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[…]of the writing and/or (college) teaching profession. Such discussions can address issues of working conditions, salaries, and job availability, issues that I, as part of the sub(if you will)-professional class of English studies in the university, find especially relevant. In the university, I am a Writing Associate laboring under one Director of Writing Assessment and one Writing Center Director. Both PhDs and both men. We (three women) Writing Associates have a “(.50 FTE), academic year assignment” with “a salary of $7,972.20 plus benefits” – reason enough to continue to seek full employment. Still, it’s the first time my family has […]
[…]what we see in most codework writing and art practices is less code per se than the language of code: codework that integrates elements of code into natural languages and brings code to the surface as a medium for literary, artistic, and experimental composition. The codework practice of “netwurker” Mez, which again involves the use of a made-up code language as a mode of artistic composition and everyday communication, is paradigmatic. An overview of Mez’s work can be found in her recent JavaMuseum solo show (February 2002), commemorating her nomination as “Java Artist of the Year 2001.” For a sample […]
[…]That Scott complicates these historiographical assumptions with a romantic nostalgia is well-trod critical territory, Elias notes, but what’s important for her argument is that in doing so, the historical romance summarizes and anticipates this tension within many postmodern novels. Whereas Scott had his sights set on the historical real but stumbled over romance, the postmodern metahistorical romance has its sights set on romance, but sometimes stumbles over the real. There are other issues at work in the book, and one of them is that postmodern writers are as influenced by contemporary historiography as Scott was by the historiography of his […]
[…]I believe to make of Ground Zero what they could. A photograph, a mark, a memory, a silence. A group of groups of which in many respects (certainly from the limited point of view of the terrorists) I am a part. Crowds passing under my window. Many from overseas. Yet mostly they are terrorist’s Americans I know alive or dead; still more really they have been, when they reach the ramp, more like Robert Frost’s people on the beach, who “cannot look out far…/ [and] cannot look in deep./ But when was that ever a bar / To any watch […]
[…]greatest gift, however: the published volume also comes packaged with a CD-ROM, which contains “working versions of some of the most important new media artifacts ever created…games, tools, digital art, and more — with selections of academic software, independent literary efforts, and home-computer era commercial software.” I had an opportunity to preview some of this material along with my advance copy of the Reader, and it is indeed an embarrassment of riches: Spacewar!, Weizenbaum’s Eliza, Will Crowther’s Adventure, Atari and Apple games (Karateka, anyone?), early hypertext including lost poems by William Dickey, an anatomy of Stuart Moulthrop’s “Forking Paths,” the […]
[…]So does the Web’s ability to draw into interaction communities from many different language groups, including groups whose languages have not been part of the standardization process but who nevertheless wish to use the network to speak in other registers. See Crystal, Language and the Internet. To some extent, then, what seems on the surface least political about the Web may be what is most important: providing raw bandwidth to those whose voices and languages have been pushed away by standardization. (However, the relative difficulty of sustaining broadcast media technologies in nonstandard languages such as low-power radio and television stations […]
[…]I. Schiller in the early seventies. Reflecting its origins, the department had a reputation for critical studies and support of free speech. The courses utilize texts such as Paolo Freire and Robert McChesney which emphasize the need for community empowerment and access to communications resources. Those very issues were to come home in late spring of 2000, as the department became embroiled in a struggle around freedom of speech that put to the test some of the theoretical concepts regularly featured in the midterm exams of undergrads and dissertation drafts of the graduate students. This struggle was over the Burn! […]
[…]Yes, it does, and it seems to me to explain why your work has been taken up particularly by critical studies of technoscience, people who are working in English, or rhetoric, or cultural studies. D Or performance art. L Performance art, exactly. D Yeah, I get taken up much more by artists in the broad sense, who often get what I’m doing both critically and in terms of more life-affirming stuff, not that criticism isn’t life-affirming, but that it isn’t the whole story. I get much more taken up by artists in that double way than I […]
[…]faculty intellectual property rights in “the coming battle.” Few people seriously engaged in critical information studies would necessarily jump to the conclusion that defense of faculty IP rights can serve as a core strategy for combating informationalism, This is not to suggest that there aren’t circumstances where the notion of intellectual property rights, as in the struggle to resist the exploitation of indigenous knowledges, can’t be mobilized with great tactical effectiveness (Coombs). but the real issue is the sudden swiftness with which Noble’s informatic struggle seems to have opened and closed. If academic informationalization isn’t just another Hundred Days’ War, […]
[…]we have learned from the Frankfurt School how devastating the culture industry is for working class and other democratizing movements, it behooves us to understand the potentials of the technology, to learn how they may be deployed in constructing cultural forms more appropriate to a democratic lifeworld, and not to become obsessed with every outrage perpetrated by the ruling class. Such an attitude of creative appropriation is encouraged by the discourse of cultural studies and by countless artists and creators across the globe. Certainly cultural critics need to attend to the moves of the establishment, but we must equally be […]
[…]expectations, however, are insurmountable obstacles in changing the nature of online learning. Working in new registers of medium-scale, team production or large-scale, corporate production undoubtedly can transform the current understandings of job control, working conditions, and career development shared by many academics toiling away in contemporary research universities. The development of disciplinary-software systems, such as Mathematica, Web CT, and Blackboard Course Info are leading to a curricular economy that is no longer one tied to handicraft work. Instead, these corporate innovations suggest that distance and distributed learning will become embedded in more factory-like, industrial organizations, involving integrated teams of labor, […]
[…]can act to change the world – the question of agency. Employing theories from both cultural studies and media studies, we problematize the mass media’s role in the ideological side of social control and investigate possibilities for resistance. Students study the media’s techniques of persuasion and manipulation, as well as activist attempts to use the media’s own conventions (such as those in advertising) for subversive ends. Course assignments build upon one another throughout the semester and all assignments contribute elements to the creation of the final project hypertexts. The course is structured so that we address its two threads – […]
[…]what we know as the discipline specialist, prefaced here by the parenthetical but increasingly critical prefix, multi. Without going into too much detail here, I want to suggest that the role of the unidisciplinary specialist is in many ways uniquely tied to print culture and thus imperiled in this `late age of print'” (120). The fan site is the first new form of scholarship to appear on the Web and provides us with a guide for how to transform our students into active researchers. The fan occupies a marginal position in popular culture and is often represented as a socially […]
[…]in the U.S. and abroad. Forming the FRE grew out of dissatisfaction with the old “reading group” approach to collaboration. I had always participated in one reading group or another, organized around theory. The practice is familiar: an interdisciplinary group of scholars would agree on a list of books, usually works of French theory, and we would meet regularly to discuss and argue. I learned a great deal from these sessions, and if anything they died of their own success, in that the groups tended to become too large. The chief source of dissatisfaction, however, was the homogeneity of the […]
[…]would be delighted to see the manifesto on the World-Wide-Web and to go ahead and mark it up (i.e. code it for hypertextual interplay). He probably regrets ever having sent me that message and agreeing to do it, because now, as Alt-X’s site manager, he helps me encode and design an average of 300k worth of new data (not including images) every month! By the Fall of 1994 things were moving very fast in the global vaporware market (otherwise known as the new media industry), and this caused some real critical reflection on my part. Being digitally-networked seemed to provide […]
[…]“are two important ways of being public…but what I want to call for is a practice of cultural studies that articulates the theoretical and critical work of the so-called public intellectual to the movements of public policy” (12). Bérubé is right to criticize “cultural studies theorists of the left [who] often express outright disdain for the policy implications of their work” (11), and to locate the source of this disdain in our tendency to value most in our intellectual work and indeed in ourselves whatever we assume is so unconventional, transgressive, or “cutting edge” that it can be used to […]
[…](in general, i mean), i think he does an excellent job in his article of demonstrating why english studies has become anguish studies, and what english faculty might do about it – that is, how to act without repression, and with a sense of solidarity… but what happened next was, in retrospect, to be expected… ———– Subject: Re: Poetry and the Academy i really do think that the alternatives are not simply the “professional” as currently construed over and against the “hobbyist”… and although one may locate oneself outside of academe per se (thankfully) the reality is that academe per […]
[…]Marie-Laure. “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media” in Game Studies, volume 1, issue 1, July 2001, http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/ Simon, Herbert. “Literary Criticism, A Cognitive Approach,” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, volume 4, issue 1: “Bridging the Gap,” Updated 8 April 1995, online at http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/simon1.html Trippi, Laura. “Networked Narrative Environments,” Oct. 2003. […]
[…]they probably do not see the same outcome for this struggle. Indeed they should not, if game studies have any critical value. Do Not Immerse Murray’s approach to new media seems both culturally and technically conservative; for some indeed this may be its main virtue. Like the design theorists she most admires, Laurel and her mentor Donald Norman, Murray assumes that new media should provide highly efficient, minimally obtrusive tools. She seems to agree with Norman that the best computer is an invisible computer, at least where narrative is concerned: Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness […]
[…]Tom Ray’s Tierra attained early notoriety. Around the same time, some robotics researchers were working with emergent paradigms of robot behavior; many of these were grouped around Luc Steels in Belgium and Rodney Brooks at MIT. Since the late 1980s, the notion of semi-autonomous software entities has proven a rich catalyst for experimentation in both the fine and the applied ends of the electronic arts. In recent years, complex autonomous entities called agents have been a subject of much excitement, and subgenres of research such as “socially intelligent agents” have arisen. In my presentation at one such gathering, the 1997 […]
[…]and evaluation, which includes the explicit and implicit goals of the project creating it, the group dynamics of that project, and the sources of funding that both facilitate and circumscribe the directions in which the project can be taken. An agent’s construction is not limited to the lines of code that form its program but involves a whole social network, which must be analyzed in order to get a complete picture of what that agent is, without which agents cannot be meaningfully judged. 2. An agent’s design should focus, not on the agent itself, but on the dynamics of that […]
[…]machine, simulated on the reader’s computer, which the reader must learn to operate and decode. All three approaches received substantial critical applause, a lasting following, and (perhaps most importantly) have inspired numbers of subsequent hypertext artists. Joyce’s lyrical hypertextuality finds recent echoes, for example, in Chapman’s (2001) Turning In, Strickland’s (1998) True North, as well as Arnold and Derby’s (1999) Kokura. Moulthrop’s hyperbaton is key to Coverly’s (2000) Califia, Cramer’s (1993) “In Small & Large Pieces,” Eisen’s (2001) “What Fits,” and Amerika’s (1997) Grammatron. McDaid’s artifactual approach, dormant for some years, finds recent expression in Bly’s We Descend, Malloy and […]
[…]Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1, no.1 (July 2001). http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen. Frasca, Gonzalo (1999). “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences between (Video) Games and Narrative.” http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins (1994). “Nintendo and New World Narrative.” In Communications in Cyberspace, edited by Steve Jones. New York: Sage. Gunning, Tom (1990). “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute. Jenkins, Henry (1991). What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press. […]
[…]from the urban ghettoes, Rose’s study was one of the first, and still probably the best, critical studies of rap. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction. New York: Ungar, l988. Zorn. John. “John Zorn on his Music” [Liner notes]. Spillane. Electra/Nonesuch, 1987. ____________. The Big Gundown: John Zorn plays the music of Ennio Morricone. Icon Records (Electra/Nonesuch), 1976. Lester BOWIE. I borrowed the term “avant-pop” from the title of a 1986 album by Lester Bowie, the great jazz trumpet player and composer best known for his work with the wildly inventive Art Ensemble of Chicago. Listening to the […]
[…]kind, with constant interruptions, embedded interfaces requiring attention, requests for response, codes to remember, and the constant need to back up and track versions of the document being read, composed, or read-as-composed. The electronic disturbance is creatively disruptive, to be sure, but not in the way that literature is disruptive. Writers seeking to break from established forms and hierarchies have always, it is true, worked against the “line” of print. In postmodern fiction nonlinearity (of plot, design, and sentence construction) has been the rule rather than the exception, as Conte points out (following George P. Landow in Hypertext 2.0: The […]
[…]Current political analyses of digital being cannot even figure out how to apply existing criminal codes to Internet MUDs, or intellectual property laws to ordinary software piracy. Historical awareness of digital beings, even if one adopts the omnipresent pose of De Landa’s robot historian, clearly pales next to their anonymous proliferation in the workings of informational society. Perhaps some future historical preservationists will unpack the hard drives of old PCs to chronicle the doings of digital beings as telecommuting, cybersexed, hyperreal-estated lifeforms. Perhaps they will work to save the codes of some major personage’s PDA as his or her biotronic […]
[…]lays out all the textual loops for the bit-player to click through in advance. To fabricate a critical ecology in the context of hypertext writing, one seeks to maintain a certain duplicitious relation to the medium. On the one hand, one manufactures the critical ecology according to some of the rules of the hypertext game. (It is especially necessary to simulate the medium when the text is appearing on the Net, of course.) On the other hand, the critical ecology comes designed with an infrastructure that enables it to play itself out of some of the hypertext game’s constrictions. The […]
[…]critical technical practices: it entails having one foot in an AI Lab and the other in science studies or cultural studies. I.e., the other foot needs to be in an area that can give one perspective on the limits of what one is doing back at the lab. Perhaps, following Noah (Wardrip-Fruin and Moss, 2002), one needs three feet to participate in a critical technical practice. That may be the case, but my point is simply that those of us who right now call what we do a critical technical practice have all, at one time or another, found our […]
[…]translates the universal flashing LED, the lingua franca of the peizo electric squeal, the date code, the bar code, the telephone ringer adapter that translates that familiar ring, the tingling insistent trill of an incoming call, into “a well-known phrase of music”Patent #5014301 (May 7, 1991). (an approach that has since become popular in cell phones, where this function is useful in differentiating whose phone is ringing), or the unrelated patent that translates the caller identification signal into a vocal announcement. Within the translators there are distinct attitudes; for instance, the impassive reporting, almost a “voice of nature.” This is […]
[…]studies over the last two decades. Originally from Mumbai, India and today living and working as a professor of Women’s Studies at Hamilton College in the United States, Mohanty has added much to the debates on feminist epistemology and the politics of location. I enjoyed re-reading many of these texts, and their collection in a single volume is highly illustrative of the contribution and the challenges Mohanty has made to cross-cultural feminist scholarship. The arguments in these texts will be familiar to many feminist researchers, whether they are re-reading them or encountering them for the first time. Indeed, at times […]
[…]Theory and Cultural Forms. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Critical Art Ensemble. http://www.critical-art.net/ Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund. http://www.caedefensefund.org/ Cassel, David. “Hacktivism in the Cyberstreets.” AlterNet. 30 May 2000. 16 June 04. http://www.alternet.org/story/9223 Griffis, Ryan. “Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3, interview with subRosa.” YOUgenics. 2003. 16 June 04. http://yougenics.net/subRosaInt.htm Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. [1985] 149-181. Harmon, Amy. “`Hacktivists’ of All Persuasions Take Their Struggle to the Web.” New York Times on the Web. 31 Oct 1998. 16 June 04. http://www.thehacktivist.com/archive/news/1998/Hacktivists-NYTimes-1998.pdf Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: […]
[…]and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. de Lauretis, Teresa. Ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Derwin, Susan. The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Docherty, Thomas. After Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Frye, Joanne, S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Geniwate. “Language Rules.” Electronic Book Review. 28 Jan. 2005, 3 March 2005. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, […]
[…]viruses, spyware, or other threats. By comparison, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is closed-code. Only Windows employees are allowed to see the code that makes the browser work and as such only a limited number of individuals are able to make improvements to the code. While one might think that the open-source Firefox is more vulnerable to attack than Explorer (because hackers have access to the code), this study by Brian Livingston on the website TechRepublic demonstrates the speed with which Firefox is able to respond to perceived threats as opposed to the glacial pace that Microsoft addresses security flaws in a […]
[…]and external (the marketing), might just as well be found in a larger subset of bibliographic codes (copyright notices, author photos, margin size, etc.), since blurbs, of course, migrate craftily onto covers, and, in certain trade paperbacks, to the inside leaves. Let us now jump quickly from “blurb” to “font,” another impossible nexus place of crass intention and pure meaning. The word ‘font’ derives from the Middle French fonte (think: fondue): a melting together in both the casting of type and the smelting of external occurrence with internal transmission. In the space of the “font,” the real and the unreal […]
[…]and critical practices; as such, both books add to the on-going conversations in American Studies and American literary studies. Along with recent scholarship such as Brent Hayes Edwards’ Practicing Diaspora, Penny Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World, and Scott Saul’s Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Soto and Martinez’s books confront the centrality of ethnic and racial experiences to the narratives that make up American identity. Rather than erasing those experiences, they examine the crucial role that race and ethnicity play in our understanding of the Lost and Beat generations and thus the role that both play in our cultural identities. […]
[…]stuck in an inextricable web of intrigues, whereby he apparently becomes the plaything of radical groups both on the left and the right who, in the apparent knowledge that he is a fake spy, try to scapegoat and even eliminate him to equalize their mutual debts (or is all this a pathetic joke of his Paris friends?). His life as a double agent, his supposed grand scheme which was going to dispel the idea that he was working for the CIA by paradoxically exposing his intelligence activities, eventually entirely robs him of the possibility of individual agency. “My game had […]
[…]retrieve a realist attitude”: To retrieve a realist attitude, it is not enough to dismantle critical weapons so uncritically built up by our predecessors as we would obsolete but still dangerous atomic silos. If we had to dismantle social theory only, it would be a rather simple affair; like the Soviet Empire, those big totalities have feet of clay. But the difficulty lies in the fact that they are built on top of a much older philosophy, so that whenever we try to replace matters of fact by matters of concern, we seem to lose something along the way. It […]
[…]to enable U to see what she sees, and vice versa. Craig Saper, in The Two Ulmers in e-Media Studies: Vehicle and Driver, ingeniously interprets Ulmer as an object of study, as both a vehicle and driver of signification. Ultimately Saper’s goal is to offer a critical approach to understanding Ulmer’s work, particularly in relation to its historical development. How he does this is an act of invention that adapts Ulmer’s peripatetic ‘philosophy over lunch’ motif (also glimpsed in Jon McKenzie’s piece) as a way of analyzing Ulmer as Ulmer analyzes his subject matter. Written in the style of a […]
[…]files. I spent my year as a Creative Writing student assembling infinite hypertext networks of critical theory quotes in which nearly every word was “hotlinked,” as we said back then. SCULD: [n] Goddess of fate: Future. See also: Norn. My education in theory, then, was classical, acquired by a word-for-word transcribing of “the masters” from print to screen. Longinus himself would have approved of this method, which also describes how I learned HTML, “stealing” code from the web pages of others. This writer shows us, if only we were willing to pay him heed, that another way (beyond anything we […]
[…]transposition that views literature itself as history – the position of contemporary cultural studies, which is committed to the demolition of such “obsolete” categories as poetic autonomy, poetic truth, and formal and rhetorical value. (9) Whether or not one agrees with Perloff’s representation of cultural studies, her arguments for treating poetry (in the largest sense of the term) as itself worthy of close study on its own terms, of practicing what she calls poetics, are interesting and valuable. By pointing to examples of the kind of criticism she admires (some of the early studies of Ulysses, The Pound Era, for […]
[…]again to her main quarrel with a book she “admire[s] very much”: her claim that composition studies has tilled Graff’s field. However, instead of regretting the neglect of “the extensive body of contemporary work in composition studies on the social construction of knowledge” (Bizzell 322), I wish a spirit of generous collegiality rather than petty turf wars could govern critical readings of our colleagues’ scholarly endeavors. Bizzell could have focused on the wide range of scholars and bodies of research Graff does not neglect such as Robert Scholes, David Damrosh, Howard Gardner, Mike Rose, Joseph Harris, Deborah Meier, Kurt Spellmeyer, […]
[…]and pre-Kantian and post-Kantian. Which parts of these structures are which? What those of us working in the humanities might learn from contemporary scientific disciplines is that knowledge can be collaborative even when a chemist works by himself in his laboratory, or when a philosopher reflects on the problem of time, if, after one has reflected, one assumes the responsibility of communicating what one has observed. It is sometimes necessary to introduce new terms, to employ figurative language, and to write in a way that is not immediately completely comprehensible to readers of any and all backgrounds. Readers must therefore […]
[…]from his theory-building project in Cybertext, as well as the important contributions to our critical discourse from the textual studies of Jerome McGann and Matt Kirschenbaum. For a compelling argument on the value of textual studies to the criticism of electronic literature, see Kirschenbaum’s “Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of.” To some extent, Hayles’ command of the fields of cybernetics and information science, which she brings to bear with such panache in her critical writing, has also steered our focus toward pragmatic concerns, despite Hayles’ repeated plea that we strive for balance. To give requisite […]
[…]emergent structure, but still everybody can propose tags and groups, decide on the openness of the group, and, in the open groups, join and post what they wish. Nonetheless, the open folksonomic taxonomy potentially leads to heterogeneous collections and impossible classifications like Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, which opens Foucault’s The Order of Things – classifications that are not ordered with stable relations and categories . As in language, semantics, and culture, the categories and their relations are dynamic, emergent, and created by context, contiguity and poetic plays on words, as well as on hierarchy, similarity, and the preconceived, lexical meaning of […]
[…]– an intuitive grasp of algorithmic operations; to watch Giselle Beiguelman’s “Code Movie 1” is to begin to appreciate code as it operates in the construction of digital meaning; to engage the playable space of Donna Leishman’s “Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw” is to start to grasp the weird, uneven transitions between sovereign, disciplinary, and control societies and the mutating subject positions available to the players within them. “History,” Wark suggests, “is the virtual made actual, one hack after another” (009). What seems to matter most to the poets and programmers who constructed the Electronic Literature Collection‘s thinkertoys and […]
[…]the media artifacts they study as a black box, losing the crucial relationship between authorship, code, and audience reception. Code is a kind of writing; just as literary scholars wouldn’t dream of reading only translated glosses of work, never reading the full work in its original language, so new media scholars must read code, not just at the simple level of primitive operations and control flow, but at the level of the procedural rhetoric, aesthetics and poetics encoded in a work. New media practitioners without procedural literacy are confined to producing those interactive systems that happen to be possible to […]
[…]modes of play are not always part of a D&D session, such play is undertaken at times, and some groups of players value making decisions that are “in character” even more than they do successful progress through a story, environment, or series of puzzles. A single character is typically played over the course of many adventures, and the players typically have some freedom to define their character’s traits, although randomly determined abilities provide a basic idea of what the character is like. Also, a player character’s relationship to other characters in the party is quite important. Similar sorts of play […]
[…]and John Tynes; Pagan Publishing. 1997. Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson; Tactical Studies Rules. 1974. Empire of the Petal Throne. M. A. R. Barker; Tactical Studies Rules. 1975. Kuma\War. Kuma Reality Games. 2004. Max Payne. Remedy Entertainment. 2001. Millennium’s End. Charles Ryan; Chameleon Eclectic Entertainment. 1993. Oregon Trail. Paul Dillenberger, Bill Heinemann and Don Rawitsch; Carleton College. 1971. Power Kill. John Tynes; Hogshead Publishing. 1999. Unknown Armies. Greg Stolze and John Tynes; Atlas Games. 2002. Unreal. Epic Games. 1998. Waco Resurrection. Mark Allen, Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Jessica Hutchins, Eddo Stern, and Michael Wilson; C-Level. […]
[…]out of sight while the players attract the limelight. This off-stage design team is composed of a group of shadowy, often anonymous figures working behind the scenes as the writers, programmers, directors, and stage managers of the live gameplay. They are the first real-time digital game designers, and they are called the puppet masters. The Rise of the Puppet Master If you’re the puppet masters, what does that make the players? Your little puppets? – Anonymous audience member at the Game Developers Conference lecture, “I Love Bees: A Case Study” (McGonigal 2005) This essay is a response to two sets […]
On December 16, 2003, popular Web magazine Slate published an article by journalist and author Steven Johnson (2003). Reviewing simulation games that engage problems of social organization, Johnson posed a question: “The [2004] U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it’s still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?” Upon reading this article, we smiled at its perfect timing: at that very moment we were developing The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Former Vermont […]