Seven Lions

I keep meaning to write something about poor Jared Diamond’s woes and the shadenfreude that the entire discipline of anthropology is currently feeling.  Other topics that should have already been thrown into the giant hopper but haven’t:

I’ve started racking up good reviews for Son of the Great River, including librarians and middle-schoolers.  I doubt I’ll be quitting my day job any time soon, but it’s nice to know that it wasn’t terrible.  Interestingly, when you speak to modern 4th-6th graders these days, it does restore a bit of your confidence in humanity.  If you think this blog is a rambling, off-topic bit of lunacy, you should see me linking deforestation to video games to YouTube to writing (And while you may not follow along with all the connections, I assure you they’re very brightly lit for 4th graders).  Web 3.0 is the 4th Grade and I’m glad to be a part of it.

I need to review books like I promised.  There’s a particularly rivetting review of Civic Agriculture that only exists in my head (And, as an environmental historian, I should be making some comment about Nature-Society interactions–can you believe I said nothing about the situation in Punjab??).  Confound the bonds of customary target audience hucksterism, I will review books at random times, especially when they have nothing to do with my PhD.

Art and Social Computing.  I want to join DeviantArt and show off my unit icons for Bughunter and my obscure flash games, but the wife won’t let me on account of it diluting her brand.

Then there’s all the review’s trickling in of Lih’s book on Wikipedia.  It sounds terribly superficial, I can’t wait…

But, really, I’m in the middle of trying to churn out dissertation- and conference-think, so the only bit of thoughtfulness I can give is a quote from someone else about digital map-based geographic locationally spatial media:

The rapid developments occurring at the intersection of geographic computing and web-based information technology cannot be identified with any single label, nor are they effectively described by any single body of academic literature. A variety of terms are in use for one or another aspect of this domain, including “web mapping”, “neogeography”, “social cartography”, “the geoweb”, “webGIS” and “volunteered geographic information”.

Now if you don’t mind, I need to call some 4th graders and find out about this Semantic Web thing.

Recon by fire

For those of you curious as to how the game is played, it was summed up like this:

ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS WILL BE SLAUGHTERED LIKE CATTLE.  Don’t expect anyone you roll up in the first week to remain alive for more than twenty four hours.  Remember Wierzbowski in Aliens?  Of course you don’t.  You’re Wierzbowski.  Or that guy who takes off his helmet on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.  Expect to have the lifespan of an extra in a John Woo film.  Most likely within two seconds of your first contact, you’ll be reduced to bloody chunks.  Learn to love it.  Don’t get too attached – after all, you don’t have to write letters to their mothers/queen.  Learn the ropes, and someday you’ll be able to do the same to the next batch of lambs led to the slaughter.

For those of you trying to figure out the theme of this blog…  Well, I’ve got no answers.

An artistic representation of the action in Bughunter

In my ongoing attempts to spurn accepted wisdom and create a blog with no niche, which is sometimes about non-traditional publishing, sometimes about Islamic Art–or was it the Digital Humanities and Environmental History, or is it just constant Wikipedia meta-criticism–I present this amazing artistic rendition of a game that normally looks like this:

Not nearly as dynamic, don't you think?

Bughunter is a php-based game based on all the best action movies of the 80s, played by maybe thirty people over the entire course of its history.  It’s almost like a digital version of kids games back when all kids didn’t play the same highly-engineered and produced media.  Cowboys and Indians must have had countless variants with countless different “magic circle” rules, and Bughunter is just like this.  Astounding, once you think about it.  The game has been ongoing for a couple years now, in various iterations, and while the gameplay is solid, it really only exists as a playspace for a small subset of a long-standing on-line community.  One day, it will disappear, and the digital archivists won’t even know it was around to bemoan its loss.  I wonder how many of these games actually exist in the world, and what motivates the people who create and maintain them, as well as the people who play them.  Somehow, its substandard graphics and interface (When compared to that created for games that cost millions) don’t seem to bother the handful of people who grumble and mutter, like old AD&D players, “I think we should start a new game of Bughunter” every three or five months.  Made for free and never marketed, it contains elements based on whimsy and group consensus, and its longevity reflects that strange dynamic.  Unlike traditional games, it never even enters into the cost-analysis aspect of design.  But it will also never have an audience of millions, or even thousands or hundreds.

I suppose that somehow my blog maintains its niche, as this is a game that will be played and appreciated by a few, like books that are read and appreciated not by the entire audience of Oprah but by only the smallest nano-percentage of the world-connected population.  Deep but not pretentious, these small pieces of media hearken back to an older time, of the creation of games and books that never made it outside their small borough, and no author or designer thought anything of it.  Despite the ever-growing sameness of experience across the world, there still exist these smallest of communities and their smallest of projects–emerging, abiding, and then swaying out of existence like a wise man in a village with no ledger.  And yet, somehow, they affect us, and not self-consciously with hipster dramatis, and are reflected in our own creation of art, knowledge and techne.