Seven Lions

There’s such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It’s not even the writing, it’s that people read it and they just accept. Like they’re listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they’re so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can’t express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on page thirty-three, ‘They make up’.

But there are forms of storytelling that have been able to avoid that.

There was this old computer game, Zork. You run around solving puzzles and fighting, but you could mix something up, do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it didn’t let you know. You keep playing, oblivious to the fact that you can’t win.

It’s simple, really. You run around collecting treasure—platinum and jewels and… stuff. Well, one of the treasures is this Faberge egg, all covered with jewels and gilt. But the egg isn’t the treasure, it’s what’s inside: this little bird, made of gold. No matter what you do to open it, the bird always gets broken and ruined. Like in life, there’s no warning and, just like in life, there’s nothing you could do to fix it. Video games nowadays, they’re determinist, derivative or just plain porn. But those old games, they were like life.

Life, not random but not determinist, not like a book. Why does every linear work need conflict, suffering and pain, why can’t it just be a happy story about love? Because it follows a pattern, it has to: because linear narratives can only do so much.

In Zork, there’s this thief, he prowls around while you’re playing, and if you’ve got something valuable he takes it, that’s why when you find the treasure, you have to lock it up. If you let him have the egg, he’ll open it. Turns out you can get the egg back, later, and next to it is this beautiful clockwork canary.

But I don’t know if it sang, because I always broke it.

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”:

. .  . . . . .

. . @. . D

If  . . . . . makes you quiver in your boots, but maybe you’re no longer so worried about suffering Yet Another Stupid Death and instead you wish you could get together some friends to assemble a ballista and shoot the damn dragon, then you’re Dwarf Fortress material.

As an aside, if you have no idea what that @ symbol is supposed to be up there, then there’s not much I can do for you.  Back to Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is a Rogue-like virtual life simulator wherein you make a small society of midget alcoholics dig wells.  And tan hides.  And forge copper goblets.  And it has aquifers.  If you really feel like you need to know about the game itself, do what the Internet does and look it up on Wikipedia, because what it does isn’t nearly as exciting as what naturally occurs as the result of the interaction between simple rules-based elements.  The goal of Tarn Adams, the game’s creator, is to build a functioning world that creates emergent narrative.  While this kind of thing has been hinted at in various sandbox and world-domination games, Dwarf Fortress is the first to my knowledge that has built-in structures for creating a long-tailed history of a living world.  Your dwarves will engrave important events on their walls, and they’ll leave behind an abandoned hall (a la Moria) that an adventurer can later explore.  The world is built not only through realistic geological and environmental processes, but populated by rules-based ‘legendary’ people and states.

It’s currently a .28 release version, and while you’re menaced by rather moronic goblin sieges (Adams is as critical of them as anyone) you can still have an amazingly good time harnessing the killing power of magma, mining ore, smelting it, creating alloys and using that to fashion goods (And everyone knows I’m a big fan of ancient metallurgy, even the fantastical kind).  It’s not any one individual activity that makes Dwarf Fortress interesting, though, it’s that they’re all running together, to create the semblance of a functioning society that goes beyond a glorified ant farm and becomes almost (still not quite) like a story.  It’s quite an amazing thing.

Dwarf Fortress (Did I mention it’s free?)

How would WOPR describe a recession? I suppose a little like this. There are collections of creative visualizations like Data Beautiful and theorists like Edward Tufte from whom we can draw rules for the visual display of information. But how do we use creative (visual) expression of knowledge to portray complex, deep and novel theoretical claims? If I have new scholarship and want to convey that new scholarship to my colleagues, is there a time when the best method of conveying that scholarship is non-narrative and non-textual? Or are visualizations better-suited for the purpose of illustration or pedagogy? Are they a spice that cannot stand on their own or can we make claims in multimedia that we cannot make using traditional linear text? And if so, what are the best examples of such claims?

I gravitate toward maps, both physical and conceptual. Flowcharts as slices of models also seem ripe with potential. And, of course, conceptualizations of “The Future” always contain animations and flashy visualizations that happen to be well-suited for portrayal in an episode of Star Trek, various attacks on the Death Star, or a Matthew Broderick vehicle from the 80s.

Years ago I’d mentioned to a friend how someone should create an image search based on images and not on phrases.  So I could put in a picture of a Ding Tripod and get all sorts of images that somehow shared visual similarities with Ding Tripods across the world (Even if the image name was J00001.jpg or someweirdmayanthing.png).  Just played around with Google’s Similar Images search, expecting that the folks who just handed 30 million books to Stanford had finally gotten it.  They haven’t.  Similar images to this:

are, according to Google Similar Image Search, a whole bunch of classic 2d maps.  Documentation is scarce, but it seems to have a text- or peer-collaborative- backend that doesn’t have anything to do with image analysis.  Oh well, on to Google Wave, which I hope will live up to all the hype.

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.

Rather than use some kind of creative title, with allusions to timeless pieces of art, I decided to go for the lowest-common denominator, because I think people need to spend a little less time talking about Wikipedia and a little more time creating subversive works based on the implications of its status as the first Internet-enabled global cult of disinformation.

You can’t leave anything alone on the Internet for more than three days without it crashing spectacularly.  Still, it’s better than ZModem.

It’s more a tweet masquerading as a blog post, so I leave you with a link to the latest security patch to WordPress, and direct your attention to the pings.  WordPress, like so much of the New Web, is so unprepossessingly international that it hardly seems fitting to draw attention to it.

Twitter was taken down by the last trick known to the “hacker” community.  Oh sure, passwords still get stolen and personal information still gets used to humiliate the semi-public figures of the Internet, but it’s all done in a remarkably low-tech manner, using the digital equivalent of old-style private eyes.  All that’s left for script kiddies is the poor distributed denial of service, used indiscriminately for destroying racist talk show hosts or random AT&T customers.  Like a Sergio Leone villain, the Final Boss of the Internet has a few tricks but only one real weapon, and a taste for high-profile targets.  So that’s my prediction, let’s see how it pans out.

Updated to add that I’m definitely not the first to theorize the connection, but I am the first to equate the Final Boss of the Internet with Indio.

A new data set on Wikipedia edits and new article creation is being breathlessly touted as a sign that Wikipedia has reached its peak and is pointed toward inevitable decline.  I think the biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it draws out amateur criticism and analysis.  First off, it’s not like Wikipedia statistics are hidden away in an archive in Tibet, written in a mysterious Fujian script–it’s all publically available.  Which begs the question, why is the state of Wikipedia in 2006 somehow today’s news?  Shouldn’t we have been bludgeoned by “Wikipedia is Peaking!!!” articles three years ago?

But more troubling is the almost childlike understanding of the nature of knowledge that Wikipedia lays bare to the world.  In an interview with NPR back when Wikipedia was peaking, I pointed out that the reason why the George W. Bush page was constantly being changed on Wikipedia was because our conception of Dubya was still in flux and that Wikipedia was accurately representing that flux.  That’s not a brilliant observation on my part, and any undergraduate studying philosophy should be able to provide that answer, just like they should be able to tell you that, naturally, the recording of knowledge-based content will not continue at a geometric pace when measured by article creation.  There aren’t any more counties, cities and chemicals to describe.  All the major buildings, wars and sports teams have their page already.  If article growth on Wikipedia continued apace, and editing continued apace, it would mean that the actual creation (As opposed to the recording) of knowledge content was accelerating at Gaussian proportions or that Wikipedia had lost its focus on describing knowledge and fallen into accepting fluff content pages (Which, with all the Simpsons Episode pages will tell you, is always a danger) simply to maintain some arbitrary measurement of size.

Still, it’d be nice to see Brittanica win one.  I always root for the underdog.