Prisoners of Palaces

Wonderful interview on BLDGBLOG about photographer Richard Mosse's study of Saddam's palaces since he was deposed.

"Mosse: Sebald recounts how the German population, after the end of WWII, would ride the trains, staring into their laps or at the ceiling—anywhere but out the window at the terrible wreckage of their cities. It was as if they were somehow disavowing the war by willing it away, by refusing to perceive it.

It's interesting, then, that, in both instances—in both Iraq and in post-war Germany—it's the tourist, or the outsider, who observes this blindness. I suppose that's why I like to make photographs in foreign places: only the tourist notices the really dumb things that everyone else takes for granted."

Circular Linking and Drinking Thinking

Just got back from the Champions League match with Avi. The same interview on gaming and culture he pointed to was initially highlighted by Snarkmarket to pull out this quote: "All CCTV footage of road traffic, for instance, looks like CCTV footage taken right before an accident."

I was already thinking about the pervasive nature of games, but the combination got me thinking about the fact that, for me, games are the primary channel for accessing certain parts of culture and activities. To wit: Up until this year, I hadn't watched a soccer game on TV since childhood, but recently I started playing FIFA.

Result: All wide-angle shots of crowded playing fields with little men running around looks like the beginning to a game I'm about to play. I only really understand soccer, to the extent that I do, because of video games. Or, to a surprisingly strong degree, I only understand soccer as a video game.

Secondary result of mirror neurons and avatars: I'm a bit disappointed that striker Joey Seiler couldn't come in to win it back for Manchester.

We Are All Fuddy-Duddies, But Everything Is Compelling

I've covered the virtual worlds industry for two years. It's a youth-driven medium. (28% of kids 3-11 who use the Internet visited a virtual world at least once a month over 2008.) It's also very much a medium that's like the MMOs Avi talked about: users group together, chat, play casual games or solve mysteries, or just pretend that they're playing games in the virtual world. (One of my favorite stories is of users in Habbo, a popular world, banding together to create pretend jobs at a virtual diner. There were no actual virtual burgers served, no virtual currencies exchanged, just imagination.)

Marketers don't call this a game because girls (a key demographic) don't play "games."

My point is that while Avi's calling out the shared fantasies of games as one of their most compelling points, I think it's the shared fantasy of any social space that makes it not just compelling, but a game. E.g., Facebook is a game, eBay is a game, and, most explicitly, Flickr is a game. I.e., World of Warcraft isn't compelling as a game because it's shared, it's a game because it's a shared, compelling experience.

As a species, we are game players. Johan Huizinga called us "Homo Ludens," or "Man the Player," in a book of the same name way back in 1955. It's just getting more explicit now.

As Avi pointed out, for most people our age, video games have been a part of our lives since childhood. My folks didn't let me have a console until I could buy my own, but I spent plenty of time playing Mario at my friends' house across the street. I got my first job for two reasons: first (in theory) to pay for debate tournaments and second (realistically) to pay for a PlayStation.

I am now what's politely known as an outlier. More directly, says the Pew Internet & American Life Project, I'm old.

Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories. [emphasis mine]

You want hard numbers? Fully 97% of American kids aged 12-17 play games on the computer, Web, portable devices, or consoles. 50% played "yesterday." 86% play on a console. And, the part that really blows me away, only 48% use a cell phone or organizer to play games.

I remember as a nerd in high school thinking that once all the cool kids started playing Snake on their new cell phones, they'd embrace me as a leader. The casual, handheld devices that were ostensibly for communication were more and more often being used for gaming. That held true for a while and maybe still holds true for our generation and those a few notches older than us.

We're not only biologically predisposed to think of things as a game. We're now culturally trained to transform our social experiences into games. If there's interaction (I do x thing and get y result), reward (y result gets me z benefit), and shared results (z benefit gains me recognition among my favorite group), it starts to feel a lot more like Mario and World of Warcraft than just hanging out online.

I'm not sure what all the effects will be, but they're already on the tipping point of pervasive. I do think we'll need a new vocabulary (or I read to need more game scholarship) to talk about different types of games and social experiences.

Multiculturalism is a Warm Gun

Interesting little article on Snarkmarket about the tendency to lump many separate cultures into some nebulous white culture.

Semi-Random Thought: Is that why I associate with my Indian heritage more than my German-American roots?

It Takes a Village (To Win a Video Game)

Video games have been a part of my life since I was seven and my parents bought a Sega Master System for my brother and I. And while I've never considered myself more than a casual gamer, there hasn't been a year of my life that a console hasn't been in my household. Video games have been more constant (if not prevalent) in my life than, say, the Internet.

I think I'm very far from being alone here, yet this recent article on gaming cultures around the world had me rethinking our own gaming culture here in America.

A list of common (read: mainstream) connotations with gaming in America through the 1990s might read like this: consoles, computers, indoor kids, obsession, nerds, etc.

Has that been eradicated? Altered? If our opinion of gaming culture is centered on WoW which is equivalent to D&D...then our culutre's mindset has not grown with its gaming.

Part of my answer to this is that gaming is everywhere. How many millions play fantasy football? How inundated is our market with sports? Now certainly there's a visceral difference between playing a sport and playing a video game, but are their more similarities or differences between playing fantasy football online and WoW? The difference is in our culture mindset. Why else was it called fantasy football?

Several decades before fantasy sports existed, Robert Coover penned a provoking novel called The Universal Baseball Association. The protagonist created an intricate baseball league run by the rolling of dice, but more than the doubles, triples, homers, and strikeouts were the mythos that he created. Certain teams had distinct personalities, as did players, who retired to own bars or write songs about the league. The protagonist lived in the world of his league rather than his own.

That obsessive mentality is readily ascribed to Warcrafters, but fantasy sports do something very similar: they give players a sense of ownership and a sense of fantasy.

Ownership: In MMORPGS, players create their own avatar, accumulate rewards, trophies, equipment, etc. In fantasy sports, players choose their team name, select their players, choose their starters, etc. Have you ever been in a bar and seen a guy celebrating not because his home team is winning, but because someone on his fantasy team scored a touchdown? All the time.

Fantasy: It's easy to undercut fantasy in this context by applying it to WoW? Of course that's a "fantasy" world. But what about The Sims? That's a fantasy world based on the mundane.

Why do housewives read romance novels? Why are series such as Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean such smashing successes? We like to indulge. We need to indulge our minds. I read an improv book once that said that the best stories show the world as we wish it was, be that mundane or fantastical, be it a book, or a movie, or a play,

Or a game. With deeper and better narrative coming to games (but really all the way back to the base hero stories like Zelda and Mario), gaming is a fantasy with an interactive element. It's not passive. I think WoW's fantasy brings so many people in not because they can be fantastical, but because so many people are indulging in the same make-believe world. Think of it as a Neverland effect: the more people that believe, the more true it becomes. When you have hundreds of gamers working together to do something, there is something very real about it. There are stakes.

I was thinking about this in relation to a soccer game I've been playing lately, FIFA 2009. By myself, I can win almost all the time. With my roommate, we win most of the time. Playing with four people on the same team (as we did last night), we struggled to win at a much lower difficulty setting, yet the experience was much more rewarding.

Why? Not just the shared experience but the shared fantasy that we were winning something together. And that's something our entire culture--not just gaming--can build on.

Bite the Apple (but which apple?)!

Compelling analysis by Stanley Fish of Terry Eagleton's case for religion as the trump card to all other forms of thought.

The firts half of Eagleton's argument is fairly compelling, though it seems to descend into biting criticism and turgid assumptions by the end. Worth the read.

Do You Have An Hour For Your Own Happiness?

If so, read this absolutely riveting study from the Atlantic, then watch this video by Dan Gilbert.




If you don't have an hour, allow me to give you the abridged version:

Happiness is a paradigm.

Finding happiness is a paradox.

Your 15 minutes is 15 seconds: Susan Boyle Edition

Fascinating article by Henry Jenkins about the Susan Boyle phenomenon and her meteoric flash to fame.

(For those of you who haven't seen Boyle's video: click here)

More interesting to me is Jenkins' dissection of the relationship between ownership and content in the Internet age. A person might come across an article or video like the ones linked above and do a myriad of things with it: share, save, comment, etc. With one YouTube video you can say 'I love you' to one person or 'You remind me of this jackass' to another.

And very quickly this video of Susan Boyle's ascendancy isn't about her at all, it's about two people sharing an experience through her video. Just as music as become a more personal medium with the advent of albums and iPods, the Internet allows us to personalize our interactions with our culture, media, and society at large.

On the Cultural Frontline: Trash Novels

I've always believed, and wanted to believe, that the great ideas shaping, forming, and creating our thought came from Art. Capital A, mind you. Anyone who endeavors to be an artist hopes to make a lasting impression, and if an idea is emerging in and amongst our cultural zeitgeist, well, I would hope it would come pouring out in some quintessential artistic achievement. Behold, the landmark of our beautiful minds!

Reading Ron Rosenbaum's article over on Slate made me think about where the collective mind of culture exists. Even asking where, or in whom, our culture lays is a loaded question. Are we talking mainstream America? Does anyone know what mainstream America is?

Before the Renaissance (and even the 20th Century), expressions of art were vastly limited to those with means. Education for the masses lived in trades and flowed in their veins. We might believe something like Plato's Republic to be totemic of a civilization, but in an era when expression was limited to those with privilege, I wonder how pandemic their beliefs actually were. As spindly disciple Aristotle expounds about the Form of things while Plato gorges himself on an overripe mango in th middle of the market, the beleaguered blacksmith does not know if the sword he holds is a Sword or not. And he doesn't give a rat's ass either.

But in this era, in this culture and country, personal expression is a gluttony. Thoughts, notes, posts, rants, raves, comments, images, memes saturate our daily life so far that we don't come close to consciously registering all of them. Does expression grant autonomy of thought? Hardly.

Maybe it's unsurprising that mainstream culture or thought would begin to manifest itself in novels found in an airport bookstore. Maybe watching the permutations of American Idol shake its rangled head tells you more about this country than any lovingly-crafted political documentary could even dream of.

Rosenbaum's article points to both low and high forms of fiction wrangling with the same subject. I'm not sure if its more or less comforting to think that both the educated and non-educated parts of our culture are toiling over the same issues--that we can express hopes and fears across 300 million people seems "Hands Across America" inspiring but somehow rings hollow.

The growing paradigm that I have failed to advance in my mind is that as everything in the world becomes more available and connected it also becomes more fragmented and niche-oriented.

What truly binds us, as people? The radio show that everyone and their pa heard is gone. The newspaper everyone read has been recycled. I wonder if the concept of culture will be synonymous with community some point in the future, so dispersed our minds will be.