Interesting Title!

If Plato felt the need to bar paintings and poetry from his Republic, the idea of a video game would flabbergast him.  The dangers that he perceives and describes in the excerpt we read are amplified by videogames, especially those of the MMORPG-type.

He uses three main points to argue the ‘evils’ of art, whether it be painting or poetry: art focuses on false truth by being imitations which cannot compare to the truth of the original subjects; art appeals to the emotional instead of the rational portion of our souls; and that art damages those who view it.  Each of these ideas can be related to videogames directly.

First of all, there is the argument that video games are not reality, that they are three times removed from Plato’s truth.  The argument he makes regarding beds is the same one that has been made countless times about video games as well.  Plato asks, “if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, (would he) seriously devote himself to the image-making branch?”  In role playing games, gamers form relationships with other players, accomplish goals, and accumulate possessions, so the same argument stands: shouldn’t these equivalents in real life be more important than those solely existing in a digital fantasy?

Second is the emotion appeal of art.  Although I don’t think our current society considers the show of emotions to be the grave character flaw that Plato believes it to be, video games often appeal to a darker side of ourselves.  The themes of violence, crime, or greed which usually run through video games are far beyond anything society would consider acceptable in reality.

The existence of these themes leads to the final part of Plato’s argument, that art (or role playing games) can eventually damage individuals.  This idea is at the heart of the numerous parents groups who claim that violent behavior in video games causes children who play to become violent in reality as well.

So Plato would most likely have argued in much the same way against role playing games as he did against drama.

So what’s my take on all of this?  I believe video games (as well as art) are not necessarily evil and corrupting, and should not be banned solely because of the reasons mentioned before.  I think video games, role playing games in particular, are enjoyable retreats from reality that do not cause harm to the player.  It is true that they offer no real substance or truth to life, but unlike Plato, most of us are unable to spend all of our waking hours single-mindedly pursuing truth and pure ideals.  And as for the second and third arguments, I think they should be considered, but I believe that most people are able to separate reality from fantasy.  I have never felt more violent after playing a game where I shot my friends for hours.  I do agree with this stance to the extent that children who don’t have a clear distinction between reality and fantasy should be kept away from the violent games.

Those who have it tend to misuse it.

As I discussed in my paper, the new media seems to have given many of us more power than possible through the old media.  However, by giving such poower to the masses, a new order of power sturctures rose out of the ashes of Nelson’s computer priesthood.

My example was the proliferation of hackers (the dirty hackers, not that idealistic MIT bunch), spammers, and scammers.  Prof. Havholm already showed us an article on malicious code, so here are my two additions to the fray:

Scammer’s Delight 

Spam, it’s what’s for dinner
Did these people exist in the days of the men in white coats?  Of course not, there was no need for them (as Foucault might argue).  It appears that we’re no better at using power than those who held it before us.

I’ll leave with lyrics from an old (but recent) media object discussing (an old) new media object - Pong:

It’s in popular culture now; the notion of using new media to exercise your power over those without that knowledge is in old media.

Boy, 12, Sticks Gum on $1.5 M Painting

And the question that first comes to mind is: “Did digital media influence his decision to rebel against the heirarchy of traditional art?”

Well, not really.

But I did think it was interesting after our discussion today that this news source insists on reminding the public that this wasn’t any old painting, this was a 1.5 million dollar painting.  There is only one reference to the original artist, but two to the (alleged) price of the piece (three if you count the title).  “What an atrocious act!  He defaced art!  $1.5 M art!!.”

Now would they be up in arms about a stick of gum on a monitor?

As we look at Nelson’s hypertext and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, it is easy to find many similarities. Particularly, because as it can be concluded from the reading of both works that the hypertext seems to be a tangible and concrete form of the abstract rhizome.

Deleuze and Guattari do a good job of explaining the theory of the poststructuralist text. Their rhizomes, although necessarily lacking rigid guidelines for the flow of ideas, still have recognizable features. And from these features we can compare Nelson’s hypertext.

The most important aspect of the hypertext is its links to other text segments, as Nelson describes “footnotes on footnotes on footnotes” (Nelson, 314). Each text segment is discrete, but they may be traversed not only in the linear forward and backwards directions, but by a ‘jump’ or link to a tangential topic.

All of Nelson’s ideas are describable by using the terminology from A Thousand Plateaus. The discrete text strings in the hypertext can be viewed as the traditional territories. The forward and backward linear flow of the text follows its ‘stratification’. The links between text strings, however, speak to the principle of the rhizome. The links or jumps are the ‘de- (and subsequently re-) territorialization’ of which Deleuze and Guattariset prize. These links are ‘lines of flight’ between the concrete segments.

Where the comparison falls through, however, is that Nelson’s discrete hypertexts have only the links which they have been allocated, typically due to related topics or tangential thoughts arising from specific thoughts or images in the text. Whereas, “the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (Deleuze and Guattari, 409). Theoretically, an ideal hypertext becomes a rhizome when all points can be accessed from any text string, it’s just that this idea did not work well as a guided teaching tool from which Nelson’s description arose.

References:

Nelson, T. “No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks.” The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MIT Press: 2003

Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. “A Thousand Plateaus.” The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MIT Press: 2003

Calvino’s argument for the worth of computer-assisted stories is the freedom that the computer-generation allows the author. Both of Queneau’s stories give their author this same freedom, although they do it in different ways.

From the literal meaning of Calvino’s statements, the computer automates the combinatory possibilities inherent in writing. This means that more options for final stories are possible from the author’s initial work. A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is the perfect example of this theory. Obviously, no person could ever hope to read all of the possible poems in the work, let alone write out those combinations.

So, in the purely combinatory sense, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is the superior object as it has exponentially more possibilities than “Yours for the Telling.” The reader is used as the computer; he or she generates the combination of the final poem, which frees Queneau from the same task. With enough readers, all of Queneau’s work can be done for him and he is the author of said number of poems.

On the other hand, if we apply the broad sense of Calvino’s idea of ‘liberation’ of the author to what we’ve already studied about New Media, a strong case may be made for “Yours for the Telling” as the superior object. Although it does not automate the sheer combinatory mass as the poem generator, but it frees Queneau in a different manner.

If we look at both objects using Manovich’s properties of new media, we can see that A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is automated by the readers, as discussed before. “Yours for the Telling” on the other hand, is both automated by the readers as well as interactive. In the poem generator, the act of generation is mostly random, but in “Yours for the Telling” the readers repeatedly make conscious decisions which influence the story. Thus Queneau has been freed both from the combinatory weight as well as much of the creative burden, since the readers will actively choose their story.

So in the purely combinatory way Calvino originally proposed, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is the superior work, but in the context of Manovich and properties of New Media, Queneau is liberated even more greatly by “Yours for the Telling.”

Can a person be New Media? In the case of Chuck Norris, possibly. Led by the taunts of Conan O’Brien on Late Night, the aging martial artist has become somewhat of a cult icon on the Internet.

Currently this cult status is being supported by a website devoted to outrageous ‘facts’ about Chuck Norris as submitted and subsequently rated by the site users. As with most Internet fads, it is quickly degenerating into obscenity and bad taste, but it is undeniably New Media as described by Manovich.

Until they digitize Chuck himself, he’ll have to remain Old Media, but until then, I did include him as a ridiculous enemy in my LMK horror story generator.

I think that music is one of the most dynamic types of media, which serves to facilitate its incorporation as ‘New Media’. The production of music of all sorts is now being relegated to the computer, whether it’s fullly digital broadly classified under ‘techno’, sample looping and editing seen in hip-hop, or effects tweaking and mastering in rock and pop.

But what about using a computer to actively find you music you enjoy? I was recently sent this link to the ‘Music Genome Project‘, which does just that with its web-application: Pandora.

The program defines the primary and secondary traits of songs and artists and indexes them by similarities. By choosing an artist, it creates a custom radio station composed of similar songs. In addition, it utilizes an artificial neural network to actively learn as users agree or disagree with the song selection.

So if you’re out of ideas for new music, just let the computer choose for you.

On Nussbaum’s theory that we can derive pleasure from art by using it as an emotional surrogate, I agree that this is a way that we enjoy many types of art. The human mind seems to have a perverse enjoyment of terrifying thoroughly unpleasant situations when there is no chance of harm. For example, I doubt many of us would enjoy being chased and eaten by dinosaurs or on board for one of history’s greatest disasters, but we have made Jurassic Park and Titanic two of Hollywood’s most successful films.

I would go further to claim that there is even a pleasure derived from something simply because it would be unacceptable in our real lives. This train of thought reminded me of a flash game which I played years ago but found is still running:

http://members.aon.at/rialskaedda.html/gimproulette.swf

Would I ever want to play Russian roulette? No. It’s stupid, dangerous, pointless, and generally horrifying. But does this simulator interest me? Yes. It does because it’s all in Nussbaum’s ‘potential space’.

Hello, this is Bryan Whiting. And this is a blog. More to come.

A sample of writing is this, intended only for the enjoyment of the tester upon successful uploadation.