As I have been saying in class, MMORGP’s are much more than a game. They tend to suck you in and break the barrier between the fantasy and the real world. Not only are you playing with REAL people (in avatar form) but you utilize communication, business, tactical, and social skills in order to succeed and progress within the game. These communicative and social skills that are required in the game, humanizes your avatar and brings YOUR, as a person, personality into the game. Essentially, YOUR personal skills as a person (not as a player) come into play and affect how successful you are within the game. Due to this personal intimacy with the game or character, the game tends to become more real, or at least more attached to the real world. More specifically, players reach into their own lives and finances in order to further themselves in game, or even to purchase or sell an entire character. If you didn’t believe me that you can buy and sell characters and items in the game, and actually make a killing (because players are so connected to their character) take a look at this site: www.playerauctions.com . Another indication of how attached people are to their character is the site www.magelo.com . This is a site where players can enter their character onto this site as a member, which recreates the character’s inventory, stats, and levels in order to show off their rank and compete against other characters in the game to achieve the highest rank.
Much more than just hitting arrow keys and hitting action buttons, MMORPG’s take the game far from the screen and pull the player into a world where real life skills and media merge with fantasy.

Now that we’re on the topic of video games, I thought I’d supply a list of some of my favorite video games that I’ve had the chance to play. All of them are “Patti Approved” for fun. In no particular order…

–Super Mario Brothers 3 for Nintendo NES
–Paper Boy 2 for Super Nintendo
–Crazy Taxi for PS2
–Cool Boarders 4 for PS
–Max Payne for PS2
–The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for Xbox
–Gran Turismo for PS3
–Call of Duty 3 for Xbox 360
–Kingdom Hearts for Playstation
–Looney Tunes: Marvin Strikes Back! for Gameboy Color

Video games reviews are numerous on internet. This one though caught my attention as the style is quite peculiar. It features animation, “collage” editing and the reviewer uses this “0 punctuation” way of speaking that makes him sometimes difficult to understand (at least for me) but adds a great comical effect. I leave you with the link, you should really check it out:

0 punctuation

I had the opportunity to play “Facade” today. While I do like the idea of having text-based interactions with a video game, the technology is not yet at a place where it was even a remotely satisfying experience. As “deep” as the game may have been with its not-so-hidden layers of human interaction and the complexity of situations, the lack of full control diminished the game-play and took away from the intent (whatever they ‘intent’ may have been–another problem* of the game).

As I stated in class, conceptually it’s an interesting idea, but in practice (especially in “Facade”) text-based action falls flat. Facade’s two-dimensional characters (in personality, not appearance), unappealing atmosphere, and repetitive scenario make it about as riveting as [insert something excruciating boring here]. I could see text-based action being really cool if you were playing some sort of FBI where you got to interview a suspect and get clues from them by asking the right thing or something (just an idea). For some reason, Men In Black keeps coming to mind.

Anyways, the creators of “Facade” definitely have something. What that ‘something’ is, I think they’ve yet to define (which translates in the game). However, I won’t discount that this definitely has potential.

*Wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the game was more exciting.

After reading Jones’s The Meaning of Video Games, and computing all that he says about the complexity of video games I couldn’t help but wonder: which games are better simple or complex ones?

Using Jones’s example of Katamari Damacy, I know that even a game with a simple basis can have many elaborate layers that extend beyond the sphere of the actual game. Yet, one must ask are these games really that accessible for the everyday person?  For anyone who’s ever tried to casually join in on a game of Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or any other popular game, you know that it’s pretty much impossible to be successful at it. Without the skills to navigate the universe of these games, the games themselves pretty much cease to be fun. Speaking from personal experience I’m not really interested in playing these games because I don’t know how and I can’t learn how to play without putting in a significant amount of time. Furthermore even if I do put in the time, beating these games would take another myriad of sleepless nights. After reading the story behind Katamari Damacy I questioned the necessity of the story itself. I mean when people are playing these games are they really that worried about the narrative and where it’s going? In my experience during game play you are almost completely enraptured in the game itself and everything else is just extraneous. I mean who does wish they could just skip though all of the intro videos and transition pages?

After playing Rockband in class last week, I was able to confirm that this was more my type of game, something you could just pick up and play, albeit not perfectly, but still easily. Thinking back it also seems like all of the classic great games of the past are all fairly simple ones in context. After all Pacman doesn’t need an elaborate back-story, it’s just fun to play. Maybe times are different now with the new technology that’s available to elaborate these games, but one thing remains, while complex games may come and go with the fads, simple ones will stand the test of time in longevity. People of all generations will always be able to play simple games like Tetris, Pinball, and Pacman because they will never forget how to play once they learn. However, the same thing cannot be said about these intricate cross platform narrative games and that is why I feel as though their presence, while strong amongst certain demographics, is ultimately fleeting in the overall population by comparison.

After reading Lessig and watching Rip!, I’m definitely thinking about some of my favorite examples of remix art in a different light.  These two are both examples that occurred to me in the past week…sort of old favorites that I’ve remembered and I think about in a new light now.

This first one is by an artist/YouTube user named “Kutiman”, who essentially makes mashups of musical YouTube videos that he’s found.  I think it’s interesting that his creativity exists entirely within the circle of YouTube — he finds videos people have uploaded to the site, mashes them up, and then posts them on his own YouTube account.  Plus, this song, called “I’m New” is just masterfully done; it’s a great song in itself, discounting the fact that it’s a mashup.  His songs don’t have that ‘aha!’ moment of musical recognition a la Girl Talk, because you’ve probably never watched any of the videos before, but you can still admire the craft of it.  Here’s the vid:

Also, HERE is his own weird site, which has all his songs listed in a playlist, plus a cool function where you can see the “credits” for his songs and link to all their original youtube videos.

This second example is very near and dear to my heart.  It’s called “in bflat” and it’s “a collaborative music/spoken word project”.  Here’s how the guy came up with the idea:

“I was making a site with embedded YouTube videos, when I realized that YouTube doesn’t stop the user from running more than one video at a time. I was curious to see if there was a musical way to explore that concept, so I recorded some instrumental videos and eventually came up with In Bb v1.”

Then, for version 2, he sent out some emails and posted an open call for submissions on the site, with a few instructions:

-”Sing or play an instrument, in Bb major. Simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or groove. Leave lots of silence between phrases.  Total length should be between 1-2 minutes.”

He selected 20 of the best ones and compiled them into that page that I linked to above.  Basically, you can mix and match the videos, playing as many or as few at a time as you want, and because they are tempoless and in the same key, they all sound good together.  In fact, they sound downright magical together.  And that’s why I find this to be one of the more inspiring examples of collaborative internet creativity I’ve ever seen.  That something like this is possible never occurred to me, and it alerts me to the fact that there’s tons of undiscovered possibilities for stuff like this that the internet provides if people think about things a little differently.  It may take a little while to load, but I highly recommend checking in bflat out.

In class on…I think Monday?  We thought about whether we would consider ourselves “gamers”, and talked a bit about the role of video games in our lives.  Now my initial reaction was, no, I am not a gamer.  I have not spent a significant amount of time in college playing video games.  But thinking back, I noticed the thread of different video games over the course of my life, and they have always been present in some way or another.  One thing that struck me was how many different forms they have taken.  I think of “gaming” as playing ambitious, difficult solo games on the computer or on one of the main consoles, or perhaps playing some online multiplayer games like WoW.  But, obviously, there’s many other types of video games, and I’d like to trace my history with video games, or “digital games”, as we should perhaps call them.

I faintly remember the first computer our family had, some old beast whose monitor display consisted of a bunch of rectangles which could either be ‘on’ (yellow) or ‘off’ (black).  I don’t know what this computer even did, really…I don’t think it had Windows on it, so it probably had some way of doing word processing through DOS.  But it also had two games that I remember: Reader Rabbit, a simple educational game (I was probably about 5 or 6, I think), and a BITCHIN game called “Midnight Rescue”.  You had to use critical thinking skillz to figure out which of 5 janitorial robots was hiding the evil mastermind that was going to make the school disappear at midnight using invisible paint.  I think I played that quite a bit.

My parents never wanted us to have video game consoles, but soon we bought our next computer, a Gateway with Windows 95 on it and a whopping 1.6 GB hard drive!  On that particular Christmas day, we also got Myst, a cutting edge game to go with our new ‘cutting edge’ computer.  I like to think of Myst sort of as the Twin Peaks of computer games; an odd,  lovingly created and inscrutable game that came somewhat out of left field and opened up a lot of possibilities for what the medium could do artistically.  I think I was about 7 or 8 at this point, and my brother, dad and I (and sometimes my mom) played Myst as a family.  It would’ve been too difficult for my brother (a year and a half younger than me) and I to play on our own, but I think we learned a lot the way we did it.

I also remember playing a lot of games produced by the company “Humongous Entertainment” on that computer.  They were cartoony, puzzle-solving narrative games featuring fantastic characters like Pajama Sam and Spy Fox.  Those games were really fantastic…that probably went on through grade school, accompanied by games like Backyard Football and Backyard Soccer.  Man this is a nostalgia trip.

At some point we bought Riven, the completely-fucking-impossible sequel to Myst.  The interest of my dad and I waned, but over a course of about 5 years, playing off and on, my brother somehow beat that ludicrous game.  He’s continued playing the occasional computer game ever since.  He’s played most of the games released in the Myst series, as well as Black & White (which Jenkins talks about, I think), Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Fallout 3, all critically acclaimed games that seem really amazing when I’ve watched him play them.  I haven’t seen much of Bioshock and Fallout 3, because he played those after I left for college, but Half-Life 2 was a pretty incredible game.  He also told me about Portal (made by the same company as HL2), which is pretty short and which I played a couple of years ago (it’s really amazing), and plays some Team Fortress from time to time – a fantastic online killing game, like Halo but much more fun, from what I can tell (because most people who play Halo online seem to be complete assholes about it).  I include this paragraph only because a lot of my knowledge about what’s going on in the mainstream, critically-acclaimed gaming world comes from my brother.

My gaming habits, before dwindling early in high school, branched off into the Age of Empires / The Sims phase that I had in middle school.  I played a shitload of Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Edition, and learned mad medieval history from that shit whilst playing it.  I still remember some of the little archaic-foreign-language things that the units say when you tell them to do things.  The Sims was good, but like I said in an earlier post (as an analogy for my blog), I always liked designing the house way more than trying to keep my damned little characters happy.  I think internet games were starting to get big at this point, as well, but I never had a strong habit around those except for that game N, which I mentioned, and was mildly addicted to at some point in high school.  Check it out at yr own risk.  Oh also, freshman year of college I had a few weeks of unhealthy playing of “Bloons”, which is a fucking stupid, frustrating, horrible internet game.  Never play it.

As my computer game playing dropped off in high school, my diet shifted to the occasional playing of more socially-oriented games with friends, almost all on Nintendo 64 (which may be the most perfect gaming system yet invented).  Actually, mostly just the original Super Smash Bros. and Mario Tennis.  Fantastic games which we still play sometimes when we’re home.  Also, Mario Kart 64 was pretty big on my freshman hall.  Now I play the original Smash Bros. or Rock Band every once in a while…once every 2 or 3 weeks, I would say.

I’m not sure exactly what conclusions to draw from all this…I just know that it was fun to do, and I recommend tracing your video game history like that.  I guess what strikes me most, as I said at the beginning, is how diverse a set of experiences these different games provided for me: there’s the purely-educational, like Reader Rabbit.  Then there’s the more abstractly educational, like Myst (which I associate with a similar feeling to having books like The Golden Compass or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, slightly above my reading level at the time, read to me at bedtime) and the Pajama Sam/Spy Fox games.  These games taught ‘critical thinking’ but also gave me experience in consuming and enjoying narrative and visual art.  Then there’s the “god games” like Age of Empires and the Sims, which were also educational in a variety of ways.  And there’s internet games (which seem to me the least redeemable) and social, console games, which are somewhat associated with nostalgia because they’re almost all on N64.

They all have enriched me in different ways, but I don’t want to seem like I’m saying video games are only useful if they’re ‘enriching’/’educational’, because if all art was like that, it would be friggin obnoxious.  I think many of these games were both enlightening and artistically beautiful, which is what much of the best ‘art’ is.  So, games…they get a bad rep!  Makes me want to pick up one and play it, I just wish it was winter and not spring, because I would be much more inclined to pick up something like Bioshock, which I’ve been sort of interested in playing for a long time.  I guess I need to pick one soon for my project, I just haven’t quite figured that out yet.

….What is it?  I just read these two articles:

http://adage.com/digiconf10/article?article_id=143301

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181163126094200.html

I understand that they are finally going to try to turn a profit, but I’m unsure about their approach to advertising.  It seems like they are trying to catch up to Google as a search engine.  What will a sponsored tweet look like?  Will people start searching twitter more now?  How will the “Resonance Score” referred to in the WSJ article affect advertising in other venues?

Does anyone have an opinion on this?  I don’t yet….

A prospective student walked in while we were “studying” Beatles Rock Band in class today…this struck us all as ironic–how can something so fun be “academic?”  I’ve watched Project Runway in a sociology class, read magazines in another Film and Media course, and attended screenings of the Simpson’s, Seinfeld, and the Hills.  My friends make fun of me for this, and I often find myself at a loss when it comes time to explain just how one could possibly identify any of these manifestations of pop culture as an academic category.  I have even questioned my own decision to take such classes.  I remember now a reading from the beginning of the semester in which the writer pointed out that fish don’t know that they’re swimming in water, people don’t pay attention to the fact that we are breathing in air, etc…these classes have taught me to pay attention to the world that I and my friends actively consume, but that many of my friends don’t attempt to understand in the ways that we do in these courses.  These classes, while they might sound frivolous or too fun to be worthwhile teach two things: first, media literacy; and second, that valuable learning doesn’t have to be traditional and it can happen outside of erserves and textbooks.

I really enjoyed the documentary “RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.”  I thought it did a great job of both explaining and illustrating many of the contemporary issues of copyright issues and cultural change that we have been discussing in class.  Not only that, but it made critiques about certain media by remixing those media… it was like one very long project for Media Technology and Cultural Change.

I found the film entertaining because a lot of it had to do with the work of Girl Talk, who happens to be an artist who I enjoy very much.  It was entertaining to see him work, hear his thoughts on copyright law, and especially see his concerts.  At the point in the film where the recording of a Girl Talk performance is muted because “[Gaylor’s] point had already been made, so using the clip was no longer fair use,” i was genuinely disappointed, but the message was perfectly illustrated.

Another thing that I found interesting was the interactive way in which I watched the film.  As it would happen, I missed the screening of the film here at Midd, but luckily for me it was available online.  The way in which they showed the film online, however, was they played it as twelve separate chapters of the film.  At the end of each chapter the Brett Gaylor (the director), would appear and ask viewers at home to think of new ways to remix the chapter they had just seen.  Whether it be adding a remix of their own, or a different soundtrack, or anything, the idea is that the film about remixes is attempting to be remixed itself.  Online viewers can upload their remixed version to the website, and eventually Gaylor will be releasing a RiP! 2.0.  I just thought this form of viewer participation was very interesting.  It addressed one idea that I took away from the film, which was that if enough people get involved and make changes themselves, the lines of copyright and ownership become more and more blurred.

All and all, I really like the documentary.

So I finally took the tour and did my second life snapshots.  While I am still somewhat hesitant about second life, I did have some fun going to the different places and trying to take good pictures next to interesting stuff.  Here they are:

Here is me with the librarian:

Me at the Moulin Rouge in Paris 1900:

Me in space, chatting it up:

Me at Colorado Tech:

Me at the Space Museum:

Me In Austrailia:

Me in an Irish Pub:

Man, seeing these great photos of my avatar in fun places is way cooler than actually going there myself!!!

ABC Nightly news with Brian Williams is a program that millions tune into across the country as a source for what’s going on in the nation and the world on a regular basis. I personally have replaced watching the news on TV with reading it online or watching little clips here and there on the internet. It works with my schedule, I get to watch/read whenever I want and don’t have to deal with (many) commercials.

After spending time with my grandfather during break, who tunes in on a nightly basis, I saw how little has changed about the nightly broadcast. There was one major thing that I have never seen before though that caught my eye. At the end of the broadcast while the credits rolled, they had four icons across the bottom under the words “To get this broadcast”. The Facebook “F”, the Twitter “T”, the RSS squiggles, and the Podcast “i” icon are all there popping out like candy on the screen in their colorful “shorthand” icons.

ABC has recognized that in the modern day, many people either have converted to digital/internet media for collecting their information and they really don’t want to miss out. If you had told them five years ago that to keep their following they would have to convert their broadcast into four different electronic versions, they would probably tell you you’re crazy and that everybody following them watches TV. Now, they have stayed up with the latest and turned a half hour TV show into many other forms of communication.

How you condense that into 140 characters or a wall post… I’m not sure but, they have found ways of making it work to get their program to the masses. I think that it is interesting also that you see it at the end of the broadcast. They don’t put it in the beginning saying if you don’t want to watch this whole thing or don’t want the commercials then look at our online sources for giving you the news. It is only after the broadcast is over that they advertise other possible ways. It would be interesting to see how the five different ways of collecting their news are different and what is cut out in certain ones.

Life on the run is always shifting and thankfully, industries are noticing that and tailoring their products to help go along seamlessly with the shift. I’m sure that the daily commuter appreciates being able to bring up the highlights of the newscast on their blackberry from the same firsthand source that they would have gotten the information from on TV.

Just saw the 3 oclock showing of the Rip movie.  Good stuff!  I was worried at the start; it seemed a bit like a less-nuanced version of a lot of the material we’ve covered already.  That “CopyRIGHT” and “CopyLEFT” business, for one, was pretty brazen and kinda oversimplified, I thought.  Basically, he boiled every problem with intellectual property in our culture down to corporate greed and oppression, which ignores the part we all play in these problems by supporting the established norms.

But I really got into the film as it went along, and I think it’s unsubtle flashiness was one of its strengths.  It did more or less cover stuff we’ve already talked about, w/ Lessig’s book and our related discussions, but it did it concisely and compellingly, and his knack for visual flare and seamless integration of bits and pieces of borrowed culture was really impressive.  I think the “culture crusader” tone that the film takes on is different than, say, Lessig’s reasoned and measured take, but one is not necessarily better or worse.  I think that tone in Rip might even be better suited to empowering and inspiring people to take charge of their own consumption of culture, which is what he was aiming to do.

I certainly felt inspired leaving the film, and even a little proud of the piece of electronic music I’ve been working on lately, which samples “Sycamore Trees” by Jimmy Scott, a song which I heard through its use in a Twin Peaks episode.  I had kind of taken the fact that I was essentially remixing this song for granted, probably because doing it for an obscure song like that feels different from remixing/’ripping off’ Lady Gaga or whoever — artists on the scale of the ones that Girl Talk uses in his remixes.  But watching this film reminded me that doing this can be a ‘culturally significant’ act…I think?  Since I’ve grown up with this kind of thing all around me, it doesn’t feel like this big ideological stand (unlike the M.L.F. guy’s actions, which were hilarious and badass), but I guess I should take pride in my little participation in R/W culture.

SPIEGEL: “…But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?… Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?”

Eco: “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

This very insightful (and relatively short) interview with Umberto Eco was conducted in the lead up to the opening of an exhibit that he curated at the Louvre, an exhibit studying the nature of lists, and the places that they show up in literature and the visual arts.  They cover a lot of concepts, and many of them are beyond the theoretical scope of our class, but it’s still very interesting.  First, he discusses how making lists is one of our fundamental cultural impulses — as with all art, it’s a way of trying to impose order upon infinity, or chaos.  He segues into that point which I included up top there, that we do it to try to escape our thought about death.  Whee!

But then, near the end, they move on to discuss lists as a form of filtering, which strikes closer to some of the issues we’ve discussed in this class.  We’ve talked about how our modern, networked culture provides us with access to more content than we can ever possibly process; the idea of “publish, then filter”.  And we talked about how we all rely on certain sources, whether they be websites or people or whatever, to help us choose what culture we want to consume.  And often, this comes down to listmaking, whether implicitly or explicitly.  We LOVE lists in our culture!  There’s countless lists of the “best ___s of the year” published at the end of every year.  Personally I have kind of a guilty feeling about this (I feel it sort of goes against the artistic spirit when I listen to music throughout the year thinking about where it will fall in my year-end list), but I also think there’s a necessity to it, now, and it’s also kind of fun.

And they even touch on Google in the Eco interview.  He thinks it might be a bit dangerous because it gives us the illusion that we don’t have to be discriminating when searching for information, that Google will do all of that for us.  Eco says, “…in school when dealing with the Internet, the teacher should say: ‘Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information.’ If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others’ mistakes.”

I absolutely agree with this sentiment, and that’s why it has always annoyed me when teachers preach against Wikipedia; one just has to learn to be a discerning reader of Wikipedia.  I think learning to be discerning should be more emphasized.  And it’s a subset of media literacy in general, which obviously needs to be more emphasized.

Finally, I’ll close with one of Eco’s little wisdoms that he says near the end of the interview.  In discussing his giant personal library, he says: “Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.”

At last, at last, here is my remix! I chose to use video clips from the AMAZING tv show Madmen! The story takes place in the beginning of the 60′s, in New York City and we follow Donald Drapper, handsome middle-aged man working in an advertising company. Those of you who know the show were probably striken by the relationships between men and women. I then chose to work on this theme.

Concerning the audio, I chose the song “Possession” by the Dirtbombs, an amazing garage band from Detroit. I highly recommend buying their cds if you like their music because they are modest, talented and rock as hell!