Author Archives: Steve

Crawford on Art and Games

Chris Crawford has generated discussion on the question of games and art at NoGD. It’s an interesting classification quandary. First we have what is called a game and then we ask but it is also art. Is an artist a person who does art or who puts paint on a canvas or symbols into lines of verse. I would assume that if a player sat back after a few hours with a game, she could certainly claim that the object is a “work of art,” the experience of which is simply different. A couple of Crawford’s arguments:

First, the individual: there is no question that individuals are better generators of artistic creativity than groups. Throughout history, the most revered artists worked as individuals (although some did work with groups). The individual is the focal point of creativity. Yet the games industry has settled on a system using large teams of workers, with creative control diffused among a number of people. This short-circuits the lightning bolt of creativity.

The second factor is economic. If art can be produced cheaply, then lots of people will create art. Most of that art will be junk, because most people have no talent. But the number of attempts will be so great that there’s a real chance that one of those attempts will be brilliant. Conversely, if art is expensive to produce, then the range of possibilities is narrowed. Fewer attempts will be made and the chances for a bolt from the blue are reduced.

Key to Crawford’s argument is an ecology of risk, boundary, and creativity. I wonder, however, if there are more important questions to ask beyond the one about art, whose trails can be fun, but whether games are or are not art gets us what?

More on Games and Storytelling

From Gabe Newell at Edge:

It’s been one of the topics that’s been super interesting to us as a group of developers since the original Half Life. At that time, we looked at the shooter genre, which really had degenerated into a shooting gallery, and we believed there was a lot more room for storytelling. The first person perspective really opens up opportunities for storytelling and so we’ve always been interested in the ways in which games can become a storytelling medium.

What we’re trying to do now is to create a shared story that you and your friends can all be part of rather than just the experience that you go on by yourself.

Going forward, we’re definitely going to use some of the things that we’ve learned – what worked and what didn’t work – with Left4Dead not only in multi-player but also in our single player games in the future.

I’m not skeptical. Just somewhat confused about the basis of what might be the conflation of games and, specifically, storytelling. In a game, an avatar or POV character typically solves a problem with the player steering the action and making decisions. You figure puzzles and learn how to move through a world.

But storytelling is the act of telling a story. Authors tell stories in a variety of forms. A group can tell a story, too, by passing the narrative act to another teller at a given time. There’s a difference between story, however, and storytelling. Story is an abstraction, the description of a pattern, like Ode or Sonnet.

The events are trying to give them [the players] a sense of narrative. We look at sequences of events and try to take what their actions are to generate new sequences.

If they’ve been particularly challenged by one kind of creature then we can use that information to make decisions about how we use that creature in subsequent encounters.

This is what makes procedural narrative more of a story-telling device than, say, a simple difficulty mechanism.

This appears fairly straight forward. John and I have considered such an approach in the “Composition” game, where players encounter an opposing force, a metaphor for the teacher of a college course, and this opposing force must “accumulate” in a realistic sequence to provide a “sense of narrative,” which would amount to a sense of purpose in a larger struggle. But we won’t be telling a story. Story elements will certainly provide a framework. In games, storytelling frameworks are critically important.

Flourishes

Wallace Stevens wrote that a man could be taller than a tree. Here’s how he put it:

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

The proportions of human space are distorted by the senses. That’s one reaction. Another observes the relation Steven’s discovers about size and how we measure it. What impulse, in addition, sends us off to measure ourselves against trees? It’s an odd thing. Let me stand against a tree and consider my measurements in relation to something grand and massive or let me stand against a tree and understand where I am. Because sometimes this can be difficult to do.

It would appear to be a meaningless or simplistic action. Perhaps like writing a poem or a story. Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see; sometimes images come that we hadn’t considered in a flash or in the car or while pecking at a line, something significant, disturbing, colorful, grand. A beetle becomes a turning planet. The stripe of a finger through dust becomes the top of a giant letter J or someone having just pushed through a pesticide cloud.

Proof and Possibility: Next Up

This just in from Jesse Abbot, the upcoming Proof and Possibility session:

The Tunxis Humanities Department and Seekers & Sophists, the Tunxis Philosophy Club, Present:

Proof & Possibility 2008-2009

A Series of Talks in Philosophy and the History of Ideas

Monday, December 1st, 7p.m.

Rooms 6-127 and 6-128 (Adjacent to the Cybercafé)

Part 1:

The Incursion of Divine Presence: Fate and Its Implications in Homer’s Odyssey and Greco-Roman Religion

A Reading and Lecture

Charles Stein, PhD

Homer’s signature treatment of the subject of fate in his Odyssey—sometimes a process taking place by the agency of the Olympian gods and other times something to which the gods themselves are beholden—is a fruitful point of departure for a broad range of studies in the philosophy of religion. Reading key passages from his own new translation of the Odyssey, Stein will then describe how this dimension of the poem sets the stage for the eventual focus on liberation from fate in Hellenistic and Greco-Roman religious settings. Texts and practices as diverse as the Chaldean oracles, Hellenistic astrology, Gnosticism and early Christianity are important landmarks in this development.

What we could call the “theology of fate and ontology of narrative” strikes at the center of questions regarding what it means for any of us to be alive and participants in a greater story than we can imagine.

Opening Presentation: Homer, Hierophany, Hypertext

Jesse Abbot

The frequent appearance of gods in the Homeric poems has been reduced to simple entertainment, fancy. . .even psychotic hallucination. But what if the cadences and other effects of poetic structure served as a kind of hypertext that ushered in valid Olympian epiphanies? This meditation in the poetics of the philosophy of religion reexamines our assumptions about truth claims in religion in light of the dual function of poetry to distract and focus the mind.

______________

Dr. Charles Stein is a poet and independent scholar of considerable accomplishment. The author of eleven books of poetry. he studied ancient Greek at Columbia University and received a doctorate in literature from The University of Connecticut. Published just weeks ago, his major new verse translation of Homer’s Odyssey is already gaining recognition in academic and literary circles alike. He has also received favorable critical attention for his exploration of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone Unveiled (North Atlantic Books, 2006), which includes his translations of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the extant writings of Parmenides.

Jesse Abbot is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Tunxis Community College. His writings on philosophical and religious topics have appeared in Parabola, Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and elsewhere.

*UPCOMING*
Thursday, February 19th – Part 2

Quantum Mechanics and Spooky Action at a Distance

Barry Loewer, PhD

Chair of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Intramurals

Michael Shanks on intramural art:

Whether looked at from the standpoint of teaching and training, or from that of intramural or extramural programming, what is striking about this landscape—a landscape shared with many (if not most) leading contemporary research universities—is at once the richness of the options that are made available and what is best described as a collateral “cost”: a tendency for arts practice, education, and training to find themselves atomized and distanced with respect to the university’s core functions of producing knowledge. Within this model, humanities scholarship that involves critical reading, reflection, and writing on the history of literature and the arts is cast in a role that is, at best, complementary, at worst, ornamental, but never integral to arts education. The social sciences are relegated to an even more accessory role, perhaps with the lone exception of domains involving issues of cognition and perception. Even further removed are the very technology and science disciplines within which the transformative techné of our era have developed, from gene splicing to robotics to global positioning satellites to 3D visualization.

Poetry Problems

I’m currently working on a hypertext poem. This means I’m writing poetry. The problem is I’m writing poetry and I have a dozen other things to do. But writing poetry sucks you into an elaborate and time consuming fantasy space, where nothing else should matter but “odes dripping from the tree branches.” Images come and all kinds of problems need to be solved. Then there’s the added problem of “hypertext” poetry with its new aesthetic layers.

I’m writing a hypertext poem because I’m jealous of our students in new media who have all kinds of opportunity to produce, but no, not the teacher, who has a dozen other things to do. That sounds a little boohoo dramatic and certainly this is a condition others would love to grapple with.

I’m going to be sucked in, though, other dozen things be damned.

P.S.: I have found a perfectly reasonable application for stretch text in the project!

Observations on the Economy

Yes, the economy is in a bad way, and we’re all worried. No, things are not good. It’s not a sellers market for much of anything. Buyers might find lots of bargains for certain goods once over valued.

In my neighborhood a house bought six years ago for 350K could be on the market for 5 or 550k. Even these days houses show a great deal of market value in my small town. This is all absurd. We know that the Monopoly money deals have revealed problems with how value is defined in a market with or without controls. How much, for example, is the 700B in Paulson’s chest actually worth. That depends, right?

I’m not an economist but it seems to me that the value of most market items is up for grabs in the transfer system. For example, how much is an average 20k auto actually worth? Doesn’t this depend on the cost of smelting equipment and labor? How much is labor worth? If pay is not proportional to the cost of necessary goods vs luxuries, then what is the worth of the luxury market with its limited cycles (you know, cell phones, TVs).

At the moment, chicken and butter are really expensive. But what is the value of butter?

Political Futures

Mary Glassman comes to some interesting conclusions:

Our town is not unique. Connecticut is more reliant on local property tax revenue to fund local education than any state in the nation. Our state contributes only 40 percent to our K-12 education, compared with other states such as Michigan, which contributes 78 percent. As a result, towns are forced to turn to the only revenue source available to them: the local property tax.

Funding education is not the only major challenge facing the state. Connecticut currently loses more young adults than any other state in the nation. That means that as our state population ages, there are fewer young people coming in to fill our jobs, buy our homes and purchase our goods and services.

Faced with these challenges, local and state elected officials must work together to create a long-term statewide plan that sets priorities, saves money and creates regional solutions.

In Connecticut and New England generally, regionalism is becoming more and more interesting, an idea that seeks to deeply link the fortunes of municipalities and states. It calls to attention, during these days where old paradigms will no longer provide answers to individuals wondering how they will fare in five years, the differences between theory and practice. Here’s what I mean by theory.

In another HC article, Jim Campbell offers advice to the GOP in how it can “come back,” providing a theoretical set of principles as a path, aiming at perceptions over realities. He writes

Second, it’s important to reassert the party’s traditional principles. Core Republican beliefs in lower taxes, fiscal responsibility and a strong national defense remain popular with most Americans, even as many have lost confidence in the GOP’s ability to govern. With Democrats back in power, they are already committed to an agenda that includes raising taxes on some and dramatically increasing spending. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that defense spending will rank as the new administration’s top priority.

In present contexts, none of the above hold contextual logic and amount to theoretical political science, as they always have. Lower taxes has never worked in practical terms, as Glassman shows above, and strong national defense must always come with qualifiers. What does “dramatically increasing” spending mean? Last week the auto industry travelled to Washington asking for bailout money. And why should national defense be a the “top priority” when the bricks are cracking at the local school?

Over the next few years we will be hearing a lot about “the parties” and why one is better than the other. Practical solutions will be on people minds. Not the great Platonic bridge. “I believe in lower taxes” in political framing is not quite a logical tautology but it’s pretty close.

World Changing’s Inaugurate Change

Worldchanging has a letter to President-elect Barack Obama:

With your help, we will show that the people of the United States are ready and willing to accept this challenge. And we will ask Obama to issue a call to action with an inaugural address that set specific goals to do the following:

* Set a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions
* Launch a national campaign to curb sprawl and encourage smart growth
* Set national building standards that will require all buildings to be carbon neutral by 2030
* Redirect all funding and support for fossil fuels into clean energy development
* Give policy support to small farms, local food, and better food quality in schools and low-income neighborhoods
* Take a leadership position in international climate, trade and development talks