Begin by considering a situation. You go to a gallery to see some art. You go with a friend and the art is by someone whose work is unfamiliar. The entire style the entire genre is unfamiliar. It sometimes happens, it almost always happens that you “just don’t get it” the work seems flat and undifferentiated. The pieces all look the same. You have no way of remembering or distinguishing this one from that one. There is a blur of style. There is little meaning. Sometimes you don’t stop there, you don’t give up. Maybe your friend who brought you is a great fan and she calls your attention to the features – maybe she draws your attention to the artwork, aesthetically culturally etc. and all of a sudden, the art was flat or closed, and all of a sudden you can see it. You get it. What was flat now seems to have depth or significance or meaning or power. It stands our recognizably. What was flat now has structure. What I just described was a transformation that occurs. What I think we can agree on is that a subjective transformation has occurred. Where the change is within you. But it’s not merely subjective; you don’t have just different beliefs. You are now able to see the work before you where before it was hidden from plain sight. This transformation enables you to see what was there. What is this transformation? “Understanding.” Through looking, through interrogating, you were able to achieve an understanding that enabled you to bring the work into focus, to perceive it.

This is generally true about perceptual consciousness. It depends on understanding. It is understanding that makes the world available to perceptual consciousness.

Situated against a background of how perceptual consciousness might work. In this other way, consciousness is more passive. Eyes give rise to processes that we experience. The experience happens inside of us. The visual world is the world that projects into the senses. This projective model is wrong for important reasons.  Being stimulated by an object in that matter is neither necessary nor sufficient for perceptual consciousness.

Example: red car was blue. You didn’t see it because you were ‘passive’ in relation to it.

ex. The illusion of seeing. The meaning is not something that affects your retina. We see so much more than that which strikes the retina. We experience the occluded, for example. If you think of what is visible is what projects to the eyes then vision is not confined to what is visible.

We need a different model to think about the scope of the visual world. Instead of thinking of what is visual as what projects, think of what is visual as what is available to a person from a place. This shifts the contours of science; we’re interested in what the perceiver does. This is what I want to focus on. As was mentioned, the central idea of this last book is that we’ve been looking for consciousness inside of us. But consciousness is not something that happens inside of us, it’s something we do. And like anything else we do, it depends on our situation.

Perception is given in terms of availability. The modality of the presence is the modality of the accessibility to me. Right now I look out upon you and I have a rich sense of your presence. Of course I don’t fixate on you individually and nevertheless you are present for me, even if you are on the periphery or out of view.  You are available as “to be seen” even with regards to the thing that I’m foveating on there is always a shifting of attention.

There is the hidden and the available and there is never anything more than an act of exploration. Now one of the reasons why this is important, is that what are the conditions of access? Alva says for the sake of argument, you can only have access to what there “is” it is a further condition of access that you have the skills/capacities to take hold of what is out there. So if you are a reader of English, the slide presented you with the illusion of seeing the meaning. It shows up because your requisite background knowledge. You take it for granted – because of that knowing, the meaning was there for you.

If we think of perceptual consciousness as an active skill of exploration of the environment, we can revisit the claim at the outset. That it’s understanding that brings the world into focus for perception. It is the perception and development of skills. A concept is a skill too. A technique or a method for taking hold of something.

Now I want to try to sharpen this more. Wittgenstein in Tractatus makes a claim about the general form of the proposition. Wittgenstein said that the general form is “such and such is the case” propositions are possible states of affairs. To use a proposition is to say that things are that way. I mention that to give you background. The general form of the work of art is this: ‘see me if you can’
‘cope with me if you can’ ‘bring me into focus’ ‘come on, you can do it’ ‘you can’t see me but try!’ this is what the work of art does. It confronts you!

Now one of the consequences of this idea is of this. Arts don’t’ really have anything to do with their apparent subject matter. Choreography is not concerned with dancing. Dance has nothing to do with choreography. It’s like saying ‘music is about instruments’ it’s missing the point. e.g. Saturday night fever, tony manerra is not an artist is a great dancer and maybe some day he will be an artist. Dance for him is a practice, a technique for engaging in a certain kind of social dynamic. Dance for him is a form of deeply beautiful sexy wonderful interesting social play, but it isn’t asking the question that I think the art world asks, which is to prevent you from seeing it from getting it, where you have to transform yourself to get it.

An architect shows you a balsa model. You know what he is showing you. As the context or function changes – if he were presenting this to his daughter as a dollhouse - the model changes its significance. As long as you know what the situation is, however, which you usually take for granted, you know what he is showing you.

This applies to pictures as well.

Door handles are transparent for us (as American adults.) but if you change the context, if you subvert the taken for granted function, tools lose their meaning.

[[what is the role that play has in this?]]

Without context, background knowledge, etc, pictures lose their intelligibility.

With regards to pictures and other similar technologies, if you deprive them (technologies) of their home you deprive them of their meaning and self-evidence. The picture acts on your nervous system in so far as the similarity is preserved. Pictures should be thought of as ‘producing effects’ in us. They are instruments for achieving access to the world.

Picture making is a technological practice, I think language is too. Technologies only have meaning with respect to background knowledges and practices.
We are designers by nature, insofar as design is a part of culture. We are cultural by nature.

-something is a part of our biological nature.

Design stops and art begins when the object disrupts that which is taken for granted has its normal function.
Art is always the enemy of function. It is the subverter of function. It is the disrupter of function.

Art changes the context, like in the party game, like with this image. Note that there is no context that can be taken for granted you need to take a stand on the situation that you find yourself and it is only through this interrogation that you cultivate the skills to be able to see/perceive what the artist is doing. That is a revelatory, a transformative experience. So a picture, an art picture, is a tool that has been alienated from the background setting against which it alone has significance. An art picture is a strange tool. Art is in the business of making strange tools. It is in the business of exploring context, which allows us to make meaning in the world.

Art is thus a philosophical practice. It is precisely a practice of trying to understand the possibilities of our understanding of our relationship to the world fundamentally. When you go to the gallery and achieve an understanding that is what philosophy strives towards, an achievement of understanding. e.g. the Socratic method.

Philosophy, I think, correctly understood, is an aesthetic practice. I think that the philosopher more than any other, who explored and illustrated and amplified this ideas was Kant.

Kant realized that there are two [things about our experience with art] 1) our response to art is a matter of feeling and 2) that response is that which makes sense to have agreements with others. We must explain our aesthetic responses, not that we can, but we must. The artwork is always irreducibly necessarily in a space of possible critical conversation about the artwork. Criticism is not this extra thing. It is an essential aspect of the encounter with the aesthetic, with the work of art. This is what philosophy is. Somebody says ‘courage is this’ no no ‘courage is that’ everybody knows the basic facts; the question is trying to justify the responses.

Philosophy and art are all method in their method in their result. There is no conclusion, no q.e.d. You don’t read Descartes to know ‘he thinks therefore he is’ you read it to know why he said that. Art similarly is a practice [to gain understanding]

[in conclusion...]
consciousness is not something that happens in us. Now let’s add performance. What makes an action a performance?
We use the term “to perform” very generally, usually as the most general form of an action. And we can speak of performance on the job, or in the classroom. So what is a performance?
Actions done before another not necessarily before an other, but done before a possible other. Done in light of the possible critical reaction response reflection of another. That which we perform is that which can be judged, and that which is judged, all the time.

Performance seems to be a very pervasive feature of our lives. ‘Sit straight’ I say to my son. It is pervasive and it is performed with the anxiety of being evaluated and judged.

What is it to be a person?

The word person comes from persona, which refers to the mask in a drama.

There is a basic sense that which to be a person is to be the player of a role, is to be a performer. And thus is to be always and unavoidably judgable or at least anxious about being judged. And is confronted with the possibility of criticism.

There is the human being. Then there is the overlay of person hood. There are these labels. I don’t know if you can peel back the labels and get to the human being that is beneath the layers. Insofar as we are person we are performers and we are in the space of being evaluated

I think that this means that the performing arts have a very special basic role among the arts. For performing arts if you like go right to the very basic fact of our personal being, of our personal being of our personal existence. The performer doesn’t just ‘do something well’ but says ‘see if you can make sense of this, see if you can make sense of what it means to be a person.

Now whether or not we think that the performing arts are special/specially basic. They do have a sort of primitiveness. There is something unusually compelling about the encounter of the performer. There are interesting aspects – it’s real time, dynamic, fleeting – but what I’ve tried to do is suggest is…
well the question that I was thinking when I started working in this area was: what is art? And why does it matter to us?

Neurobiological, neuroaesthetic and evolutionary approaches to art miss the point. Because art is not a biological trait. Perhaps the technologies are evolved aspects of our phenotype. Maybe it’s productive to think of language and picture making that way. But art is like irony. Irony presupposed the possibility of straight talk but it is not something that all people do. People get irony, but not everyone is ironic. Art is something like this. It happens in different ways/places… it’s a second order phenomenon. Offering a neurobiological theory of art is like offering a neurobiological theory of philosophy.

Curious.

Notes on Material Cultural Studies as a Methodology

Panel Title: Does literary studies need a text?

DL

Does literary studies need professors? I’m going to talk about what it means and what it meant in the early modern period to what we understand as text. Or I’m going to ask what kinds of texts or text… (“Literature” has a very long and complex history)

Previously included Poetry prose drama fiction essays, but should now be exapnded because the study of literature should be circumscribed to these…

Bacon said, that literature is the “domain of all knowledge in written form”

We are being truer by emphasizing breadth, rather than specializing literature towards imaginative writing associated with say the romantic premium on imagination. When you ask yourselves what do we mean by literature, what i’m suggesting is that – in the early modern period it had an extrordinarily exclusive sense, and we’re in the process of rediscovering this.

Take, for example, John Fox’s [something]

He used collaborators yet put his name as author, it was an unstable yet evolving text that went through many editions, it was political, it raised issues relating visual and print culture.

Elisabeth used symbols, wrote prayers and speeches, not poetry and prose.

Only since 2000 has there been a scholarly look at her texts; elisabeth was indeed an author and virtuoso writer, though not in the sense of “imaginative writing” but she did produce texts that now warrant our attention in critical ways.

M

I was going to talk about derrida – there is nothing outside the text. Instead I’d like to talk about the figure of the animal in late victorian fiction. I think this isolates four approaches in tying evolution and literature together. These are:

1. Thinking of evolutionary theory in rhetorical terms. E.g. middlemarch, author uses evolution/darwinian language to think about society, how there is a web of affinities that connect us all. This does not answer the question of how evolution can help us think about literature critically
2. The second point is to think about literature as a discursive phenomenon – to think about how ideas that informed the evolution project enable the realist novelist program of representation of making plausible the deliberate …
3. Moretti: evolution in historical terms. Think of literary evolution. So Moretti, novels and genres follow an evolutionary path in the “slaughterhouse” of literature. Evolution occurs around “cultural selection”
4. If all human social behavior can be traced to inherited characteristics then literature should be a product of the mind acting according to a set pattern of behaviors. Cites e.o. Wilson, mind as a narrative machine. Interesting to think about literature as “pre-coded” which returns us to derrida

If the genetic code is like literary code, then there really is nothing outside the text.

Tk

Visual culture has been a long part of culture. Thinking about the visual requires me to think about conceptual possibilities at the edges but also at the middle of reading the text.

Looking at how allegory operates in modernity.

[There's something here about the tensions between the specific and the general]

The visual is often diagrammatic, or conceptual. SO with visuality, we may rarely find it worthwhile to talk about what ‘looks real” instead visual phenomenon should attend to “how it looks”

Call for interdisciplinary work perhaps

Question

Q1 What’s at stake in calling something a “text”

TK: In an era where text is ‘imaginative literature’ I think that people think of text as a substitute term for studying things … it has been for 200 years so why would you want to change that? Something about rhetoric…

M: ~

Q1.1: What are the kinds of skills/methods or analysis that we need to bring to bear on texts?

Red shirt: they did a lot of studies that did not use the word “text” . I think our purview is extremely wide, however there are all sorts of complications that arise from that – it totally messes up your idea of ‘coverage’ what does it mean to be a romanticist?

If we use our tools to study a political speech, we might look at something different than political historians. We might look at things differently, we should not be apologetic for it. We SHOULD be in discussion.

Q2. ?? something about giving our attention to texts in certain ways

A: Your approach changes the way that you construe the text

Q?: What do you see as the role of enjoyment? What is the trajectory that you see for students?

A:



What I think this drives at is the way that our similar understandings of “how games work” – the mechanics, dynamics, content, etc. within a game –allows us to communicate effectively. Here is a recent conversation* that Kevin and I had while discussing a game that existed only in our minds and on a white board:

Kevin: But I think that the game is broken because it’s got too many boxes

Matt: I think that’s an issue of balance, not mechanics

Kevin: Oh

While this is pretty banal, and any game designers reading this are probably rolling their eyes and returning to a better blog, I ask you to hear me out, as I’d like to point out how exactly this conversation is crazy.

I’m guessing that the way that most folks think about learning is based predominantly in an information theory perspective; that how most people think about learning is based in late 20^th century psychology. I’m guessing this, in part, because I know that’s how I thought about learning, but also in part because that’s what I’ve heard designers describe as how they think about learning.  Considering the impact that thinking about “information transfer” has had on the past seventy years or so in terms of the development and advancement of science and technology, it seems fruitless to even consider hacking away at this epistemology. Nevertheless, I am increasingly convinced that considering learning as information transfer is part of what’s holding back good educational game design.

This notion of learning as precisely information transfer (with the usual caveat of observable behavioral change sometimes thrown in) stands in opposition to, as the field of education and a different branch of psychology has proposed, learning as an act of situated and knowledge as constructed. Rather thank focus on the bits of ‘information’ that are transferred via some medium from setting to individual, these perspectives acknowledge the importance of setting, of wetware, of motivations, and of the individual, not just as factors that affect the baseline learning process, but as fundamentally irreducible from the definition. Rather than thinking about learning as simply information transfer, they think about learning as a social act (like rituals, perhaps?) that involves the construction of situated meanings.

What’s amazing about the conversation that Kevin and I had was not just that we could communicate effectively about some construct that we were grappling with, but that we could reference another construct that we were both familiar with, leveraging language and meaning based on previously shared experiences, in the pursuit of a continuing activity. That is, what’s amazing was not the fact that we shared information with one another, rather is the way that with some mediator (the game we were designing, our previous working together, our shard cultural understandings) we were able to communicate.

The reason why this is important is because it means that what games provide players with is not just the “content” of the game nor just the mechanics of the game, rather they provide shared experiences of meaning construction. That is, games can be thought of as creating a dialog between the designer and the player, in which meanings are constructed via the actions of the player and the subsequent responses of the system. Or said another way, games can be thought of as akin to conversation in that player constructed meanings get refined through action and feedback.

*This memory is almost, but not quite, entirely made up.

Soon, we’ll be publicly discussing a few lessons that we’ve learned from running these sessions. Before we start hitting up more formal venues, however, here are some brief thoughts on what we learned from the jams. Though we haven’t quite figured out why it’s particularly important to do them, I/we suspect there’s something interesting happening here.

1)   Game design is it’s own skill set. One thing I’ve seen, time and again, is the assumption that designing a game and learning how to use a medium (e.g. a programming language) can be done at the same time. While I’m sure that some talented folks out there have come up with a good way to teach this, I am becoming more convinced that separating them out is immensely helpful for novice game designers. People would probably have a hard time learning how to write a (good/creative) poem or a novel while learning to write in a new language, and in the same way, learning to express an abstract concept in a new programming language while simultaneously learning the language will be difficult, if not impossible. The answer to grappling with problem is to separate out game design from other skill sets, and to use the least common denominator. In our case, that meant using paper and pencil. Which leads me to my next point…

2)   “Old fashioned” non-digital games work. In an education era that places a high value in technology learning and digital experiences, it probably runs against the current to argue for the use of old fashioned tools. The essence of game design, however, can be authentically captured in a non-digital medium, and more importantly, a lot of the educational benefits that people are claiming digital design experience provides is still evident in non-digital game design. The jams fosters motivation as individuals intently work to complete a (creative) game in an hour and provides some good “old fashioned” fun as people play the games at the end of the session.

3)   There is no “right” way to design a game, except that there is. The right way, in these jams, means meeting the time/topic constraints. Having an infinite number of possibilities available to design from is intimidating, and having an indefinite amount of time can cripple the process. The constraints of the jam are what define it, and meeting those constraints is half the fun (the jam is quite nearly a game unto itself). Other than keeping to the time constraints, the jammers were successful in designing games each in their own ways.

There are two primary ways that I think psychology could help designers push forward on innovation with motion capture systems. By thinking about player input in it’s own terms, I think that designers can (or perhaps already have, but without talking about it) start grappling with new player verbs that could be used in games. Rather than looking at the controller’s inputs, in terms of the accelerometer or the buttons, designers need to add player “actions” into their design constraints and I specifically contend that figuring out what’s “fun” for players to do with their controllers would greatly benefit from a vocabulary or way of thinking about what the “words” of player action are: gestures and postures. Moreover, games that have been careful about what gestures they recruit for use in-game are more fun to play than games that tack on “wiggles” or “flips” into their repertoire of inputs.

These two ideas, gestures and postures, are fairly straightforward and for the most part, can be interpreted colloquially. A gesture can be thought of as a movement that conveys meaning, such as flipping someone the bird or throwing a thumbs-up. A posture can be thought of as the position of the body at a given point in time. By thinking about player input in terms of gestures and postures designers may be able to develop the verbs of action that could help make in-game input more complex and interesting. For example, consider a Dragon Ball game (or even a street fighter game) that includes a Kamehameha maneuver, an attack in which the player draws his hands back to his right hip and shoots them forward. Using the accelerometer and gyroscope (assuming motionplus), player gestures can be developed that match the fighting seen on-screen. What makes this powerful and interesting is not simply the one to one matching, rather is the way that the player is forced to make meaningful actions via macroscopic movements in game-play.

I do feel fairly guilty about the way that these design recommendations come from a fairly inexperienced designer with no actual hands-on experience programming wii input, so perhaps the next post will include my initial search for wii tutorials and source code from other sites.

Zombies are a staple of video games, maybe one step above pirates and ninjas. Infectonator! World Dominator (IWD) builds on the original Infectonator with the player now attempting to destroy the world with a zombie-inducing virus. With this as the premise, the player proceeds to click their way through major cities in the world.

IWD is a game about perturbing a system and seeing the results. Each stage has three possible outcomes: failure, objective met, and town destroyed. Failure occurs when the player’s infection fails to kill a predefined number of people. Killing that number results in meeting the objective, and killing all people in the city leads to the town being destroyed. The citizens are magically restored in both the failure and objective met results, and so the real goal is how to reach a new equilibrium state.

The problem with this is that once players develop their zombies enough to destroy one location, the monetary rewards and zombie upgrades creates a positive feedback loop. Doing so means that new levels are often much easier than prior levels—for me at least, the most difficult levels were those in Africa before I had understood the means to upgrade the zombies. Once players begin the feedback loop, even the initial problem of determining when and where to begin the infection becomes relatively trivial.

Making players feel good is a primary goal for many games, and IWD is no exception. The most successful of these games reward the player greatly while still suggesting that it was skill that led to the reward. In Bejewelled, for example, players aren’t rewarded for swapping any two tiles; only matching three or more in a row will be rewarded. In God of War, players need to press the right sequence of buttons to finish off monsters with cinematic ferocity. IWD instead rewards players for clicking almost anywhere on the screen at the later levels, and doing so robs players of the illusion that this action is meaningful.

After the novelty of the premise wears off, it’s unlikely that Infectonator! World Dominator will remain in constant play.

For the most part, I disagree. I think that the Wii’s popularity has made helped to bridge generations of gamers and spread “gaming” as an “ok” social practice. I think that the wii has helped to maintained more “group” and “social” games that aren’t rock band, and that those who game together are more likely to develop and maintain lasting friendships. I think that the Wii has some really great potential and moves in the right direction, as far as development goes. While I’m certainly impressed by the looks of games like Heavy Rain, I am a firm believer in the philosophy that a game doesn’t HAVE to be in HD to be a good, fun game, and that continued development in games and consoles that help to push social, interface, and mechanical boundaries are good just because they’re trying new things. I’ve heard from various industry folks that there is a strong tendency in larger, more commercial practices, to be as conservative as possible with monies due to the nature of investment economics – why invest in something that hasn’t been done before when you can invest in something that’s boring, but guaranteed to sell X number of units? The wii isn’t your uncle’s console and it hopefully will never let you “boom, headshot” some “noob” while you smack-talk the twelve your old opponent with your bros. Sorry.

I do, to some extent, agree with your complaints however. For example, despite the Wii’s popularity, I too, was sorely disappointed in the lack of innovation in development around the wii-mote and nunchuck. Granted, I don’t own a wii, so I haven’t had the opportunity to really explore a lot of games on it yet, but from those that I’ve played and seen played, a good number feel as if they’re ports from some other systems. Often times it feels like the wii’s accelerometer input is simply tacked on rather than used intuitively or innovatively, and from what I’ve heard, this may in fact be the case.

Now, given the upcoming release of Sony’s motion capture system and MS’s Natal, I suspect that future game development will improve, if simply because more people and money will be thrown behind the design process. I also suspect, however, that there will be much more of the same sorts of designs – designs that fail to really take advantage of and explore the new affordances of these devices. Specifically, I think that motion capture devices require reframing the way that designers think about input; that to continue privileging the tool-end of the input (the acceleration changes, for example) will mean continuing to miss innovation. Solving this problem of “reframing” may have an answer, in part, in studies of human movement, motor control, and learning. More on this tomorrow.

For starters, we’re hosting a global game jam site this year which Kevin has awesomely taken the lead on. This adds immensely to our continued bi-monthly game jams that we’ve been running with our friend and colleague John Martin. Hoping to improve our practical skills, we have added  a flash workshop that GLS affiliate Tim Cartwright has graciously volunteered to help teach.

In order to tie our research to our gaming, we’ve also begun a small project investigating our Team Fortress 2. Though this project is in its infancy, expect more updates on it (very) soon.

-matt

Papert, S. (1993). Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas. Basic Books: New York.

To-do lists, whether paper or digital, serve two functions: they help me remember and they help me plan. It’s easy to understand how they help me remember – at a glance, they allow me to see exactly what needs to get done.  How they help me plan however, is a little more ambiguous. Because each project that I’m involved in has its own agenda, its own set of tasks that need to get done, its own time frames extending weeks, if not months, into the future, it would be a pain in the ass to keep track of all of their intricacies. Specifically, and more importantly, it would be exceptionally difficult to figure out what exactly needed to get done, and in what order, and then to keep it all in my head. This is where the to-do list steps in. The to-do list magic comes from its creation – making a to-do list means systematically planning future events, and in doing so, imagining their accomplishment before it even happens. That is, by defining tasks in manageable chunks, by thinking through them, breaking them up, and typing them into todoist, I complete a walk-thru of future activity. By turning nebulous activities like “work” into more concrete tasks, to-do lists give me perspective; the difference is like looking at a forest without a path versus seeing a trail amongst the trees. The magic of the to-do list isn’t in each of the items that comprise it, as these are not just discrete, decontextualized activities that need to be accomplished. They are plot points for an overarching narrative of work. The structural organization of my list isn’t just a reflection of how I represent the tasks in my head. It’s a map explaining how I get from point A to point B.  To-do lists, whether physical or virtual are not just a memory store for facts. Rather, they are the artifacts that are created through a self-programming process, that gives shape and form to previously unknown future actions.