Well, here I am at DAC, in an odd green building full of geometric patterns and shapes, a very appropriate venue. A quick welcome from the dignataries of Melbourne started us off with a rush.
Panel 1
Mikael Jakobsson and T.L. Taylor, Sopranos meets Everquest: Social networking in massively multiplayer online games.
People distinguish between RL (real life) and gaming friends--sounds like how mafia people introduce each other: friend of mine or friend of the family.
Everquest is a 3d world where people interact. One of the massive games: 430,000 subscribers, peak playing periods can host 100,000 people at once. People pay $12.95 a month, buy upgrades to the software, and keep up with the system to play.
To succeed at the game, you must have social capital: social networks developed through the game. This is not in the manual; but has developed through people playing the game.
Link death: when the network crashes and loses contact. People can petition game masters (employees who run around helping people.) Trust is important: lizard looted an object--according to the rules--he shouldhave given it up but disappeared. He then got a poor reputation, and could not play effectively. The social network functions as a way to keep and gain trust--if trust is abused, players will not go far.
Friends are the ultimate exploit in the game. Social networks evolve and are not played according to the manual. Players are not supposed to have more htan one player, but does own other characters. People group together, play with family and friends. This is a rich social space.
Rich social networks evolve in a formal way with guilds as well. System recognizes guild structures as formal associations, which facilitate game play. However, there is a high degree of sociability in the guilds. Guilds build reputation both with an individual's identity and guild itself. You apply to a guild with a posted application.
Families are built around reputation, trust, and responsibility.There are social guilds to hang out with and raiding guilds with a strong purpose. Groups of people pool property as a guild bank. However, this is not formally recognized in the system, so this depends on the trust of the players. People also trust their lives and property to fellow guild mates. People share accounts (a bannable offense) with guildmates, so they are also risking real life consequences --being banned from the game.Brad McQuiad, designer, says "The key to creating community is interdependance. In EverQuest, we forced interdependance in several ways and although we've been criticized for it, I think thats one of a couple of reasons behind our success."
So, just like the mafia, there is a strong level of trust and honor in the absence of legal boundaries. A favor and family system has evolved to create groups more powerful then the individual. A vow of silence within the guild enforces these social exploits and grouping to play the game inside and outside the formal game boundaries.
Lisbeth Klastrup, University of Copenhagen
A poetics of virtual worlds
This is part of her pHd thesis--recently completed--CONGRATULATIONS LISBETH HOORAY!!!
We have all been (Virtual) world builders. We play and demarcate playing spaces --a child playing on a carpet can be on a spaceship or a lion's den.
A virtual world is:
A virtual world is computer created. It is fiction that "Pretends to be real. These worlds are a potential waiting to be realized: The seed is vitual, the tree an actualisation, the cycle of constance re-virtualisation. This re-virtualisation takes place with expansion packs--new charactgers and features--and interact--players create new spaces and new actions.
THe world is an interpretive framework:
Virtual worlds are a cultural artifact, a new variety of an interactive text with two main possibilities of interact:
interaction with the world (naviagtion, manipulation, game system)
interaction with the players (social network)
We can ask the same questions in a virtual world as we do of traditional literary texts --what are the rules, forms, and laws of this specific aesthetic genre? WHat creates social experience, immersion (suspension of disbelief) presence (Feeling that you are there).
Worldness--the specific and unique traits that make it a world. This is like literariness or gameness. The worldness of a specific world are system (what you can and can't do and the backstory of the world) and emergence (shared social experience and mastering geography and strategies--what you live and experience, and what others live and create)
Life cycle of experiencing a world:
1) Getting to know the world, learning the lingo
2) Experimenting with successful strategies and mastering rules, socialising
3) the sum of lived experience, mastering the rules to perfection, extended social network.
EverQuest is a sum of the experience of the player--as a game, as a social world, as a piece of software.
Worldness should be applicable to other environments such as hypertext and single user games, (Navigable and geographically extended fictional texts) Can we make a general theroy of this type of text.
Her next project is the meaning and implementation of death
John Bank, University of Queensland
Intellectual property--who gets access in a game development company.
New media demands that we rethink relationships between producers and machinists.
Is this a form of resistance and consumers? Is this a cooption by cultural imperalists?
Next, a whirlwind of faces from the past for me: wonderful to see Nick Monfort, Rob Swigart, Rob Kendall, geniwate, Julianne Chatelain, Wendy Morgan, Catherine Bott, Komninos., Jill Walker--too much to talk about too quickly!
Whew it is incredible to get together with so many creative and friendly foks!
Panel 2: Room 2
textuality Janez Strehovec, University of Ljulana
Internet culture and internet textuality
Digital textuality is the field of visual culture. This is a moving target--not just about reading and writing but how to search the progrfam to navigate this new media.
We are using technology (cursor and stylus) to enable us to read and write and get a subtle feeling of being there, of being in the text-scape--a textual landscape. This is a subtle form of virtual reality.
The visual, time based aspects of the text and poetry is a way to look at literary works in an entirely new way.
This is not just about the semantic issues, but the relationship with the viewer and reader--the cinematic, visual, spatial aspects of the signifiers come to the fore.
Print and electronic poetry have common factors: writers manipulate words, both use random access. Both use white space--the absence, silence, display and not display. The whiteness and absence can be seen in the movement of the text, the animation and time sequence of the poem.
Poetry language can be defined as an attempt to express as much meaning as possible in the fewest amount of words. This economy of language is intensified in the electronic media, using temporal and spatial syntax as well as text.
(An aside, the technical aspects can be funny --the "no Signal" message of the projector floats across Janez' head--showing an irony. Janez actually is full of signals--I am getting caught up in the integration of white space and silence in digital works and print works, I think about the power in Ahkmatova's leaving just the edited out spaces in Poem without a Hero, of Claire's use of whiteness and blanks in Dazzle as Question...Now I will go back and listen..)
One problem with digital poetry is what is the reference frame? What is the environment for digital poetry, for electronic creativity?
Digital poetry is club culture, internet culture, emerging from online and modern (modem?) communication. It is devoted to the screen. It is time to come closer to kinetic poetry, to digital poetry, to time based images.
The logic of replacement gives way to the logic of coexistence and simulation.
The ontological status of digital poetry--we are changing from stable artifact of paper to a nonmaterial entity of screen. we are changing experience from a linear paper to a nonlinear multimedia exploration.
Susan Ballard, Otago Polytechnic
Talks about three artworks in her paper: her own work, a student's, and Maddy Lees--she came across these at the same time and tried to work out what these works share.
They don't share media--not the same media, or location (spatial or aesthetic), or content.
They share a notion of affect, so Susan examined the aspects of affect in these artworks.
Katherine Hayles also examined these affects--of flicker.
These are connections of embodiment--what positions do we adopt in front of artworks?
People walked up to an artwork in an exhibit and tried to touch the screen. Played James Walton's projection (untitled)--I wanted to touch it too, the film of the water aned rocks looked like I could touch the velvet surface of the awater, the dry graininess of the rock. This is a still work, Susan says, but I see the movement of the waves. Susan says this has a clock jumping about with times, but there are still waves, still a scene that persists (Lisbeth's words) through the time.
This plays in between digital and analogue, virtual and actual.
Susan then showed pictures of installations of her work Sensible. This is a photographic piece with lights and movement, a differing still feel than James'. It was filled with scent, and Susan expected people to be "attacked by the sense" and then go to the pictures. But people actually looked at the photos and then start to gag at the scent, and look around for the source of the scent. Viewers were made aware of their own embodiment and materiality.
Susan showed an installation of Maddie Leach's work, Lilacs. This is a film in two rooms, and you move between the two parts. Maddie constructed a large ice skating rink, and you could put on boots and skate up and down, so you become the work--performed the work and making the work happen.
What is the flicker? Do viewers enter the flicker? Or is it something we can see and not enter? Thinking in terms of squeezing in and virtual immersion. In her paper, the word flicker shifts and changes as the notion of flicker shifts.
(I like the idea of words changing and celebrating noise and flicker, it is an intriguing notion when the word reflects what it is, a sort of three dimensional onomotopeia.)
Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Franz Universiy
Showed and talked about the interactive fiction, Ceremony of Innocence. The interactive logic is an "obstructivist" design--get a post card, solve the puzzle, get another postcard. You go through 60 levels to get to all the lexia.
It is simplistic at the macro level, but delightful at the micro level. The puzzles are funny, inspiring, and witty./
I have to spend time with this work!!!***
You get a suspension of disbelief--you surrender to the experience.
This is a narrative like a game--is there a contradiction between interactive experience and engaging with the text and suspending disbelief?
Do you need narrative in an interactive work? Can the audience flicker between surrendering to the work and engaging with the work?
Oh, this is based on the three art books with Griffin and Sabine!! I LOVE those. I HAVE to get this!!!
Narrative is infused in the design and work.
Narrative texture--the exaggeration of craft to express narrative emotion and character.
Expressivity application of craft to infuse meaning into a work
(This will be intersting to compare the physical work of the art books with the online work.)
Narrative texture spreads information throughout a work.
Functional transformations-with cursors (matches are used in Griffins, and Griffin is mundane objects, limited characters). Sabine's cursor is a parrot, a butterfly, whereas Sabine's are exotic. Sabine is a witches familiar, a dark angel. GRiffin's is a sad, mechanical death whereas SAbine is a transcending death.
The cursor tumbles and becomes disoriented, lose control of the cursor. The cursor gets swatted out of the picture with a cat. In some, there is no agency at all. The cursor loss of control shows the loss of agency for the reader. We lose the nexus, the interface between the hand, eye, and screen. The subversion of the cursor is part of the puzzle, and part of the character and narrative and plot development.
(wow, what a great idea. to work within and subvert these convensions...hbmmm.. I gotta play with this....)
REal Media Media==get through Amazon
I skipped out of the third session to get setup and put this online immedioatly. Welcome to blogging and real world timing! I have resisted this immediacy for a long time, but I can see--briefly--where it might help...
Posted by at May 19, 2003 12:46 PM