tired! - but here's a stab at it anyway:

Identification vs immersion - identification holding up a mirror, whereas immersion ("the 'immersive' aspects of electronic media") isn't just looking at something, it's being in the thick of it - "involves introjecting or surrounding the other (or being introjected or surrounded) and ultimately, the mixing of two 'bodies' in a dialectic (exchange of reasonable arguments, says dictionary.com) of inside and outside"

Identification associated with the cinema - depends on a certain distance; new media's immersive aspects pull the user right in and are dependent on direct user interaction and involvement. A movie will keep on playing whether you're paying attention or not - an interactive/immersive new media piece will only go so far without your input - in essence a symbiotic relationship between artwork and user??? certainly for the artwork - it can't proceed without the user, and I guess the user's interest makes them somewhat dependent on the artwork proceeding... oh dear. think I'm going to regret all this later. Anyway, next point:

Morse seems very keen to associate the act of immersion with eating - the way she describes it though (and the parallels she draws - eating/eaten, enveloping/being enveloped) seem to my admittedly fuzzy brain to draw perhaps an even closer parallel with sex. Even more than eating, sex is a corporeal function which overrides the feeling of being "incorporated" (does that make sense in this context) - it draws the participants out of the trappings of their bodies for a time, whereas while eating does sometimes have a similar effect, more often it is clearly associated with the body (i.e. after sex, one feels somewhat disembodied for a time, whereas after eating one frequently feels full, weighed down by what one has eaten [possibly sick] and more aware than ever of the presence of the body).

Next bit: use of "nonfood" - "Vitamin gels and chemical soups qualify precisely because they blur the categories of food and drugs" - I guess this then reduces the act of eating to the mere consuming of nutrients - eating as refueling rather than eating as a physical pleasure. Recharging the body too in ways that require a minimum of processing, a minimum of byproducts of consumption - "the strategy is not only to feed the mind but in the process to purify the body of organic deterioration".

I guess the human desire for immortality is an obvious aspect of human/technology hybrids - after all, it's been a recurrent theme down through the ages. Immortality in itself includes a negation of the physical body - it's the mind, the consciousness, the soul that appears to be the "live" part of us - in order to live on, it seems that we just need to fix the organic body's nasty tendency to break down and decay - to replace the dud bits with technology, either in part or wholly would seem to be the next logical step for an extreme technophile.

Not entirely convinced by her arguments in favour of cannibalistic fantasies - whether of another or of being oneself consumed. Does this come from Freud or someone?? Think I'd need to read more about the original reasoning behind this to really understand it - stated baldly it comes across as unconvincing.

Second skins: "the cannibalistic fantasy of introjection has a counterpart in the reverse gesture, that of covering oneself with the other as a means of self-transformation". Not sure where her examples - Aztec rituals, conquistador massacres, flayings in Yugoslavia - are intended to be applied here.

"When political boundaries fall apart, ego and identity are also threatened with fragmentation, and they must be radically fortified or surrender to dissolution or transformation... an ordinary skin may no longer be enough to contain the ego or to protect bodily fluids from escaping or pollution and irritants from the outside world from entering" - simultaneously protecting/preserving the body and expressing it more dramatically perhaps? There's also the element of disguise, which is often an aspect of preservation.

Virtual reality: "the second skin (or 'interface') that mediates the virtual world also masks the apparatus of that mediation. This masking allows the referential to appear to collapse into the symbolic field: to utter the symbol for an action is to perform the act itself"

Enough, I think (it is 1am now). Tomorrow, part 2...

Stelarc - extending the body

OK. The readings have helped ... a bit. I still say he's a strange strange man, but as they say, it takes all sorts to make a world, and if nobody was a little on the extreme side, then we'd never progress anywhere.

I've just finished reading Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford's Extended body: Interview with Stelarc which was surprisingly accessible and understandable.

I'd heard about Stelarc's suspension events, but hadn't realised that he'd started off working with ropes and harnesses. He switched to hooks through the skin after coming across Hindu Indian piercing practices (presumably something like the festival of Thaipusam as celebrated in Malaysia and Singapore) as a way of reducing the visual clutter of the ropes and harnesses - as Stelarc puts it, "all the ropes and harnesses were seen more to support the body than to suspend it, so when I first came across the notion of piercing the skin, I thought if you could suspend the body using techniques like these, then you would have a minimum of support, you'd have just the insertion and single cable." So I guess for Stelarc, the hooks enable his artwork to focus on the act of suspension rather than the technicality of achieving suspension. Although the grotesquerie factor rather makes one wonder if this is the case - yes, the visual appearance of the performance is simplified and the act of suspension is the focal point of attention - but to my mind, it's the focus because everyone is thinking "OOOUUUCHHHH!". Hmmm. Apparently with the Indian (and also North American) rituals, there's a key element of trance which results in participants feeling no pain, experiencing little bleeding and no post-event scarring. Seems that Stelarc does not go into trances for his performances. In the interview, he states: "For me there was no religious context, no shamanistic yearnings, no yogic conditioning that had to do with these performances. In fact they occurred in the same kind of stream of consciousness. I mean, I don't take any anaesthetics, I don't chant or get into altered states"

He also talks of his suspension events linking primal yearnings and contemporary reality - primitive suspension rituals relating to a primal desire for floating and flying compared to present day zero-gravity floating of astronauts... The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased." (Hmm. I was having a thought when I started typing this but it seems to have run away. Maybe it'll allow itself to be recaptured later on...).

I found it interesting that while reading this interview with Stelarc - and the other readings I've gone through so far for this week's class (most notably "What do cyborgs eat?" by Margaret Morse) - that what has most been brought to the fore in my own mind are two of my favourite TV shows - Buffy and Dark Angel. The Buffy episode I was especially thinking of was the one where Willow starts an internet relationship - which turns out to be a demon trapped in the internet - from a flesh body, he has been trapped within a book, and has been released into the internet through scanning the text - kind of like what Morse seems to be heading towards in her article, where the body in this age of technology has become more or less obsolete as we more and more focus on the life of the mind and our bodies are more and more neglected by lack of maintenance and poor diet. Dark Angel of course is all to do with genetic engineering and in the second series looks at synthetic implants, and nanotechnology. Not sure that I'll bring up my pop-culture meanderings in class though - I don't think my thoughts are well-enough ordered yet.

Don't think I can quite come at Stelarc's stomach sculpture yet though... that's GOT to be uncomfortable. I hope none of the bits drop off into his system... uuurrrrghhh.

An addition - 11:54pm
Thinking more about pop culture and how it tackles human vs machine and human-machine combinations... It may just be the shows I watch and the books I read, but there seems to be a clear consensus in shows and literature which does more than just tell a catchy story in favour of the human - in Buffy, technology is a useful tool - like magic, when it becomes more than just a way of obtaining necessary information, when it takes over the human, it leads to evil or at least wrongness and must be stamped down - cf Warren and the robot girl (and of course The Trio), Spike's Buffybot, Willow's internet 'boyfriend', Ted. CS Lewis' This Hideous Strength pits the human (and Christian) against the horrific might of science and the fascination it holds for mankind which gives it the power to largely do whatever inhuman things are required in the name of knowledge. Even a film like Terminator 2 supports the humanity-rather-than-machines ethos, with Arnie's cyborg gradually developing human-like characteristics (which the bad-guy cyborg never does) - but ultimately remaining machine and so being destroyed, leaving the humans in possession of the field - which hopefully due to the machine's assistance will remain human and avoid the destruction wreaked in the possible future where the machines take over. And of course The Matrix - where computers are 100% the bad guy and while humans use technology, it's to bring about the destruction of the machines and re-establish a society based on human values.

Actually, thinking of Buffy - ever noticed how many of the villains represent the human (or "human") being taken over by the non-human? Angel-turned-Angelus the Mayor-turned-big-snake, Adam (the cyborg par excellence), Ben-turned-Glory, Bad Willow? I can't quite remember the details of Season 7, but 5 out of 6 ain't bad!

Probably babbling here. Apologies if all this sounds incredibly trite - it *is* the middle of the night & I'm just trying to make some sense of what I'm reading!

Brain strain

Been trying to plough my way through one of the reference readings for the last class, just as a bit of follow-up, but finding it terribly hard going. Oh well, will keep trying.

This coming week we're looking at the interaction of computers and bodies, so I had a look over Stelarc's Ping Body site - that man sure has some curious ideas. Not quite sure how it's art, but certainly an intriguing concept. Maybe the readings will elaborate a bit more!