Readings, 8/2/07

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What if, instead of trying to reconcile all video games with one monolithic set of laws for design and reception, we admitted that video games have many possible goals and purposes, which couple with many possible aesthetics and designs to create many possible player experiences, none of which bears any necessary relationship to the commercial video game industry as we currently know it. ...

I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media. - Ian Bogost, "How I Stopped Worrying About Gamers and Started Loving People Who Play Games" [Gamasutra]

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The only way to support the view that Exile [on Main Street] is best listened to as an album, in other words, is to dismiss the actual preferences of most of the people who like the Rolling Stones. Carr sets about this task with gusto:

Who would unbundle Exile on Main Street or Blonde on Blonde or Tonight’s the Night - or, for that matter, Dirty Mind or Youth and Young Manhood or (Come On Feel the) Illinoise? Only a fool would.

Only a fool. If you are one of those people who has, say, "Happy" on your iPod (as I do), then you are a fool (though you have lots of company). And of course this foolishness extends to the recording industry, and to the Stones themselves, who went and put "Tumbling Dice" on a Greatest Hits collection. (One can only imagine how Carr feels about Greatest Hits collections.) - Clay Shirky, "New Freedom Destroys Old Culture" [Many 2 Many]

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The onslaught of recalled toys and food originating from China continues with yesterday's recall of nearly one million Fisher-Price Toys sold between April and July 2007, due to lead paint. ... When looking at the sea of toys, one thought pounded in my head: I would never have bought any of these products for my daughter.

• Elmo's head on a toy power drill
• Elmo and Cookie Monster on a shape sorter
• Elmo's face on a 6-key musical keyboard
• Cookie Monster on a toy saxophone

What does Cookie Monster have to do with sax music? When we buy out-of-context licensed characters we are following a marketer's agenda for our children. - AJ, "Elmo's Head: An Analysis of Recalled Fisher-Price Toys" [Thingamababy]

Happy Fair Use Day

Incidentally, today is Fair Use Day, which I have nothing interesting to say about. Just to be a jerk about it, I will point out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation doesn't know a good soapbox from a bad one - give them one, however rickety, and they'll stand on it and start crowing.

"Disrespectful, shameful, and outrageous" indeed - I disagree with the broader position on copyright that Web Sheriff and the labels employing the company represent as much as anyone at the EFF, but what von Lohmann castigates Web Sheriff for is simply a company trying to be more personable in enforcing an unpopular law with some small measure of sensitivity. The post, and the argument, is a credibility-squanderer - unless, of course, you are another of those people already so blind to opposing views on the issue that the mere whiff of blood will get you thrashing around.

Five Questions TV Turnoff Week Does Not Answer

Today marks the start of the official week dedicated to celebrating our national pastime by exhorting each other to abstain from one of life's great joys. Yes, it's TV Turnoff Week. Eat your heart out, Marshall McLuhan.

I love the original and modest goal of TV Turnoff Week: Be aware of how much TV children are watching, and limit it. Whatever else TV may or may not do to developing brains, social skills, or worldviews, watching seven hours of TV a day is guaranteed to make a child as fat and gullible as a Christmas hen.

But TV Turnoff Week is undergoing an identity crisis.

First, there was the change in the organization's mission to address all issues of "screen time," encompassing video games and all time spent online while acting as though this introduced no new issues, no alternative set of pros and cons. Then activists adopted TV Turnoff Week as a rallying cry against corporate culture and state-licensed brainwashing.

The end results have been damaging to both parties.

TV Turnoff Week, as mundane and invaluable a call to sensible parenting as the food pyramid or early dental checkups, was radicalized against its will, losing precious ground in a battle that never needed to be turned into a class war.

Meanwhile, the anti-corporate message that animates much of the cultural far left gets a yearly drubbing while attempting to bully the general public into making a pointless and symbolic gesture that does not reflect most TV-watchers' beliefs about the world. The general public is quick to appreciate the fact that anyone preaching to them about the benefits of living TV-free were asking them to do something they themselves could not relate to: giving up something they value and then getting it back, fully intact, a week later. It's nonsense, and what is true about the message - that TV will turn you into a consumer zombie if you don't manage it wisely - which is true! - is completely missed.

I'm tired of the passion play. TV is here to stay, and it ain't all bad. Here are five ways that the ethos of TV Turnoff Week does not reflect the complex relationships we have with our "screen time."

1. John, a young parent, meets several fellow toddler dads at a bar. They all watched the season finale of their favorite reality television show the night before, which they enjoy mocking but simply couldn't stop watching. Most of them got interested in the show because one of the contestants was a friend of a friend who has been blogging about the show since she got kicked off early on. In addition to swapping a few recent parenting stories, John and his friends discuss the ramifications of the show's final challenge, how the contestants responded to the pressure, and what the blogger thought about it. Can television inform, harness, or even boost social engagement, or only diminish and impoverish it?
2. College freshman Sam begins attending a friend's "Lost" viewing parties midway through the season, and started reading a lot of online commentary to help catch up with all of the plot strands. His girlfriend, who has a night job and doesn't watch much TV, mentions that she always thought that show looked interesting, and Sam ends up renting the first season on DVD and watching the entire thing with her in a marathon weekend. The next week, Sam has plenty of theories of his own to share with others at the party. No one wants to hear them, so he decides to start his own blog about open-ended mysteries, starts pirating "Twin Peaks" episodes from a bittorrent client, and shells out cold, hard cash for Umberto Eco's "The Open Work," which he loans to three people in six months. Can television engage and stimulate our intelligence, or only deaden or distract it?
3. Sixteen-year-old Vivian gets a digital video camera for Christmas and starts creating short video sketches with her friends and posting them on YouTube. Other kids at her high school see them and think they're pretty funny, and they end up getting written about in the school paper. Before long, other kids at school are making their own response videos. A group of black students publishes a video that highlights what they see as their ostracization from school life, which surprises Vivian, who thought that the black kids at her school didn't want to have anything to do with the white majority. Other students follow up with videos that are deliberately offensive and intend only to heighten conflict, and the principal decides to ban YouTube access from school computers. A programmer at the local cable access channel hears about the situation and invites students to organize a variety show, which could draw from the already-produced videos and be only lightly censored for television. "Why?" Vivian asks. "People can just watch them online." Who here needs to brush up on their media literacy? Who speaks the language of television - and how did they learn it?
4. Eight-year-old Anna doesn't have much time for TV - she's too busy playing video games. Sometimes kids from her neighborhood come over to play on her Wii, which a lot of other neighborhood parents can't afford. Other times she plays live multiplayer games on her computer, working to slay virtual dragons, solve mental puzzles, and share information with other players to develop the talents of her virtual persona. She did start watching one show last year because her friends started talking about how there were parts of the show you could only learn about online, but she found the format too restrictive and quickly abandoned the PR vehicle for more open-ended games. Is "screen-time" really equivalent to TV-watching time, as TV Turnoff Week's campaigns in recent years have suggested, or is there something fundamental that is changing about the way visual media impacts children?
5. Seventy-four-year-old embittered former faith healer Frank used to sit and feed pigeons all day in the courtyard of his nursing home. Once a passionate birdwatcher, he spent years in his retirement community with his hobby sustained only by the the incessantly-chirping finches his son misguidedly gave him for his birthday, which Frank has devotedly worked to slowly poison with negative mental effluence and cold, hard stares. But a few weeks ago his son brought over a computer, and Frank discovered an interactive and competitive birdwatching site which invites viewers to help identify birds in San Francisco's Sutro Forest. Frank is rapidly climbing through the ranks and fantasizes about the day he will surpass the point total of Morgan, the site's top contributor, at which point Morgan will collapse and die of shame. How do personal values impact the relative importance and resonance of TV for individuals?
   

I'm currently finishing this post while watching the new episode of "The Riches," one of the best dramas I have yet seen on cable television. Eddie Izzard's confident slur is a small revelation. Half an hour ago I was debating with my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter about whether we should listen to a CD storyteller recount the story of the "Three Little Pigs" or read a fairy tale from the copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales I just dug out of a box of books we've been saving. On nights when we read stories involving complex machines or unusual animals, we might take a quick break to look up images on Google to see what something looks like, or search for a video on YouTube to show her how something works. In a world where Americans struggle to silence their TVs for a week to justify their year's worth of regular TV-viewing habits, there may seem to be a disconnect here. But not in mine.

Tomorrow, the TV you should be turning off. Plus a first - a Think In Pictures product giveaway. Stay tuned!

Joshua Gibson On Susan Sontag, Annie Liebowitz, and Camille Paglia

Joshua Gibson at Fagistan posted a great piece yesterday about Camille Paglia's ongoing war on Susan Sontag. Here's an excerpt to entice you:

Paglia has a well-known problem with Sontag, though it's one that, even after reading "Sontag, Bloody Sontag", I've never really been able to understand. Paglia hypes herself as one of "Sontag's most outspoken critics" based, almost solely, on that one essay. The essay doesn't really make any particular intellectual charge against Sontag, but instead focuses on how Paglia invited Sontag to give a lecture at Bennington College. Sontag was late and then had the audacity to read a new short story rather than deliver a grand cultural lecture. She was also mean to Camille. This "outspoken criticism" is nothing more than girlish humiliation and resentment and hardly worthy of a serious intellectual attacking another serious intellectual.

It gets even better. And then better still. Read it here.

An Open Apology to the Late Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut photo by Zach Fine.
Copyright the University of Washington Daily.

Listen: You died yesterday after falling weeks ago. You were one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I miss you already. And I'm sorry.

I interviewed you almost 12 years ago, when I was in college, and got to follow you around for a day while you met with people on campus. You were 73 then. I was 19. The university's student activities committee paid you $10,000 to come speak; it was practically their whole budget for the year. I wrote a long profile to advance the event, assuming as so many college journalists do that whatever they have just discovered is news and that they have to bring everyone else up to speed on it. I don't recommend rereading the whole thing, but here's a good excerpt:

What he learned, of course, is that public support doesn't have much to do with American foreign policy. It's a nice thing to have, but our leaders can get along without it. And it really would be ridiculous for any writer to expect that a well-crafted novel could actually change their priorities.

So Vonnegut has a different goal: to catch young people before they become corporate leaders and politicians and, as he puts it, to "poison their minds with humanity."

Take this opportunity to be poisoned. There are few authors, dead or alive, whose work so skillfully marries criticism and compassion, who have so comfortably combined intelligent ideas and a lucid style, and even fewer who have written as seriously and as humorously at the same time.

I meant it then, and still do. You are still one of my favorite writers. More importantly, you influenced which writers would become my other favorites - Thomas Hardy, Donald Barthelme, Laurence Sterne, Saul Bellow. I can trace my appreciation for many of them back to my reading and re-reading of your books.

When you came to campus you let me follow you around for the day. You met with a graduate-level creative writing class which was absolutely in awe of you, and you gave them truly devastating career advice, which was basically that the market for new fiction was total shit and that they should really consider another field. It was hard for them to hear.

Then I got to interview you, which was a disaster. I had a new tape recorder and a tiny directional mic and I was too timid to ask you to wear it, so I put it on the table between us in your hotel room and it picked up maybe 10% of our interview, which the paper had heavily hyped on my behalf. I was also incredibly nervous, and you responded to all my overwrought questions with canned responses I had read years ago in his book of essays Palm Sunday, down to the word. You were quoting yourself.

After you left I promised I'd send you the pieces I wrote about you. I sent you the profile I had written before the event and you sent me a letter typed on a typewriter, which I still have, in an envelope on which you had typed my name and address.

Here's what I never told you. It probably isn't a big deal to you, but it has bothered me.

I published what I could salvage of the interview. I also wrote a follow-up feature based on my day with you, which it was very hard to write and to publish. I liked you a lot and am one of the many tremendously grateful fans of your work, and I hated saying what I believed was true about you. What I believed was this: That as a cultural figure your work was already finished, your voice had lost much of its relevance, and that young writers should not let you dampen their spirits. I counted myself among them, as I was writing fiction at the time and had spoken of "growing up" to be a novelist since I could remember, although I didn't tell you that. Wherever you are now, I'm sure you have Internet access. You can read the interview and the profile online if you want.

I considered you a friend even though we only had that one encounter. You were kind to me and very thoughtful to send the letter.

When I heard years later that you had been injured in a fire in your apartment and were in the hospital, I felt a wave of relief that you were still alive, and thought about sending you a letter. But I assumed you would not remember me, and I didn't send one.

I now realize that it was cowardly for me not to send you the commentary I wrote after your visit, as I said I would. At the time it felt self-important to assume you would want to hear a 19-year-old's criticism, but I have since learned that humility is often a mask for other, more selfish concerns. (I think that's in one of your books, too.) You had the right to see it and to react to it if you wished to do so.

So I'm sorry, Kurt Vonnegut, that I never sent you the piece, which I still think is true, although you did say some interesting and very brave things about terrorism in an interview a few years ago. I'm also sorry I didn't at least send you a card when you cheated death in 2000. I'm sure a lot of other people did. But I should have.

More than anything, though, your death for me raises the spectre of a much more intimate relationship that ended very badly several years ago, with a truly disturbed mentor and friend's attempt on my life. He may already be dead, although I can find no word of it online. He is half a world away and I am not sure if I will ever have the chance to make amends.

You would have liked him, and my stories about him. He'd be 75 now - about the same age you were when I interviewed you. He is depressed, as you were, and angry, and confused. He is the person who taught me that we do not necessarily grow wiser as we grow older, and that this is not always our fault. I'll tell you his story sometime.

An Open Letter To John Sinno

Our favorite gadfly Joshua Gibson is back, this time with a few choice words for John Sinno, who sent an open letter to the Academy Awards committee to protest the portrayal of documentaries at this year's Oscars. TiP discussed Sinno's letter last week, which was published online in Art Threat.
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Dear John,

Every year we get treated to at least one wounded nominee bemoaning their treatment at the Oscars. Last year, we got E. Annie Proulx's mean-spirited attack on Crash, which she calls "Trash," in defense of her own idiotic, bland Brokeback Mountain. Now it's the documentary's turn, with you as its standard-bearer.

Listen, John, the Academy is not designed to award documentaries. The standards are so different, so difficult to understand, that it's difficult to call documentaries "art" at all, and handing out awards for them in the same ceremony with narrative films is troublesome at best.

While your concerns about "independent" documentaries are worthwhile, it's difficult to sympathize. Why should documentaries be held to a different standard than narrative films if they wish to play the same Awards field? And besides, documentaries produced by Spielberg and directed by Michael Moore have won the award in recent years, making it difficult to see how small films benefit from the current system in any event.

The Oscars are, in essence, a commercial enterprise. To argue against that is futile. Just be happy your film made it at all!

As for Seinfeld, the mocking of the awards and the nominees is hardly a new tactic and hardly one worth crying in one's milk over. Will Ferrell was more or less explicitly mocking a whole range of actors (from Sean Penn to Meryl Streep to Daniel Day-Lewis) who portray the mentally and physically challenged in his song about having sex with Helen Mirren. I didn't see Javier Bardem writing any open letters about the inherent dignity of his work being sullied by Ferrell's mockery.

If anything, documentary filmmakers should be happy their work is now seen as worthy of mockery by high-profile presenters and proud that the Academy now believes documentaries have the ability to compete on a commercial stage 75% larger.

It's hard to be taken seriously when you spend so much time taking the Oscars seriously, Mr. Sinno.

Too Much Information For InfoWorld: Ephriam Schwartz Roams The Foothills of User-Generated Content

Elitism has its place, and there are services which user-generated content just won't provide what centralized expertise can. That said, however, a recent InfoWorld article Troy Worman's Orbit Now pointed to recently is just embarassing.

The end reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Barcelona:

Ted: Maybe you'd like an analogy. Well, take... take these ants. In the U.S. view, a small group, or cadre, of fierce red ants have taken power and are oppressing the black ant majority. Now the stated U.S. policy is to aid those black ants opposing the red ants in hopes of restoring democracy, and to impede the red ants from assisting their red ant comrades in neighboring ant colonies.
Ramon: That is clearly the most disgusting description of U.S. policy I have ever heard. The Third World is just a lot of ants to you.
Jurgen: Those are people dying, not ants!
Ted: No, I... I don't think you understand. I was reducing everything to ant scale, the... the U.S. included. An ant White House, an ant CIA, an ant Congress, an ant Pentagon...
Ramon: Secret ant landing strips, illegally established on foreign soil.
Fred: Where are the red ants?
Ted: [pointing to an ant hill] There.
[Fred crushes the ants]

What Ephraim Schwartz is missing here is that users visiting such sites like Helium may show up to be heard, but they stay to discuss. Is the value of that act to those individuals really up for debate? Talk about the Ugly American. How does John Udell put up with this man?

Many of the privileges which uniquely positioned the reporter - access to specialized information, topical knowledge, independence from the subjects of their review - have been eroded away by new technologies for the past thirty years. The Internet blew the lid off it, and the Web 2.0 sealed the deal. The question is not whether any control over content should be handed over to users; it's how to hand it over in the context of a toolset that users can use to develop great information resources. Helium probably isn't it. But Swivel, Yahoo Pipes, Coghead, and other companies are rolling out new ideas for how to harness the power - even the intelligence, Mr. Schwartz! - of the ants at the picnic. To say this is the end of expertise is to attack a straw man and call it a battle royale. Even the hordes on Helium can manage that. The challenge developers are tackling right now is to form social media that produces resources of lasting value. Resources that evolve with ongoing contributions rather than simply ranking existing content. Helium is a gesture in that direction, if not a very potent one.

Of course, this is coming from a site which features ads that do this when you accidentally mouse over the wrong part of the page:


So Schwartz can be excused for being just a single link in a chain of disrespect. If a publication doesn't respect its writers, how could its writers possibly respect its readers?

Eleven Things To Think About When Thinking About The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Bomb Scare

What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Journals (1849)

For Camus... People may create meaning in their own lives, which may not be the objective meaning of life, but still provides something for which to strive. However, he insisted that one must always maintain an ironic distance between this invented meaning and the knowledge of the absurd lest the fictitious meaning take the place of the absurd.

- Wikipedia entry for "Absurdism"

1. Guerrilla marketing is a symptom of corporate arrogance. Graffiti is a symptom of social powerlessness.
   
2. Why do graffiti artists feel powerless? See Kierkegaard.
   
3. Marketers choose guerrilla marketing strategies for two reasons: to save money, and to suggest to the general public that the products of multi-billion-dollar corporations run by boards of directors and shareholders are actually ruled by rebellious young people.
4. Companies which engage in guerilla marketing tactics are rarely penalized beyond the direct cost of their actions. This makes it very cost-effective advertising, which makes boards of directors and shareholders happy. I have heard the figure of $750,000 cited by the Boston police. This is very cheap advertising considering the stunt's impact.
   
5. Why doesn't acting like rebellious young people damage corporations' credibility in financial markets? See Camus.
   
6. The term "guerrilla," - "little war" - has its origins in small groups of Spaniards who resisted Napoleonic rule in the early 1800s. The advertising community found this term attractive for two reasons, one explicit and one subconscious. The explicit connotation, the one they know they like, is that they resist control by moving more quickly and fluidly than the power structure can, because they are not constrained by the power structure's logistics and its rules of war, and thus slip through its fingers and live to fight another day. The subconscious reason is that guerrilla marketing is an act of violence against the very modest checks against the absolute privatization of our public space to have survived the last thirty years. Since corporations are a dominant force in our world, the explicit reason is a perfect example of marketing double-speak, and the implicit reason is the one that has caused it to stick.
7. The Wooster Collective reports on Stephen Brown's recent art project in Germany: "In front of the town's City Hall on the main square, Steven built a stone hearth each night for 10 days (Jan 14-23 2007). He simply built and burned a fire from sunset until midnight. Each night people stopped by and lingered and shared stories. There was no press and word spread the old-fashioned way. Slowly, there became a regular base of people who came every night to interact (and often bring the artist food and drink)."
   
8. How would the Boston Police Department have responded to this project?
9. How do this project and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing campaign differ in terms of their engagement with the public, with public space? Does one respect its audience more than the other? Should the intended effect, and the project's motivations, be considered in evaluating and responding to the work?
10. How many different brands can you think of that could turn Brown's project into an effective guerrilla marketing campaign with a linked series of network television commercials? Think beyond Duraflame and fireplace bricks. What brand of beer would you sell with this stunt? What brand of clothing? What kind of car?
    
11. How do you feel about having so many billboards in your head? Where's the real guerrilla marketing taking place? See Camus.

Mothers For Social Drinking

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