Reblog: Haptic Feedback

Haptic Feedback

HTLit

Anne Mangen explores how haptic responses shape our understanding of text. She's interested in what we gain from physically touching a book.

Haptic perception is of vital importance to reading, and should be duly acknowledged. The reading process and experience of a digital text are greatly affected by the fact that we click and scroll, in contrast to tactilely richer experience when flipping through the pages of a print book. When reading digital texts, our haptic interaction with the text is experienced as taking place at an indeterminate distance from the actual text, whereas when reading print text we are physically and phenomenologically (and literally) in touch with the material substrate of the text itself.

The problem with this argument is that it makes assumptions about the virtues of haptic feedback, positing that some subconscious phenomenon occurs that shapes the reading experience when we physically touch a book. The physicality of the book does not bring us any "closer" to the materiality of the signified. We can't rely on the assumption that the ability to touch or feel our content enriches it without an argument for why it does, and many of the current arguments can be explained by bad interfaces or other outside factors. Superficial arguments, like that haptic feedback signals to the reader where she is in a book, ignore the fact that much of this information can be easily mimicked by other technologies: completion percentage or a scrollbar with a "page x of y" display are now familiar substitutes for assessing how far one is in a story. How many of us really physically feel where we are in a story beyond the first and last few pages anyway?

Mangen isn't just interested in ebooks; she writes of hypertext fiction:

In Narrative as Virtual Reality [Marie-Laure Ryan] concludes that 'the hypertext format could provide the type of immersivity of the detective novel, as do some computer games, if it were based on a determinate and fully motivated plot' […] I will argue, however, that when it comes to the (in)compatibility of digital technology with phenomenological immersion, plot is not the whole story. In my view, the incompatibility has at least as much, if not more, to do with the sensory-motor affordances of distinctly different materialities of technology than with plot.

(This explains why early stories like Esther and Ruth, which were designed for the sensory-motor affordances of the scroll, worked so poorly in the form of the codex book that they were soon forgotten. – MB)

I'm skeptical that haptic feedback is really at issue here. One can imagine a work in which tactile sensation is important ("words that yield" takes on a new meaning) but surely haptic feedback is not the only—or even most important—component. Do touch or—more broadly—mimetic sensations encourage more immersive experiences, or are other factors at play? How does agency contribute? It seems plausible that certain physical actions illicit Pavlovian conditioned emotional responses, but is there research to support such claims? Is touching an object, alone, enough to trigger such a response?

Sent with Reeder

Hanli Geyser

ReBlog: Patanoir

Patanoir

HTLit

Patanoir, Simon Christiansen's brilliantly clever IF piece, introduced me to the concept of pataphor—and by extension pataphysics, a concept of "physics beyond metaphysics" or "the science of imaginary solutions." Patanoir opens with the definition of a pataphor:

Pataphor (noun):

  1. An extended metaphor that creates its own context.

  2. That which occurs when a lizard's tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard.

- Pablo Lopez 

This definition, and understanding of the concepts behind it, allow for interesting play between language, concepts, and the imaginary. If John controls a chain of events, feeling constricted and even suffocated by it, Mary might stumble in upon John's actual dead body, tragically choked to death by the chain.

Patanoir explores this idea through the lens of the protagonist, you, a private detective who has come off your medication against your doctor's advice. Anytime the text uses a simile and something is like something else, you can interact with the metaphorical object because, well, you're crazy.

>x baron

Thin, as though his skin had been draped over his skeleton with nothing in between. Dark blue eyes, like deep lakes carved into his face. His hair is grey.

> dive into lake

You dive. The surface of the lake approaches quickly, until it fills your entire field of vision. Then the cool water surrounds you.

 

This structure leads to interesting puzzles and creative solutions. While at first it seemed to make the puzzles too easy—most can be solved by examining everything in a room, with similes being huge flailing pointers toward clues—the character implication for these strategies became more interesting than the puzzles themselves. Sure, you can enter the room, skim the text and scan for the keyword "like," but such a reading suggests that you're more a part of the protagonists delusions than the reader's detached and objective reality, interesting implications for reader-protagonist identification.

Sent with Reeder

Hanli Geyser

ReBlog: Techland apologises for “feminist whore” code found in Dead Island

Things like this are a problem because they demonstrate a deep seated misogynism on the part of the company responsible. While I wish I could laugh it off and say their issues are their own problem and the game should be judged only as a final product the bitter taste it leaves won't just go away.

The games industry has struggled with issues of representation for many years, and a disturbing attitude towards women still remains. I hate having to define myself by my gender, I feel like I am still fighting battles that should have been dismissed in the 70s. But every time I visit a 'gaming' site filled with half naked women and 'hot-t lesbians' I am reminded that in this small subset of society those battles still need to be fought.
Then, whenever I feel progress is being made, something like this surfaces and I am reminded that it is not the attitude only of a few trolls but something systemic throughout the genre.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother...

Techland apologises for “feminist whore” code found in Dead Island:

Reblog: Fallout: The Board Game Lets you Play Monopoly After the Apocalypse [Fallout]

From Kotako,Games of games in games:

Fallout: The Board Game Lets you Play Monopoly After the Apocalypse [Fallout]:

This custom version of Monopoly, crafted by PinkAxolotl, really has to be seen to be believed. It's not like it's just a regular board with a few Fallout references made here and there. It's as Fallout-themed as it could possibly hope for. More »

Reblog: IGF 2010 Finalist Trauma Out on August 8th

I can't wait...

Article by Tim W

A release date for the gesture-based adventure game Trauma has been announced: the triple-nominated 2010 IGF finalist will be available to purchase for 5 Euros starting this August 8th. Windows, Mac and Linux users can try the game online for free at traumagame.com, and you can also buy Trauma from Steam (both Windows and Mac) on launch day.

We'll let you know the minute it's playable online, since the hosting server is unlikely to last for even a couple of hours once news about the demo going live breaks out. Buying the game is an option as well, and getting it direct from the developer means that you'll have a version that is completely DRM-free.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog

Before I Die | A Project by Candy Chang

This may be one of the most beautiful public art works I have ever seen.

Before I Die | A Project by Candy Chang

First person photographs

Some interesting “first person” photos. The first few are far more successful than the later ones, but it's interesting how the inclusion of a body part signals the first person perspective. While the viewer of a photograph is always aware that it is created through a first person point of view due to the very nature of the camera, in photography point of view is largely obscured, even effaced. Traditionally the role of the photographer as creative agent is masked. This is amplified by the frame and screen which, echoing painting and echoed in film, makes the photo seem removed, as if coming from an omniscient narrator. Some photographers do reinsert themselves into the frame through the inclusion of shadows and reflections. But here that experiential, embodied element is brought through by the fps convention of the fragmented limb. The 'first person' title alludes to both game and narrative techniques. All in all, one or two great images, and an interesting concept.

Cool First Person Photo Project

Cool First Person Photo Project: Andrea Di Gioia is a great photographer from Italy. Here is a set he's been working on of "first person" photos, but make sure you go check out the rest of his stuff a...

Reblog: Could You "Finish" World Of Warcraft Without Killing Anything? [Make Lore, Not War]

from Kotaku by Luke Plunkett

"

Here's an exercise in patience: a World of Warcraft player has managed to reach the maximum level 85 without killing a single thing. For a game built around the idea of, well, killing things, that's quite the achievement! More »

"

Reblog: Video game in your browser's location bar

Cory Doctorow at boingboing points to this amazing little game:

URL Hunter: http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

Video game in your browser's location bar:
  

Probably Corey's (sic. Should read Probably Interactive's) HTML 5 video-game 'URL Hunter' takes place entirely in the URL bar of your browser, in which you must chase down rogue 'a's with your mighty 'O' and clobber them with the spacebar. I keep running into croggling demos of HTML5's capabilities -- last week in Toronto, Mozilla.org's Brett Gaylor showed me a WebGL demo that left me with my jaw on the floor. It's going to be a cool couple of Web-years, most surely.
"

Reblog: Browser Game Pick: RIZK (Playerthree)

An truly fantastic game reflecting on the environmental impacts of resource gathering. Well worth a play.

Found thanks to IndiGames.com. 
Article below by Cassandra Khaw.
 "

Back in the early nineties, long before the gaming industry became obsessed with sex and other drivel, edutainment-related material was everywhere. Sadly, only a handful were brilliant; the rest were mostly boring or, at times, borderline preachy. Granted, that's how my nine year old self remembers it - your mileage might vary. Thus, when I first heard of RIZK, a part of the Science Museum's three-year series entitled 'Climate Changing..', I was extremely skeptical about its production values. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
RIZK is, essentially, a 2D tower defense-like game that requires you to nurture and safeguard an alien plant that serves as your only means of escaping to the next level. In order to accomplish this, you'll have to carefully budget a somewhat meagre stash of coins in order to create your strangely ameobic-like minions. There isn't any violence in the game, though. Your enemies here are not hungry herbivores but indigenous vegetation that release spores capable of hurting your plant; your own critters won't do anything outside of generate protective shields of varying strength and range.
According to the press release that popped up in my mail today, RIZK's visual presentation is apparently greatly influenced by the sci-fi posters of the 50's and 60's and honestly, there's something quaintly charming about the game's looks. Most of the terrain is nothing but silhouettes framed against a stary, pastel-flooded sky. The placid outlook, however, bellies the surprisingly intricate gameplay; it rapidly becomes less a question of resource management and more a case of you attempting not to agitate the planet's residents too much.
It took a little while for the message to sink in but once it did, I was impressed with the work put into the game by its developers. RIZK, without sounding overtly 'in your face', rather neatly encapsulates the antagonistic relationship man's technological progress has with Mother Nature. I'm not going to explain exactly how it all works out simply because it'd detract from the message but I can assure you that it'd at least trigger a brief 'Huh' when the epiphany finally strikes.
Play the game now at the Science Museum's official website.
"

Reblog: Mateas on Agency

This post by HTLit points to a very interesting and helpful article by Michael Mateas. Isn't it fantastic how we find things?

 "

Recent interest around Eastgate in the role of agency in narrative immersion has led me to a fascinating essay by Michael Mateas, co-author of Façade. Using Aristotle’s theory of drama as a starting point, Mateas diagrams the role of agency in interactive drama, adding an additional model of choice and causation atop Aristotle’s diagram of narrative causation. This addition results in the proposition that “a player will experience agency when there is a balance between material and formal constraints.”Leaning heavily on previous work by Murray and others, the essay provides and interesting perspective for anyone interested in agency and its relation to interactive narrative."

Reblog: Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron

The following article was posted by Nicholas Carr on his blog Rough Type.   Many of the assertions are ill researched and misconstrued. I find the article rather unfortunate since it displays an emotional response shrouded in vaguely academic terminology.

'December 08, 2010 Craig Mod is psyched about the future of literary storytelling. "With digital media," he writes in "The Digital Death of the Author," an article that's part of New Scientist's "Storytelling 2.0" series, "the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time." E-storytelling is to storytelling, he says, as Wikipedia is to a printed encyclopedia. And that's a good thing:

The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to arrive fully actualised ... [Ultimately,] authorship becomes a collaboration between writers and readers. Readers can edit and update stories, either passively in comments on blogs or actively via wiki-style interfaces.

Sound familiar? It should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when personal computers were new and their screens appeared to literary theorists as virgin canvases, there was enormous excitement over the possibilities for digital media to revolutionize storytelling. The enthusiasm back then centered on hypertext and multimedia, rather than on Internet collaboration tools, but the idea was the same, as was the "death of the author" rhetoric. By "freeing" text from the page, digital media would blur the line between reader and writer, spurring a profusion of new, interactive forms of literary expression and storytelling. As George Landow and Paul Delany wrote in their introduction to the influential 1991 compendium Hypermedia and Literary Studies, "So long as the text was married to a physical media, readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed." The computer would break this static structure, allowing text to become more like "a network, a tree diagram, a nest of Chinese boxes, or a web." That in turn would shift "the boundaries between individual works as well as those between author and reader," overthrowing "certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text." Then, as now, the celebration of the idea of interactive writing was founded more on a popular ideology of cultural emancipation than on a critical assessment of artistic expression. It reflected a yearning for a radical sort of cultural democratization, which required that "the author" be pulled down from his pedestal and revealed to be a historical accident, a now dispensable byproduct of the technology of the printing press, which had served to fix type, and hence stories, on the page. The author was the father who had to be slain before culture could be liberated from its elitist, patriarchal shackles. The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new, in other words. Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories. Interactive storytelling hasn't become popular - and will never become popular - because it produces crappy stories that no one wants to read. That's not just a result of the writing-by-committee problem (I would have liked to have a link here to the gruesome product of Penguin Books' 2007 wiki-novel experiment, but, mercifully, it's been removed from the web). The act of reading a story, it turns out, is very different from, and ultimately incompatible with, the act of writing a story. The state of the story-reader is not a state of passivity, as is often, and sillily, suggested, but it is a state of repose. To enter a story, to achieve the kind of immersion that produces enjoyment and emotional engagement, a reader has to give up not only control but the desire to impose control. Readership and authorship are different, if mutually necessary, states: yin and yang. As soon as the reader begins to fiddle with the narrative - to take an authorial role - the spell of the story is broken. The story ceases to be a story and becomes a contraption. What we actually value most about stories, as readers, is what Mod terms, disparagingly, "full actualization" - the meticulous crafting of an intriguing plot, believable characters and dialogue, and settings and actions that feel true (even if they're fantastical), all stitched together seamlessly with felicitous prose. More than a single author may be involved in this act of artistic creation - a good editor or other collaborator may make crucial contributions, for instance - but it must come to the reader as a harmonious whole (even if it comes in installments). I agree with Mod that the shift of books from pages to screens will change the way we read books and hence, in time, the way writers write them, but I think his assessment of how those changes will play out is wrongheaded. (See also Alan Jacobs's take, which questions another of Mod's assumptions.) A usable encyclopedia article can, as Wikipedia has shown us, be constructed, "continuously and in real time," by a dispersed group of writers and editors with various talents. But it's a fallacy to believe that what works for an encyclopedia will also work for a novel or a tale. We read and evaluate encyclopedia articles in a completely different way from how we read and evaluate stories. An encyclopedia article can be "good enough"; a story has to be good.
Posted by nick at December 8, 2010 03:26 PM'

Reblog: Fear of an App Planet

This is a brief look at the ideas of censorship that are implied by the move to app stores in obtaining cultural content. Interestingly, in a similar move of random censorship to that which Juul describes below, Amazon today removed an e-book on pedophilia from sale due to public pressure while many others on the same topic remained available on the shopping giant.

From The Ludologist by Jesper Juul:

"
With Apple announcing an App store for the Mac following the App Store for iPhones and iPads, it’s worth pondering what this means for video games.

1. It’s a great way to allow the distribution of games of different scope, so why is this the first major commercial internet-based software store for a major operating system? Seems so obvious. (Though Linux users have long had similar systems, though only for non-commercial software.)
2. The Mac App store will have similarly strict and semi-random policies as the iOS app store. As I have argued before, I think the app store policies are ambiguous and inconsistently enforced by design: this has the desired chilling effects of self-censorship among developers, while Apple can claim that it intended no such thing.
3. It has historically been the case that console games were heavily controlled and censored, while PC and Mac games allowed for freedom of expression. Assuming that more software sales move from boxed and regular web to the Mac App Store, we are going to see the Mac becoming less of a platform for edgy and experimental content. You can still get your software elsewhere, but convenience matters.
4. And again: there would be an uproar if a major bookstore censored books according to Apple guidelines, so why do we accept censorship for games?
5. Which means that the potential future in which all games on all platforms are distributed through app store-like channels … that is a potential nightmare."

Reblog: YouTube vs. Fair Use

This is a disaster for fair use practices. If clips are to be used for teaching, of blogging, or referencing the draconian misuse of copyright by many copyright holders will cripple it.
Article by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror.

YouTube vs. Fair Use:

"In YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie, I described my love-hate relationship with YouTube, at least as it existed in way back in the dark ages of 2007.

Now think back through all the videos you've watched on YouTube. How many of them contained any original content?
It's perhaps the ultimate case of cognitive dissonance: by YouTube's own rules [which prohibit copyrighted content], YouTube cannot exist. And yet it does.
How do we reconcile YouTube's official hard-line position on copyright with the reality that 90% of the content on their site is clearly copyrighted and clearly used without permission? It seems YouTube has an awfully convenient 'don't ask, don't tell' policy-- they make no effort to verify that the uploaded content is either original content or fair use. The copyrighted content stays up until the copyright owner complains. Then, and only then, is it removed.

Today's lesson, then, is be careful what you ask for.
At the time, I just assumed that YouTube would never be able to resolve this problem through technology. The idea that you could somehow fingerprint every user-created uploaded video against every piece of copyrighted video ever created was so laughable to me that I wrote it off as impossible.
A few days ago I uploaded a small clip from the movie Better Off Dead to YouTube, in order to use it in the Go That Way, Really Fast blog entry. This is quintessential fair use: a tiny excerpt of the movie, presented in the context of a larger blog entry. So far, so good.
But then I uploaded a small clip from a different movie that I'm planning to use in another, future blog entry. Within an hour of uploading it, I received this email:

Dear {username},
Your video, {title}, may have content that is owned or licensed by {company}.
No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.
Sincerely, - The YouTube Team

This 90 second clip is from a recent movie. Not a hugely popular movie, mind you, but a movie you've probably heard of. This email both fascinated and horrified me. How did they match a random, weirdly cropped (thanks, Windows Movie Maker) clip from the middle of a non-blockbuster movie within an hour of me uploading it? This had to be some kind of automated process that checks uploaded user content against every piece of copyrighted content ever created (or the top n subset thereof), exactly the kind that I thought was impossible.
Uh oh.
I began to do some research. I quickly found Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System, which doesn't cover video, but it's definitely related:

I was caught by surprise one day when I received an automated email from YouTube informing me that my video had a music rights issue and it was removed from the site. I didn't really care.
Then a car commercial parody I made (arguably one of my better videos) was taken down because I used an unlicensed song. That pissed me off. I couldn't easily go back and re-edit the video to remove the song, as the source media had long since been archived in a shoebox somewhere. And I couldn't simply re-upload the video, as it got identified and taken down every time. I needed to find a way to outsmart the fingerprinter. I was angry and I had a lot of free time. Not a good combination.
I racked my brain trying to think of every possible audio manipulation that might get by the fingerprinter. I came up with an almost-scientific method for testing each modification, and I got to work.

Further research led me to this brief TED talk, How YouTube Thinks About Copyright.

We compare each upload against all the reference files in our database. This heat map is going to show you how the brain of this system works.

Here we can see the reference file being compared to the user generated content. The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. This means we can identify a match even if the copy uses just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion, and has degraded audio or video.
The scale and speed of this system is truly breathtaking -- we're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. And when we compare those 100 years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. It'd be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day without as much as a coffee break.

I have to admit that I'm astounded by the scope, scale, and sheer effectiveness of YouTube's new copyright detection system that I thought was impossible! Seriously, watch the TED talk. It's not long. The more I researched YouTube's video identification tool, the more I realized that resistance is futile. It's so good that the only way to defeat it is by degrading your audio and video so much that you have effectively ruined it. And when it comes to copyright violations, if you can achieve mutually assured destruction, then you have won. Absolutely and unconditionally.
This is an outcome so incredible I am still having trouble believing it. But I have the automatically blocked uploads to prove it.
Now, I am in no way proposing that copyright is something we should be trying to defeat or work around. I suppose I was just used to the laissez faire status quo on YouTube, and the idea of a video copyright detection system this effective was completely beyond the pale. My hat is off to the engineers at Google who came up with this system. They aren't the bad guys here; they offer some rather sane alternatives when copyright matches are found:

If Content ID identifies a match between a user upload and material in the reference library, it applies the usage policy designated by the content owner. The usage policy tells the system what to do with the video. Matches can be to only the audio portion of an upload, the video portion only, or both.
There are three usage policies -- Block, Track or Monetize. If a rights owner specifies a Block policy, the video will not be viewable on YouTube. If the rights owner specifies a Track policy, the video will continue to be made available on YouTube and the rights owner will receive information about the video, such as how many views it receives. For a Monetize policy, the video will continue to be available on YouTube and ads will appear in conjunction with the video. The policies can be region-specific, so a content owner can allow a particular piece of material in one country and block the material in another.

The particular content provider whose copyright I matched chose the draconian block policy. That's certainly not Google's fault, but I guess you could say I'm Feeling Unlucky.
Although the 90 second clip I uploaded is clearly copyrighted content -- I would never dispute that -- my intent is not to facilitate illegal use, but to 'quote' the movie scene as part of a larger blog entry. YouTube does provide recourse for uploaders; they make it easy to file a dispute once the content is flagged as copyrighted. So I dutifully filled out the dispute form, indicating that I felt I had a reasonable claim of fair use.

Unfortunately, my fair use claim was denied without explanation by the copyright holder.
Let's consider the four guidelines for fair use I outlined in my original 2007 blog entry:

1. Is the use transformative?
2. Is the source material intended for the public good?
3. How much was taken?
4. What's the market effect?

While we're clear on 3 and 4, items 1 and 2 are hazy in a mashup. This would definitely be transformative, and I like to think that I'm writing for the erudition of myself and others, not merely to entertain people. I uploaded with the intent of the video being viewed through a blog entry, with YouTube as the content host only. But it was still 90 seconds of the movie viewable on YouTube by anyone, context free.
So I'm torn.
On one hand, this is an insanely impressive technological coup. The idea that YouTube can (with the assistance of the copyright holders) really validate every minute of uploaded video against every minute of every major copyrighted work is unfathomable to me. When YouTube promised to do this to placate copyright owners, I was sure they were delaying for time. But much to my fair-use-loving dismay, they've actually gone and built the damn thing -- and it works.
Just, maybe, it works a little too well. I'm still looking for video sharing services that offer some kind of fair use protection. "

Reblog: Escaping the fridge

This is an excellent, if brief, discussion of the use of 'women in refrigerator's' in Dragon Age Origins. 'Women in refrigerators' is a term used in comics to describe the all to common use of a female characters trauma to add emotional drive to the hero's quest. In this piece Kateri looks at how this trope is subverted in a single moment in 'Dragon Age - Origins'


Original article by Kateri at falling awkwardly


Escaping the fridge:

"A quick break from srs metaphysical bsns to talk about ladies and kitchen appliances.

When is a woman in a refrigerator not in a refrigerator?

Dragon Age: Origins offers the player several ways of beginning the game, several “origins”. Each one provides your character with a home, a history, and a reason for joining the elite fighting force of the Grey Wardens, thus setting up the rest of the game’s story. This about one of them. Trigger warning for rape and violence; spoiler warning for the City Elf origin.


I have to say, when I first played through the City Elf origin story, I wasn’t wildly impressed. The lowdown: after a series of unfortunate events, the cousin of the PC, a young female elf named Shianni, is raped and beaten, and you, the protagonist, arrive too late to prevent it. This leads into a revenge opportunity against the men responsible and other assorted chaos that culminates in the PC being recruited into the Grey Wardens to avoid the long arm of the law.
While I didn’t think the (offscreen) rape was handled tastelessly or implausibly, I considered the whole situation rather a cheap narrative device. Specifically, I suspected they were falling into the “Women in Refrigerators” trope. For the uninitiated, this is a narrative device common to all media, but especially prevalent in comics (from where the name originates) and video games. It can be identified when a supporting character is killed, raped or otherwise traumatized horribly for the sole purpose of providing the main character with an ‘I WILL AVENGE YOOOU’ emotional motivation and related Dramatic Angst.
It’s not the presence of death/rape/trauma that is problematic, so much as the fact that the victim of this trauma seems to exist solely as a vehicle for said trauma rather than as an actual character. Once the desired Angst has been shovelled onto the – usually male – main character, the – usually female – victim, having served their purpose, is often forgotten about entirely. Surviving victims, in the unlikely event that the plot still bothers to involve them, will generally show no memory or ill-effects of their experience. The trope is cheap, frequently sexist and an insult to people with experience of actual trauma. Hence my lack of enthusiasm when I seemed to recognise it. Oh lovely, I thought, this Shianni character’s getting ’fridged in an attempt to provoke an emotional reaction in the player. Whatever. I left the starter area, got into the game proper, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then later, much later, I met Shianni* again. This was after my PC had been adventuring it up across the land, exploring new places, meeting new people and killing them. Shianni congratulated him on his accomplishments, in tones laced with sarcasm. Then she turned it around on him, accusing him of having forgotten, in his glorious crusade, where he had come from, and why it all started: “You don’t even feel much anymore when you remember it, do you?” she said, bitterly. “You’ve moved on, past the horror of that night. I envy you. You’ve gone on to other things, things I can only dream of.”**
I felt it like a punch in the stomach. It helped that the voice acting was a masterpiece of subtle emotion, but more than that – it was all true. She had been a plot device, her pain mere emotional leverage to set my protagonist on his journey. I had barely given her a second thought since the game proper began, focusing on my “important” quests, my “real” party members. But in that moment, she refused to let me do that. Screw you, hero boy, she seemed to be saying to my PC, you were the lucky one. I was raped, and you got to use it to your own advantage and then forget about it. I have never had the luxury of forgetting about it. Every day that you were triumphing over evil and hunting for treasure, I had to remember it, and live with it, and carry on anyway.

Judged and found wanting.

Shianni subverts the “women in refrigerators” trope not just because she survives, but because she, and her trauma, do not suddenly stop mattering once their narrative usefulness is spent. She carries on – we later find her pouring her considerable energies into activism and the defense of her people – but her experiences remain part of her. She insists on being a character, not just a plot device, and she doesn’t let the player get away with treating her like one.
When is a woman in a refrigerator not in a refrigerator? When she kicks open the door and breaks it over your head.

*OK, so technically, it’s a spirit, and it’s unclear if it’s actually representing Shianni, or (more probably) a manifestation of the protagonist’s unconscious mind. For the purposes of Shianni’s character development and role from the player’s point of view, however, it doesn’t actually matter which she is!
**It’s worth noting that Shianni doesn’t have this conversation with all City Elf PCs, as I later discovered, just the ones who deserve it. A friend roleplayed a city elf plagued by guilt about what happened, and met with a Shianni who, while still haunted by the memory of what happened, gently tried to assuage the PC’s self-blame. File this under “BioWare are Impressively Sneaky”."

Reblog: the truth is in the back and forth

An interesting experiment by James Bridle.  Article as posted by Bob Stein on IF:book:


the truth is in the back and forth: "
James Bridle (designer and programmer of the Institute's Golden Notebook project in 2008) just published the complete history of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.

James writes on his blog: This particular book--or rather, set of books--is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article's inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'.
As early as 2006, i wrote in if:book that the truth in Wikipedia articles lay in the edits, rather than the surface article:
In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. The standalone nature of print encyclopedias also means that any discussion about articles is essentially private and hidden from collective view. The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the 'finished piece', ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the 'truth' is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide. Network-authored works need to be read in a new way that allows one to focus on the process as well as the end product.
Four years later, we don't yet have the tools that would let people read Wikipedia articles in 'a new way' but hopefully Bridle's very impressive experiment with this one article will spur efforts to develop new tools for reading online works which are constantly being changed and edited.

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Reblog: Gamer Dreams

Interesting if contentious research highlighted by Jamie Madigan at psychology of games:


Gamer Dreams: "
Do hardcore gamers have more bizarre but less threatening dreams than non-gamers? One of the things I love about academics is that if you chain a million of them to a million graduate students, then one of them –by pure chance alone– will study a question like that. For example, I’ve been reading about a research program by psychologists Jayne Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla about the ways in which the dreams of hardcore gamers differ from non-gamers.
Curious as this is, it’s actually not that off the wall if you do some digging. Research suggests that people, especially adolescents, use violent and/or scary media as a way to practice dealing with life’s comparatively mundane but nonetheless stressful situations. The theory goes that games (and other media like comics, movies, or books) give us a safe place to either become a little desensitized to anxiety-provoking ideas, or to develop cognitive strategies for coping with them. It’s like play fighting, but for your brain.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing that one of the studies by Gakenbach and Kuruvilla¹ looked at, except that they examined how our mind may do this mental preparation for real-world threats during our dreams. Termed “threat simulation theory” the idea is that our minds create dreams to simulate aspects of those threats so that we can practice dealing with them and be better prepared for the real deal in real life. So if we’re worried about crime, we may dream about our house getting broken into.

A typical gamer at rest.

Gakenbach and Kuruvilla figured that like dreams, video games, are fake realities into which we project ourselves. This is particularly true with highly immersive games where players start to feel like they are spatially present in the game world. The researchers hypothesized that intense gaming sessions can fill the role traditionally handled by scary and threatening dreams, and with lowered needs to practice dealing with real-life anxiety, there will be fewer threat simulation dreams.
And, lo and behold, when they studied the data from surveys asking participants to recount their dreams and game playing habits, Gackenback and Kuruvilla found that this was generally true. With regards to people’s dreams, the survey measured whether or not there was a threatening event, what it was like, who the target of the threat was, how severe it was, whether or not the dreamer was participating in the threat, and the dreamer’s reaction. In short, hardcore gamers² still had violent and threatening dreams –no surprise, since we often dream about what we encounter while waking, and for hardcore gamers that often includes video game violence– but they reported being less frightened by the dreams and were much less likely to characterize them as “nightmares.” Even more interestingly, this was especially true of those who played lots of first-person shooters.
But is that the only way that gamers dream differently? Nope. In a subsequent study,³ the same researchers also looked at how likely hardcore gamers were to have really bizarre dreams. And honestly, what I found most fascinating about this study was how they conceptualized bizarreness as consisting of three factors:

• Incongruity or mismatching features of dream images
• Uncertain or explicit vagueness of dream images
• Discontinuity or sudden appearance, disappearance, or transformation of dream images

Anyway, the researchers figured that since we see so many really weird things in our video games during our waking hours, that weirdness must seep through into our dreams. Turns out they were right. Upon analyzing more data from surveys asking participants to describe their dreams and gaming habits, the Gackenback et al. found that gamers tended to have dreams with more vague and incongruent content, especially as it related to people and places.
Again, maybe not surprising, but the authors have some interesting theories as to why this is the case, beyond the obvious explanation that we tend to dream about what we see while awake the day before. For example, the more bizarre dreams may happen because gamers’ minds may be conditioned to be open to and even expect unorthodox relationships between concepts and things. This jives with other research showing that playing video games may enhance nonverbal problem solving, especially as it relates to spatial reasoning. Additionally, greater creativity (which also requires one to “get” unorthodox relationships among different things) has been shown to greater dream bizarreness. So hardcore gamers, as a group, may be conditioned to be more creative and better at certain types of problem solving relative to casual gamers or non-gamers. Because …we have really weird dreams. Or rather, we have the weird dreams because of those other things.
At any rate, it’s an interesting line of research, if a little niche.⁴ Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.
Footnotes:

1. Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256.
2. The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods.
3. Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231.
4. Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games.

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