First post

Voila. The first entry for the Fragments blog.

Let's begin with a not so scientific theory: from careful observation I have deducted that cats probably are capable of a proces akin to photosynthesis. How else could you explain them laying in the sun all day, visibly sucking up energy, and moving to another sunny spot when the sun moves? ;-)

Aug 17, 2001 @ 11:55 » no comments » General

Videogame thesis

Ah, I just stumbled into an interesting looking MA thesis by Gonzalo Frasca, entitled Videogames of the Oppressed: videogames as a means of critical thinking and debate. I'm going to give that a close read when I'm done with Steven Johnson's (mostly) intriguing book Interface Culture. More on that later. I added Frasca's thesis to the Online Articles section of the CCIG Resources.

Aug 17, 2001 @ 16:34 » no comments » Research

Extracting data

The ingenuity of cryptographic systems and the attacks waged against them keeps amazing me. This article describes a method, presented at the USENIX conference, for attacking the secure shell (SSH) protocol. Because SSH usually is an interactive (TELNET) session, it's possible to measure the time between the different keystrokes. A statistical analysis of the timing data, using a Hidden Markov Model and a key sequence prediction algorithm, allows the attacker to extract the actual keystrokes from the stream of encrypted data. For me, that's got a big wow factor ;-)

Aug 20, 2001 @ 12:08 » no comments » General

Geri screams

BTW, I saw Geri Halliwell's new video, Scream if you wanna go faster, the other day and I think they made a big mistake casting Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Just have a peek at Geri's video, available in crappy quality from her heavily flashed website, and watch her run through a desert dressed in cut off jeans, a white t-shirt, big boots and a hard-shell backpack riding high on her shoulders. If Geri would have played Lara, it would probably have been an instantaneous camp/cult hit, even with the apparently crappy plot (but I'll check that out later this week myself).

Aug 20, 2001 @ 17:45 » no comments » General

Final Fantasy the movie

I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within yesterday and I'm impressed. The most impressive feat I think is that they managed to tell an engrossing, captivating story even though the character animation is not perfect. (And it won't be everybody's story; I've been thoroughly deformed by decades of sci-fi, cyberpunk and manga.) It's strange that this movie is hyped because it's incredible human character animation, which in technical terms it undoubtedly is, but it doesn't exactly match up against real actors... yet.

I could tell you about peripheral characters with the facial expression of a Quake character, the fact that serious dialogue even between the more detailed characters broke my suspension of disbelief a couple of times, but that's not the point. What struck me is that with human animated characters, as opposed to the more cartoonish characters of for instance Toy Story and Shrek, also came a more actor oriented camera direction. One of the shots, quite early in the movie, is an over-the-shoulder shot, following a character into a room where other characters are. Treating the characters as actors, allowing for certain subjective overlaps in identification that we know from other movies, in my opinion, really sets this movie apart from other animated movies. A lot of animated movies suffer from a certain "objectness" of the characters; although there is a certain emotional involvement with the character, the character usually stays in the shot in such a way that the subjective overlap between viewer and character on the screen is impossible. Final Fantasy I enjoyed as a whole and I think it would be wrong to judge it in terms of the human character animation, however technically advanced it may be.They simply reached a level of animation sufficient to be believable in the world of the movie, in the story that is told.

Aug 21, 2001 @ 09:25 » no comments » General

Some links

Let's make a little list of recent discoveries that turned out worthwhile for me:

Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research. Interesting articles in the first issue, let's see in what direction the journal will develop.

GamaSutra, the art and science of making games. A magazine/journal mostly for game developers, but with a lot of interesting information, especially now that I've become more and more interested in the more or less conscious preconceptions of game developers about games and the world(s) they create and function in.

The Digiplay mailinglist, which is part of the Digiplay Initiative organised by Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce, has had some interesting discussions.

Teoma, a new search engine that does some nifty categorizing for you, which in turn makes searching more 'topical.'

Also, I finished Interface Culture by Steven Johnson and am going through my notes for a little write-up about it.

Aug 22, 2001 @ 15:39 » no comments » Research

Oscillation and resonance

I just re-read Julian Dibbell's speech My dinner with Catherine MacKinnon and I just had to grin, again. With humor and self relativation Dibbell tells the story of what happened when he ended up in front of a Yale Law School class (and dinner afterwards) together with MacKinnon, some time after he had published the influential article A Rape in Cyberspace. I'll just gloss over 99 percent of what's in those two articles and suppose that you're familiar with the Rape in Cyberspace article (because if you're not, you oughta haul your virtual butt out to ftp.game.org and read it now!) and just focus on a point of the speech that really struck me today.

Dibbell writes:

Now, what had Mr. Bungle done, exactly? Well, in a sense, not much. He had typed some words and caused them to be communicated to the understanding of others. And let me make it clear that no one present that night was so confused as to doubt that words were the only weapon Mr. Bungle had wielded. But they also had several additional things to say about what he'd done. They called it "uncivil," they called it "despicable," and lastly but most precisely they called it "virtual rape." And I say precisely because I think the phrase captures as well as any can the ambivalence with which Bungle's victims seemed to regard his actions -- the way their response seemed to oscillate irresolvably between outrage and mere annoyance, between a tone that equated his actions with real-life rape and a tone that recognized them as nothing of the sort. And I want to emphasize that oscillation, because I think that if you don't get it, you don't really get virtual rape at all.

Oscillation between what's real and what's virtual about "virtual reality" is a really nice way of capturing the back and forth experience of dwelling in a MUD or MOO, but I think that the idea is even broader applicable. If you think about gaming, or even just watching a movie or reading a book, those are not straightforward experiences in which the individual simply acts or absorbs what s/he is presented with in one clearly definable state of mind. Rather, the individual is continually switching between different frames of knowledge, different frames of experience in order to make sense of the situation on as many levels as possible. This maybe is what allows creative solutions to surface: making idiosyncratic, novel connections between different realms of knowledge and action. Observing a person watching a movie or reading a book however doesn't show this process explicitly. It is only with more interactive activities such as mudding, gaming, hacking, writing a novel or playing football that the outcomes of this creative process become visible. And oscillation between the realm of the (idiosyncratically) imaginable (and a MUD/MOO after all is the imaginable in a slightly more persistent, if still rather ephemeral form) and the everyday, common sense situation is probably a good way of thinking about it, because it captures the always-not-yet-finished, the-always-open-for-revision nature of the process.

Dibbell ends his speech with an expansion on the idea of constant oscillation and tries to make a little more sense of the nature of the MUD/MOO:

I think the MOO is a game, and I think it is also much more. I think of it, finally, as a kind of conceptual DMZ -- a permanently, radically liminal ground on which the real and the imagined meet on equal terms. I don't think this ground is an entirely new one, historically speaking. I think that it has always existed, as an abstraction, whenever humans have had the courage to comprehend the relationship between the real and the symbolic in its fullest complexity. But as a concretization of that abstract space -- and one that can be lived as well as comprehended -- I do believe VR is something new, and I believe very much, therefore, in its potential to bring a new level of sophistication to the debates that rage around the intersection of sex, violence, and representation.

I'd never before quite realized the extent to which this paragraph resonates (to use Rhonda Metraux's term) with the approach that I used in my own analysis of MUDs/MOOs. Again we have oscillation, this time between the different roles of the MUD/MOO, or maybe better between the different models the individual applies for understanding something like a MUD or MOO. The MOO is a game, Dibbell rightly says, but it is also much more. In addition I think it's even more than a conceptual DMZ or a liminal ground, but those are more fragmented, individual understandings. Interestingly enough Dibbell uses the idea of a "liminal ground." I use the idea of liminality, a state of 'being betwixt and between,' derived in my case from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, to make sense the way social/cultural rules apply or don't apply in a role-playing MOO. This state of liminality is indeed nothing new and although the MOO can be a tool for comprehending the relationship between the real and the symbolic, the world and the word, I think that implying that the MOO always and invariably functions like that is just a touch too much wishful thinking. In many respects the MOO is just a game, something that people do because they think it's fun and entertaining. But the MOO can function as a tool for experiencing that oscillation between real and symbolic and that might indeed, as Dibbell says, have a lot to do with the fact that the MOO is an inhabitable form of the symbolic. Unsworth also discusses the MOO as an inhabitable model in his article Living inside the (Operating) System and writes:

...the MOO--an inhabitable model of Unix --is then a third-order simulacrum of the world, in which information is not only a representation of labor, and a source of power, and a form of value, but is also quite literally the form that the species-being takes, "not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference."

But, and this is an important point in Unsworth's article, the MOO, this symbolical inhabitable model, is firmly grounded in in the social, cultural, historical and economical contexts that spawned it. The MOO is rooted in symbolical universe of the Unix filesystem, which in turn is rooted in the social, political, economical structures of AT&T's post-anti-trust Bell Labs and the emerging computer-mediated "fellowship" of Usenet. One of the most interesting results of my research on the performance of gender in a role-playing MOO is the importance the players place on somehow establishing the gender of the other players behind the characters they are interacting with. The MOO is a liminal ground where players can play and experiment with the different forms that the social body takes, because the MOO, in Turner's words, is not a place where there are no rules, but where the social rules are temporarily suspended. That the everyday social forms are suspended does not mean they don't apply, but that the player has control over how s/he applies or doesn't apply them. But I think it's not ultimately the fact that the player is "in between," in limen in the MOO that allows hir to reflect on those rules, but the fact that is a constant, and in the case of the role-playing MOO often a conscious back and forth between the realm of "virtual reality" and the realm of "reality." In absence of a physical body the players are looking for the Real Body, that is to say, the cultural fiction of an unambiguous archetypical male or female body. The fact that is often overlooked is that even in F2F, physical interaction one does not perceive an unmediated, absolute image of reality, but that the only thing we see in "reality" are the same socially, culturally mediated fictions of bodies. The MOO, in a Baudrillardian sense, is just another fantasy reality, another simulacrum hiding the fact that everyday reality already is a cultural fiction. But whereas Disneyworld anaesthetizes any sense of reflective oscillation (except Baudrillard's) the MOO seems to call it up more often... or maybe that's just because it's new... or because it's textual... do graphical MUDs/RPGs generate the same self-conscious ruminations or do they drown them out in Disneyesque eye and earcandy?

Dibbell ends his speech, delivered at the Virtue and Virtuality: A Conference on Gender, Law, and Cyberspace conference with these words:

So I would argue, in closing, that if the law is to have anything to say about VR at all, it would do best to resist its own tendency to reduce oscillation and conflict to unambiguous resolution and instead direct its efforts toward preserving VR as the haven of ambiguity that it is.

The recent surge of internet and digital content legislation and the increased wiretapping efforts might be understood as an effort to stem the dangerous thought that just like in VR the world is, quite literally, what we make it and if we were to decide that copyrights or the current governmental system don't work anymore, that would piss off quite a few people benefitting from it... and we can't have that, can we?

Aug 24, 2001 @ 12:07 » no comments » Research

Where HTML is flawed

When making a link, I can point the reader to another page, but I cannot send the reader to exactly the section that is relevant. If there's a lot of text on the page I refer to, the reader might not even find the section without using the search function and the odds are that s/he won't bother. If there is anyone who knows about or can write for instance a Java applet that will let me call up a 'third party web-page' jump to the relevant section and preferrably highlight it yellow marker style, please let me know :-)

Aug 27, 2001 @ 10:24 » no comments » General

Mobile Phun

I'm going out to get my new mobile phone (the old one looks like a brick clad in leather, is about as heavy and runs down its battery in about 18 hours... I _need_ to upgrade, you understand that *grin*) and later today I'm going to spend some time sitting in a train with my gf and we wondered why our phones won't talk to eachother so we could play games on them, against eachother. I think I remember the old Atari Lynx portable game computer could be linked up (with or without cables?) so that players could play in a small network against eachother. Darn, this technology curve is not exponential enough by a long shot!

Aug 29, 2001 @ 10:54 » no comments » General



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