It Is Very Dark

I don’t like, nor do I trust, anything I’ve ever read on the internet

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

And so here we are with the LAST ASSIGNED READING. This fills me more with fear than sadness because it means that I need to really get in gear on this wacky final project that I’ve heard bandied about.

Once again, and even more so than last reading, I feel that this reading is there merely to serve a symbolic hole. Ah ha! The book says to us! You have hit the end and now here is an old explanation on the world wide web, how quaint, you can fill in the rest yourself with THE INTERNET’S AMAZING POWERS. It is a dry article that doesn’t seem to push any philosophy or anything, it just presents us with some basic history on where all this came from and a simple rundown on how it works. I suppose among the things that I didn’t know about was the gopher protocol, but according to wikipedia, we don’t need to know about that since its not used anymore. So there.

We are presented though with some brief ideas as to where the future will take us, and one of the more telling signs is a note on creating something that people can easily make their own websites where they could link all their stuff from. Here we are a decade and a half later and everyone in the class has one of these magic online platforms that does all the work for us online and automagically requires very little in the way of work. In fact, for those of you who have to install the damn things on their servers, they’ll realize that even THAT is pretty simple (though playing around with databases is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes, oh well).

I think that we don’t really appreciate how important hyperlinks are. I didn’t. This book really nails the damn thing home though, from that silly old memex that everyone got all excited about. Blogs, the biggest blogs we got, aren’t anything but blurbs with a link on the end linking to something else. All the websites on earth are just a series of doors leading to other doors, information nesting to information nesting to further information. All the bullroar about a 3D webclient, we didn’t need take into it. There may still be Second Life and mmorpgs, but our web is this, the words on the screen, occasionally blue with a line under it. If its anything that this class taught me is how massively and extremely important those little doors are.

Games are for children

Monday, April 7, 2008

One thing I noticed about this article, though I guess it was appropriate for 1984, was that the author kept bashing pinball. Better than pinball this, video games do it better than pinball that. Well its because of jerks like her that we don’t have pinball anymore. Well, that and the fact that they’re extremely easy to break, wildly expensive to maintain, and not really that much popular. But frankly, the games that Turkle is talking about don’t really exist anymore. Well, not entirely. But this is a clearly dated piece, and unlike many of the other articles that we’ve read so far it hasn’t really come out to state something far reaching (or wildly incorrect) as much as its cool to read a scholarly text on video games. But having been someone who has read a bunch of them, a decided meh from this direction.

About the games that don’t really exist anymore, at the very end of the reading, she speaks of David, who makes the clear point about these eighties video games that they’re very simple and exactly what they are. Asteroids, Pac-Man, Missile Command, you name it, they are games that are a constant challenge, and the only challenge is more of the challenge that you’re facing. Arcade games, Atari 2600 games (and games of that generation, including from stuff like the Intellivision and the Coleco), and even NES games (throwbacks to this genre existed in every following generation, but it was no longer the norm), were all about that. You could make the argument that games are pretty much all the same with a lot of sexy new graphics. I probably would, but it’d deflate my argument and I’ve already written so many words. We see, though, that there are games that go further to recreate the DnD experience that was spoken of, more so rather than the arcade-zen experience.

Actually, now that I think about it, there’s all those rhythm games, and those are pretty much exactly along those lines of the zen thing. And that massive genre of puzzle games that is similar. And retro stuff like Geometry Wars. Still though, I’m going to make the argument that the main thrust of gaming right now is moving in a direction away from what he was saying, especially because there’s a huge difference between arcade games and games that run on your home system. An arcade game was designed specifically to swallow your quarters, and thusly the difficulty curve would usually let you get maybe one level in before it beat the poo out of you. With home systems, we’ve already made the investment by the time the game is sitting inside our respective console (or souped up PC). The mainstream gamers (which has moved away from a hardcore group of masochists, which is perfectly fine by me) so unless you’re playing a game that’s designed to be a throwback to that, almost every game now doesn’t offer much in the way of huge difficulty in the way that there will always be the existential dilemma (I was actually writing a short story about this) of the fact that you will always lose no matter what. Part of that was something that made those arcade games work.

If you want to watch a further discussion of some aspects of the difference between this classic era of arcade games versus us soft mushy people that need to “win” games to have our fragile self esteems held up by garish colored lights and fancy textures, I’d recommend renting the excellent documentary The King of Kong. Look it up, you lazy bump, I’m not going to relate the plot since people have done better on this internet, but I will say that there is some talk about what makes games of that era way different than what we see now. Its also really funny, and about way more than video games.

Final Paper

I don’t like, nor do I trust, anything I’ve ever read on the internet

Games are for children

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