Seven Lions

Fellow Stanford digital type Carlos Seligo and I checking out the usability of Flash on an iPad by running a remote client and hosting the Flash app on a nearby MacBook.  This was an impromptu investigation, and so I apologize for not performing a more rigorous and involved test run, or showing off a more engaging Flash application, but given all the fuss about how Flash just wouldn’t work for iPad for stylistic and technological reasons, I have to say I was shocked at how attractive and functional these apps were, given that we’d spent absolutely no effort optimizing them for multitouch.  Even the much-maligned rollover caused no trouble at all (in the case of this test, rollover events were only triggered if your finger left the screen at a rollover point, which is actually rather interesting functionality and I’d love to play with that).

As far as the gross inefficiency of Flash, we were using well-designed and coded apps, and not hacked together ads or other junk, but of course there was no way to test power drain since this was remoting in, so we had to settle for a rudimentary interface test.  I have no stance on Flash video–I don’t use it except to embed Youtube videos and don’t care if it’s replaced by some other video standard, but I think this and other examples of quality RIAs built in Flex and Flash put the lie to the blanket condemnation of Flash as a tool for software development.  As has been said elsewhere, getting rid of Flash is not going to get rid of junk ads or junk websites, it’s just going to result in junk ads and junk websites written in javascript.  That’s no improvement.

Oh, and A Guide To Authorial London would make a killer iPad app–it’s the perfect form factor for it.

We tend towards influ­en­tial, frac­tional exem­plars, partly out of neces­sity (raised to the level of insti­tu­tions) and partly out of habit (raised to the level of tra­di­tions).

Tim Carmody’s very insightful “The Trouble with Digital Culture“, part of CHNM’s Hack the Academy event.

We’re all spoiled by cartoon maps of the allies storming Normandy or the melting ice caps, and so a visualization of spatial change in medieval China, while accurate (at least according to the Songshi, Taiping huanyu ji & Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi), doesn’t seem nearly as dramatic as thick-lined cartoon arrows rushing across the French countryside.

You can make your own slowly shifting maps of Song Dynasty political geography by downloading the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty. Or maybe you can just load it into Flash and draw some arrows flying from Wang Anshi’s hands out toward the northern counties, abolishing them hither and thither.

Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute.  It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who’s actually considering the difference between “the social landscape and the material landscape” and has been doing so for years.  The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through lessons and cause-effect chains.

Wright obviously has been engrossed in story for his entire career, and during the unplanned delay before the talk engaged with an audience and pointed out that games do not supplant the linear narratives of books, but rather modify and complement them.  This comes up at the end of the talk, where he discusses Fractal Entertainment– How modern “properties” or “worlds” are not a single piece of media, but rather multiple expressions (some cinematic, some interactive, some linear, some board game, some RPG).  This includes not only top-down licensed expressions but also crowd-driven epiphenomena such as machinima and graphic novels based on Sims gameplay.

Also interesting is the concept of emergence not only within a game but also around a game, where the activity that surrounds, say, Wii Bowling, is as important to the enjoyment and definition of the game as the hardware and software.  As Wright puts it, the absurd gesticulations one makes while trying to bowl with a plastic stick.  But emergence plays a role outside the story proper, and becomes part of the meta-story, where the story is dissected and used as lesson (Wright notes that Blade Runner is the inspiration for city planners for The Dystopian Future to Avoid) and also as Story deconstructed into components to create what the designer calls “possibility space”.  And once that space is created, story emerges from it, to start the dialectical chain all over again.

Of course, story is too narrow, and Wright deals with this by settling on describing movies and books as linear narratives, which is broad enough not only to cover romance novels but also monographs and encyclopedias.  The convergence presented by Wright is mirrored by the convergence of high end research, focusing on model building and schema pattern strategies.  And while these schemas and models are arbitrary, they allow, as Wright points out, the ability to map the patterns that emerge within possibility space.

So many years of so many toys has left the theorists of the world in flux.  That’s why we have so many would-be philosophers with no background in the matter and so many academics struggling to understand their place in  society cut loose from the linear narrative.  It’s good to see someone like Will Wright, who is knowledgeable and systematic in his understanding of how the digital world and the social world mesh and the new subtleties available as a result of that meshing.  And on top of all that, there’s a great story about the Soviet space program accidentally crash-landing in China.

“Dinner for wolves”

Prezi is a presentation creation package that advertises itself as the living presentation tool.  All the cool kids at DAC09 were using it, and it’s particularly appealing because it allows you to embed swf into the presentation, so maybe we’ve finally got an awesome presentation tool that can put a rest to the one that Tufte so despises.

To demonstrate, here’s my own Prezi from DAC09, for my paper “Scholarly civilization: utilizing 4X gaming as a framework for humanities digital media”:

Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper?  Yeah, maybe.

Because while you’ve been desperately trying to keep up with the mind-shattering connectedness of Facebook and Twitter, an entire culture based on shows, books and, well, tropes you’ve probably never heard of has sprung up, organized itself and managed to co-opt the very classics you’ve neglected to read.  Didn’t realize the Epic of Gilgamesh has elements of a Zombie Apocalypse in it or that the Anenid has anything in common with The Blues Brothers?  That’s because you don’t get it.  Somehow, while we weren’t looking, the Internet soup finally managed to get that Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons and All Purpose Cat Girl Nuku Nuku really do make up a common culture with Daoism, Lando Calrissian, 西游记, Final Fantasy, hip hop, the Lolrus and, well, everything.

It’s all tied together with a common understanding of comic book superhero powers, video game mechanics and memetic mashups.  Even the academics recognize that there’s something that ties together all these strange, seemingly dissimilar cultural artifacts.  Don’t know what a critical existence failure is or the tripartite model of videogame space?  Would you be able to recognize a 30 Xanatos Pile-Up?  If you’re sure by now that I’m making this up, put yourself in my shoes, I have to live here.

I’m digging through the Zork source code for mysterious purposes to be revealed later, but I figure I can share some of the more interesting bits with the world at large.  I’m one of those people for whom Zork was a seminal childhood experience, and I’d place it along with Seven Cities of Gold and Hero’s Quest (Later called Quest for Glory) from Sierra.  Not that Breach II and Zaxxon didn’t show up, but there was an emergent narrative character to these three games that has always stuck with me.

From a scholarly perspective, the multiple interpretations of the world presented by the software of Zork–which only exists as a series of rooms, objects and limited vocabulary in its original form–is the most interesting.  Mapped out, the caves, white house and Flood Control Dam #3 and of Zork look something like this:

A hand drawn map made by a Zork player

But taken in the form of interactive fictional narrative, the story and experience of Zork looks less like a linear text and more like a mode of explanation (Mashed up throughout the Internet, until the existence of Grues and all their habits have been analyzed and documented by a team of amateur zoologists).  There’s a vastness to these earlier games that defies translation.  And there’s also a goofy ludological ludicrousness that becomes even more apparent when we examine the code itself.

400    I=192                    ! assume inedible.
IF(PRSO.EQ.GARLI) I=193            ! garlic is joke.
450    CALL RSPEAK(I)                ! disdain it.
RETURN
C

As a text, Zork makes for a rather poor novel.  As an interactive gamespace, it pales in comparison even to the simplest sandbox games available today.  As an example of code, it is valuable in its historical quality.  But as an experience, it somehow becomes greater than its parts, and influences not only the individual through exposure to interactive fiction but an entire society in its strange internal logic and conventions, far beyond the effect of World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto.  Perhaps a vast majority of this effect is based on its foundational aspect, but there is a classical nature to this work that goes beyond its existence as one of the first computer games.

Considered as simply a computer-assisted choose-your-own adventure, Zork doesn’t seem so special, but the medium itself hides the existence and clues to the “right” or “more fulfilling” adventures and as such leaves to viewer/reader/experiental agent in doubt of their own fulfilment of possible narratives.  For myself, it wasn’t until years after my first exposure to Zork that I went back, guided by one of the countless walkthroughs all over the Internet, and “successfully” completed it (Having no idea that in all the times I’d played it that those were not “successful” in their own rights).

Available here.

tl;dr The university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university.

Just finished another read-through of the new Digital Humanities Manifesto and it’s interesting to see how the Digital Humanities continues to position itself as an academic, intellectual ally to so many of the progressive movements found on the Internet. Still, the discipline, or “array of convergent practices” as the UCLA folks like to call it, is struggling with a crisis of identity. Namely, there’s the nervous hipsterism (including scatalogical gif humor*–boy, there’s a strange phrase) injected into a thoughtful examination of a field that doesn’t quite how to describe itself to the lay and academic audiences simultaneously, but there’s also a tension that exists between the old-style Humanities Computing crowd and the more spatially and social computing-oriented Digital Humanists. As an admission of bias, I took the liberty of merging Humanities Computing into the Digital Humanities entry on Wikipedia 3 years ago (For which Willard McCarty apparently asked an audience at a conference, “Does anyone even know who this guy is who’s setting the agenda for our discipline?”), and so I reside firmly in the pro-Wikipedia, pro-multidisciplinary, pro-spatiality camp represented in this new manifesto.

Of particular saliency is the claim that we’re in the second wave of digital humanities work, which moves beyond trying to shoehorn quantitative functions in ArcGIS or MySQL into qualitative exploration of history, literature and art.  It also demands a reevalutation of Intellectual Property, especially in regard to the better-safe-than-sorry approach present in the modern university.  I’ll take issue with the call to free poor Shepard Fairey, but I’ve dealt with that in detail in an earlier installment here on Seven Lions.  In all, though, it’s the best example of aggressive, digitally-forward humanities thought since Unsworth’s Scholarly Primitives paper.  Regardless of your feelings on the place of the University in the digital world and the positive benefits of integrating wikis and twitter and GIS and any other new media into humanities scholarship, I’d recommend a perusal.

* This seems to only be present in the pdf version.  Maybe I have a rare, mashed up and graffito-laden copy.  I’ll save it for the grandkids.

I got to put on my Author Hat and meet with a bunch of 4th, 5th and 6th-graders and discuss the process of writing, the story in Son of the Great River, and numerous other topics, not least of which was Edward Cullen and Stephanie Meyer.  When I was told that Son of the Great River was best suited for intermediate audiences, I blanched at the prospect, because I thought it meant the book was overly simplistic.  After visiting a class full of small, precocious people, and the brave souls who teach them, I realized that I couldn’t think of better company.  I think if we play our cards right, these kids might end up saving the world (Unlike their facebook and twitter-addled older siblings that I teach at university).

It’s remarkable how young people resemble and diverge from their cynical, gimmicky elders.  There’s such a sharpened idealism and awareness that you feel the weight of responsibility on you with every topic you address, so I took full advantage of it.  I spoke about my book, of course, but just like any audience, they didn’t just want to buy a book, but also an author, and I was happy to play that role, too.  I got to explain in gory detail how the editing process works (With pantomimed slaps and imaginary editors shaking their heads in disdain for my over-exuberant comma use) and why my earlier books weren’t published (“Because they weren’t any good.” a 5th-grader said under his breath, to which I smiled and pointed and exclaimed “Exactly!” and after that simple act, he watched me with rapt attention) but also how they’d be growing up in a completely different world of content delivery.  Now, I didn’t use those words, instead I talked about the Espresso Book Machine and amateur actors, directors and cartoonists using YouTube to build their audiences.  And they’re not just content creators but fans, critics and reviewers, like Grady Harp, whose voices can outweigh their local paper or television station.

It was amazingly fun, enlightening and, as if that wasn’t enough, I got to check my mail later and receive dozens of notes like these:

Dear Mr. Meeks, thank you for coming.  I thought your speech was really good.  You have inspired me to make my own story.  And I would be glad to read yours.

Sincerely, Nova

Dear Mr. Meeks,

Thank you for coming to our classroom. You inspired me to write a book of my own. I am not going to put pictures in it though. When I am done with it I am going to make copies of it and give it to my friends and family. When I go to my father’s house I am going to go online and go to your site. Tell your wife she draws very well. And I think it would be cool if she could come and talk about art.                                                                                                                                                                                    From, Gage

Dear Mr. Meeks,

My class and I loved hearing about your book you wrote and about publishing. It made makes me really want to write a book! We would all love to have your wife come and show us her art. I can’t wait to read your book!! Thank you for coming!

From, Lydia

Thanks for introducing your book!

Over the summer I hope to make a short film about your book. I would also like to draw some pictures to. I truly hope to read your book.

Elinor

Suffice to say, I’m bringing Hajra the next time, and I could care less if I ever sell another copy of Son of the Great River as long as I can have an effect like that.