Film, he says, gives us masterpieces such as Casablanca, but also is used to create things as mundane as airplane safety videos. Does the game form also have the same potential for banalism, and is this a bad thing? He gives the example of Brain Age, for the Nintendo DS, which has no real innovative gameplay, or much of gameplay at all. It presents math puzzles, reaction exercises, and the like to form a game which serves to keep the mind sharp. He compares it to an exercize video, something which serves a purpose, but is not exactly innovative.

He feels that just as in any other media, there exists a continuum between the masterpieces and the banal works, and that we should acknowledge the value of both

His analysis here, my comments to follow…

I think his analysis is great, and this image in particular. He traces a linguistic tree of how he feels that the language and grammar of lolcat images evolved, from english, to netspeak, to image macros, to the specific patters of the cat images, and then to the derivatives of those.

I also noticed that, although it is unstated, he takes somewhat of the same approach that we must when studying and discussing play. A key feature must be removed from the discussion before a reasonable discussion can even take place. Play must be discussed without a discussion of why/if it is fun, and a discussion of lolcats must happen without any discussion of why/if they are funny. In a discussion of how they work, the most obvious function must be removed.

Just a thought.

It turns out that the reason they have come up with is that the ravens do not have an easy, routine life like other birds. They are always in changing situations, in close quarters with potential predators, and have to deal with that.

The variety of ways that they describe ravens playing is fascinating. Teasing predators, riding larger animals, and skiing behind animals on their backs. All these seem to be tactics to ensure that they have the flexibility of thinking needed to survive in their particular ecological niche.

Clever Ravens

One of the panelists described an interesting concept he termed the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” This was a divide which occurred when cultures changed from a primarily oral or hand-copied tradition to one of reliable, consistent mechanical reproduction. Once this happened, a privileged, reified place was given to the concept of the complete, original text, “as the author intended,” rather than an interpreted work. Prior to this transition, works evolved and changed over time, and the performative aspect was more important than the accuracy.

What is significant about this parenthesis, and one of the reasons why Prof. Pettitt talked about this concept at a conference on Creativity, Collaboration, and Ownership in the Digital Age, is that he speculates that we may be leaving this parenthetical period. He sees the digital era as having much in common with the pre-gutenberg era. To copy off his handout from the session:

Pre-parenthetical Gutenberg Parenthesis Post-Parenthetical
re-creative original sampling
collective individual remixing
con-textual autonomous borrowing
unstable stable reshaping
traditional canonical appropriating
Performance Composition recontextualizing

This seems to be accurate to me. Digital media, with it’s ease of copying, modifying, and transmission, certainly moves away from the primacy of the original work. That is the source of all the copyright problems that are disrupting media industries today. Video, audio, graphics, all are getting reappropriated, changed, and redistributed across digital media.

This follows along with the heraclitean ideas of playing and changing, rather than the platonic idealism. Media technology seems to be moving into an era where “playful” creation and interaction is facilitated by the nature of the technology, just as platonic idealism was facilitated by past technologies. However, at the last panel, someone pointed out that we should not denigrate this past technological parenthetical. Great works have been produced. The danger is to look at the post-parenthetical period as progress over or beyond the parenthesis. The new technologies should not be simply seen as better than the older ones, but as a new approach, appropriate for some uses, detrimental for others. Pettitt points out that different media forms entered into, and left, the parenthesis at different times. Poetry entered at an early time he says, while theater’s emphasis on performance had it enter later. It would be wrong to reify the new forms of media, but better to use them, and understand those uses to best apply them to cultural forms and generate the best results.

I just thought that was cool.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/media_in_transition_5_creativi.html

May be Play and Games relevent, may not be. But they are generally interesting nonetheless. I may post thoughts through the conference as I have ‘em….

Plenaries are:
Plenary Conversation 1

Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures
Lewis Hyde, Kenyon College
Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark
S. Craig Watkins, University of Texas
Moderator: David Thorburn, MIT
Friday, April 27
12:30-2:00

Plenary Conversation 2

Collaboration and Collective Intelligence
Mimi Ito, Annenberg Center for Communication
Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab
Trebor Scholz, SUNY Buffalo
Moderator: Thomas Malone, MIT
Friday, April 27
5:45-7:15

Plenary Conversation 3

Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons
Hal Abelson, MIT
Pat Aufderheide, American University
Wendy Gordon, Boston University
Gordon Quinn, Kartemquin Films
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

Plenary Conversation 4

Learning through Remixing
Erik Blankinship, Media Modifications
Juan Devis, KCET/PBS Los Angeles
Renee Hobbs, Temple University
Alice Robison, MIT
Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Mixed Magic Theater
Moderator: Henry Jenkins, MIT
Saturday, April 28
7:30-9:30

Plenary Conversation 5

Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art
Tony Cokes, Brown University
Andres Laracuente, artist
Michael Mittelman, ASPECT
Moderator: Bill Arning, List Visual Arts Center, MIT
Sunday, April 29
10:45 am-12:15 pm

Plenary Conversation 6

Summary Perspectives
Suzanne de Castell, Simon Fraser University
Fred Turner, Stanford
Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU
Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam
Moderator: Nick Montfort, University of Pennsylvania
Sunday, April 29
12:30-2

First a game, which I think is very interesting to look at in terms of all the readings we have had on Games, Narrative, and Rules. There are several games in the Eyemaze Grow series, this is a link to the basic one I find most interesting. Play it and see how things develop Grow Cube. To make things more interesting Narratively, check out Chronon which adds a time and story element to a similar basic game mechanic.

Second, on the subject of play, I’ve been drawn to the funny pictures at icanhascheezburger.com recently. Wonderful, stupid amusement, but it surprises me how well it fits into some of the classical ideas of play we’ve discussed. There are rules and requirements for the pictures submitted, there are common grammars and themes, and the website could itself be considered a ‘magic circle’ of sorts. But mainly I wanted to post up the site of funny pet pictures. I especially like the walrus ones. Find them under keyword “walrus” in the list on the right side of the page.

Here’s their list of their choices:
“Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).”

Now there are all sorts of things to talk about with this concept. The most hotly debated is what games should/should not have been on the list. Pong? Zelda? The authors (well, one of them, one who runs a video game blog) has defended some of the choices, saying that it wasn’t always the first game to do something that was chosen, but the first one which made an impact (i.e.:Wolfenstein 3D was really the first first-person shooter, but Doom was the first one to make a big splash and define the genre), but I think that debates about the content of the list will never end (Sensible World of Soccer? I’ve never even heard of that one!). But that is probably the least intersting (although possibly most fun) debate to have.

The real debate (or, at least one of them) is what good does such a video game ‘canon’ do for video game studies? In other disciplines (religion, literature, etc), a canon provides a set of authoritative texts which are considered most influential, and form the basis for all ‘valid’ studies in that discipline. Now, certainly, one of the goals of these scholars in creating this list is to give further validity to Video Game Studies as a Discipline in the academic institution. This gives an external value to such a list, a way of ‘dressing up’ Video Game Studies to be just like it’s big brothers. But is there any internal value to the discipline of having such a list, especially one with only 10 games on it?

I’m not so certain that there is. Games have a huge variety, and to limit the discussion in such a way would be harmful. There will always be comparisons made between games. Comparing newer versus older technology, open ended versus linear gameplay, and multiplayer versus singleplayer games are all comparisons that can be made. But do we need to establish a set of games which will form the core of game studies? I don’t even see how this could be done, in any real academic sense.

I think that calling it a canon is a mistake. Call it a list of important games, call it a list of cultural artifacts that need to be preserved, but trying to give it an academic label such as ‘canon’ will cause problems. Especially since it is not the NYTimes writer who called it such, but one of the creators of the list, although he was a game designer, not an academic.

What are better ways of creating a canon? Perhaps creating two, one of Narrative or genre based approaches (puzzle, adventure, fighting, etc), and one of ludic or gameplay approaches(first person, text based, linear, etc), and games could then be discussed as the intersection of various elements of each list. Then they could be compared to other games with such characteristics. The canon would be the elements (or units, to link with this weeks reading) that would be used for the discussion of the relationship between that game and other games, or other cultural elements.

However, you can’t get a genre recognised by the Library of Congress, so this approach doesn’t help with the legitimization function, which is probably what they were mostly concerned about.