Game Spaces (up for a re-write)

Video games have a limited appeal and cultural relevance. These things are growing, certainly, but in their current form and with their current direction they will always be limited. By this I don't mean limited like books are limited to those who can read, I mean limited to a minority population that won't grow (mostly because gamers don't really breed well).

To track the train of thought: Read this article on DS Fanboy in my farting about today. Understood that of course people who are playing their DSes don't want to talk to their DSes: they don't want to talk to anyone. They're playing video games. They're absorbed into that little world and they don't want to share it. Into that little world. And therein lies the limiting factor: video game systems are considered a portal into the software's world, as opposed to a portal for the software to enter our world.

Why is this bad? It's not bad, it's just limiting.

I think of the most fun I've had playing games, the standout experiences. There was the time as kids when my older brother's friends were playing Monopoly with us and one of them offered the few remaining players actual, real money for the remainder of their properties and Monopoly money. There was another time when the side of my family that basically only gets together for weddings and funerals tried to play Cranium. My little brother was charged with humming "Brick House," which he did, thumping out the baseline and everything, but his teammates just didn't get it, as they'd never heard the song before, or never listened to it at any rate. Just the other night a friend was telling me about a new game he bought that charged him with building a snorkel and mask from household items and I'm totally sold on the game. I love the card game "Cheat."

So what makes a good game experience for me? The game entering into and commenting on, asking questions about or turning me around and getting me to look at MY world, not the game's world. And MY world is populated by friends and family, not by NPCs.

But my examples of game experiences are board games or family games. Are video games different? They are, but only because of a mistake on the part of designers and developers. Video games are now made by people who see them as a novelty that can make a few bucks, like Pong or as a curiosity to be tinkered with like Computer Space. They have created a market that wants newer and shinier, not better. They develop consoles and say that now they have 16 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits, etcetera, and that that makes them better or worthwhile. They go from disks to cartridges to disks to hard drives to the internet. They just keep making the box they want to jam their little worlds into bigger instead of opening the box and letting the world pour out. And, no, this hasn't changed with online gaming. And no, the Wii jumping-up-and-down games haven't changed this. And no, the DS yelling-at-your-console hasn't changed this. BUT, these Nintendo innovations are interesting directions, not castoff novelties.

Let me look at that statement. Nintendo did not invent these input schemes, but they put them into peoples hands and homes, and doing that is innovative. But why must I say that they are not castoff novelties? Because much of the gaming community has been tricked into thinking that a bigger box makes for a better game and that's all there is to it. Or, rather, that a bigger box with nicer paint on and in it makes a better game. No, if video games are to make an input, the bigger box paradigm will be the novelty. Or will rather be looked at with a laughter-filled nostalgia ("Remember when we had those games that had real-looking people in them instead of real people in them?"). No, experimenting with input schemes is a direction, not a novelty.

Will Wright is taking careful steps in the right direction with Spore, too. Again, "gamers" and their attendant commentators are quick to dismiss his innovation as novelty, but at least know well enough to wait and see the product. Spore is bringing pieces of the social networking and user-created-content worlds of the internet into gaming. I'll let him elaborate more fully in his own way. Mr. Wright knows better than to try to tell stories with video games. Interactivity is about building an experience WITH the player, not FOR the player. Mr. Wright knows this. He's holding back, though, I know it. He hasn't given us a fully-realized multi-player game here. Neither has he given us the true multi-platform game that he will soon.

And that is what I'm looking forward to: true multi-platform gaming. By this I don't mean being able to shoot my buddy on his XBox from my PC. I mean pulling the bits of the social-networking and user-created-content Web 2.0 that allow users to bring the internet into their lives. The cameraphone bits, the SMS bits, the Jott bits, the live streaming performance bits, the click-this-prim-in-Second-Life-to-interact-with-this-website bits. The bits that blow the boxes to bits.

The really disheartening thing is that WE ALREADY HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! I can press a button on my earpiece and say a few words to update my Twitter and Facebook status. I can set up RSS feeds that stream that information into SL or onto my blog. And that's all with no technical

Okay, I'm going to skip ahead a few steps here and give my conclusion, then return to this thought and re-write it another time. I want a game that I can interact with any way I choose: through my phone, digital camera, pen and paper, phone conversations, through a video game console, through my computer, drumming on my desk, twirling my hair. I want a game that I can laugh about during and after play with my friends. I want a game I can play any time, anywhere, with anyone. This can happen tomorrow, we have the technology. We just need to forget about the big boxes.

What Using Linux has Taught Me (about computers)

1. Put it somewhere safe
You are going to lose it all. Whether because you want to try a new distro on a whim or you don't feel like re-creating the root folder you nuked, you are going to lose it all. Take it all, make a copy and put it somewhere safe. Do it all the time. Store it safely.
2. It's probably not that important
Even when you do lose it all, you quickly learn that if it was really important, someone else would already have it and all you'd have to do is ask for it.
3. Ask for help
You are not so special and unique that no-one has ever been through the same hell. Someone else has the same hardware. Tons of people have the same software. They've done it before you and they want to help.
4. There is another way
So, it's not terminally easy to get MS Office or whatever you're used to. And?
5. Compile from source
Even if you follow step-by-step instructions as verified by three or four different forums on how to do this, pick a piece of software and do it. You'll feel better about yourself even at just sneaking a glimpse of what it's made of.

Going the Narrative Distance

Holy misappropriation, Batman! My personal scrivener, Angry, and I have developed a new mask for me in his fiction. New masks for the two of us, rather: the First Nations versions of us. I really want to think this is a really bad thing, to be giving words and voice to this character I really don't know, but I don't. It works for the audience and gives a context for my very geographically-defined worldview. Having just been given license to elaborate on this by my scrivener, I shall...

The mask in satire has always held an attraction for me. Great English-language satirists like Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift and Marshall Bruce Mathers III do all their real work behind your eyes, forcing you to question their speakers' reliability. If you don't do this, you lose the work. It's simple: probe the ethos of the speaker, ignore the "author." Simple.

So simple that for me, that is the real job of the reader. I am far more interested in how a story is told than I am in what the story is, although a "good story, well told" is the epitome of fiction for me. The "good story" part of the equation comes without much work on the writer's or the reader's part. It is just the truth, and it sits there waiting to be delivered. How much of that truth is brought to us depends on the "well told" part of the equation.

Now to the mask. This is a major part of the delivery system. I don't need to elaborate on that. I do need to justify allowing myself a First Nations mask. So...here goes. First of all, I'm not writing this stuff, my half-Native scrivener is. I may have a hand in composing it, but Angry is the writer, his name appears on the stuff. So they're his characters. My hands are clean...but why is it important that they be Native. Well, admittedly, it has nothing to do with the Aboriginal experience.

It has to do with the audience's experience with the Aboriginal. A reader will allow herself to make connections between landscape, both geographical and social, and history, both broad and personal, when they are dealing with First Nations characters. A reader will allow herself an uncomfortable relationship with language to run far below the surface of words spoken by a Native mouth without needing it to surface. A reader will allow Aboriginal characters a certain kind of active idleness that highlights a tension between self and mainstream. These three features define this Didi and Gogo pairing that Angry and I have created.

I'm looking forward to watching them go nowhere.

What's the Occassion?

Car songs. I love when an artist can bring attention to the holy occasion that that the everyday is. Cake, one of my most favouritest bands, obsessed about the car as containing all of what it is to be American. The Great Outdoors gives a pleasant little number about being a beater, and on and on...but it takes a special kind of poet to turn this trope into something that just makes me fall apart. For this, Hawksley Workman is my favourite kind of jerk.

Sigh...she's lying to me...

Very well written, VERY well written. I will buy and read her monologue; it's precise and clever, but she's missing a director in this video. I really don't like being lied to, especially when it comes from a stage. I am, however looking forward to reading it.

Edit: So I went ahead and posted this without finishing it. Finish it, she tells you the truth at the end.

Beauty and Truth in Physics

Actually using the title of the video for the title of the post, but that's just because it's a great title. One thing to say about this talk, really: Give me good science, but don't tell me it's philosophy. Doing that will only make you a sciencist.

Prayer for a Sunday

Host of hosts, we pray in thanksgiving for your continued encouragement and protection of our women and men of science. They seek only truth and knowledge. We know that in You all truth resides and from You springs all knowledge. We know that their quest will only bring them to You, for You are the way, the truth and the light. Their gifts to us are held in an understanding of the laws passed down from You through Your creation. We thank You for their aid in understanding Your creation. Amen.

There y'all go...a subversive, non-submissive missive.

Sleep Song

I sat my ass right down on Moose Jaw
Removed my socks to throw to Mexico
Tomorrow's work-shirt the lumpy shield
I fluff the Rockies for my pillow
Pulled the prairies up to my neckline
Turned my back to the warmth below
My hand in front of me feels the tree line
While Pangnirtung receives my toes

Rolling over I fell to sleep
Rolling over I fail to sleep

I haven't made my bed in weeks
I'd rather clean my whole damned room
Don't want to now it's time to sleep
And I'm tired of waking up tired, too
I notice comfort, I know discomfort
It's just another night that I'll get through
In the morning I'll be too busy
And tomorrow night will come too soon

Then rolling over I'll fall to sleep
And rolling over I'll fail to sleep

The laundry pile's high enough to notice
I'll do just enough to find the floor
Throw the clean stuff atop my covers


I love refrains. I think it is a sadly under-used poetic device, far too dominated by the chorus in songs. I also love the word "refrain." Wait just a damned minute...I wrote a song...first...time...ever...I hope it doesn't suck. I'll have a look at it in a week or so and freak out about how terrible it is. For right now it captures a certain feeling for me...it is a quiet protest song...

Him Mut Powerful of Him

A previous girlfriend and current friend of mine complimented me on my manliness from time to time. This was qualified by a questioning of the notion of manliness and a certainty that her notion of it was rooted in a particular confidence that I, at least at those or that time, displayed. While this led to a number of conversations on the topic, I was never engaged with the thought as much as I am now. It strikes me that I have not developed a personal notion of manliness, where I do have at least some language to use around notions of femininity and a personal ideal of personhood.
So, where to begin?
I could work contrastively from my ideas and language around femininity. Or not, as this approach would assume a fundamental competition between these ideas that I don't feel exists. While, yes, the feminine and the masculine are fundamentally different, they are not essentially competitive with each other. They most certainly both deserve language expressive of that difference, but to do so comparatively would either narrow my thought to what can be compared, or bring me to the realm of my ideas of personhood, which is another set of thoughts altogether.
I could approach mass media representations of manliness and debunk or appreciate them in turn. While a very useful tool for understanding my understanding of media, this approach, now firmly rooted in what passes in adolescence for feminism, will not bring me any closer to what I may claim as my ideas of what it is to be a man, just as it brings me no closer to an understanding of femininity to say that "skinny models = bad." This thinking is limited to being as dimensional as the media being examined is.
I could read and consider pop-psych self-help books for men. Ha.
My recent obsession with this topic has led me to a few tools that may be useful. As I've been experimenting with bringing this up in conversation, I have heard myself resorting to forms of hero-worship in order to try to express myself. So, there's that. I've also been considering assembling an anthology of poems, song, stories, plays, essays, articles, paintings, prints, etcetera that speak to my foggy notions of manliness. There's that, too.
So, my starting point is a set of heroes, followed through with expressions that speak to the points of worship. The goal is to have a language to use to explore this world honestly. Subject, as always, to change.

What's it going to take to get Thuy out of Takraw?

This goofball has gotta get out of the sport. Hell, Thuy bugs me more than Arriaga before he got smoked in the head with the goatskin.

Ngyuen Thi Buch Thuy: 'Just Give Me The Damn Sepak Takraw Ball'

Alison Jackson

Allison Jackson and I get along just fine. Well, at least my perception of her as a character and I do. I'm enamoured with the idea of a distance between person and character and how important it is to perceive that gap, that ambiguity. Not much more to say than that, just that I keep in mind that when I talk about a public person, I'm talking about a character that has been created by a number of forces. Ethos awareness FTW! Down with narrative reliability!

Hoo-rah for Context Shifts!

Context FTW! This here song was my breakup song this summer and rarely failed to make me cry for months and months. Angry, my housemate and heterosexual life-mate, knew well enough to avoid me when I put the song on and laughed terribly (quite rightly so) for it. But now, with new people and encounters, I get to listen to it as the hopeful song it is, not the baleful song I heard before. Not that I have a pretty face... [oh, and I only half refuse to admit that this is a country song]

Practically Compassionate

Daniel Goleman talks about compassion. It is so hard to talk about this without sounding trite or using cliche but he does so with practicality and...well...compassion for his audience. I'm particularly curious to the field of neuro-science that he refers to as describing a kind of "neural wifi." I totally believe it and am curious as to how I might go about building my neural wifi network. At any rate, give a watch or a listen, there's not much to say here except that there are some good reminders.

Gadget Want

Okay...when did NXP and Purple Labs sneak into my dreams and steal my phone. Seriously, give it to me now so my dreams of a good Linux handset can be dashed before I go silly waiting for OpenMoko to give me some consumer hardware...

Will Wright Doesn't Want To Play God...

...he wants you to. I've read snippets and bits all over game blogs about Will Wright's upcoming work, "Spore," without really having an understanding of what it was. I knew that it was an evolution game wherein the player would guide the development of a life form. What I didn't know was that it was an exercise in ethics and organizational dynamics. I am resolutely excited to interact with this toy. I have yet to more specifically define my interest in virtual worlds, so this is not the time to talk about that, but I do know that the range of play available is exciting to me. I will never be too old to play, be silly and excited and explore someone else's imagination, and the more people I can have to play with, the better.