Via BoingBoing comes a digitization of an old comic based on Doom.
The comic is one of the most awful I’ve ever read, and it’s testament to the fact that “adaptation” in a multimedia franchise fits a fairly specific tradition, and even innovative works act within that tradition… when the tradition is ignored, it turns out badly. Generally a minimal set of story functions, or narremes, are transfered from medium to medium and then embellished as appropriate for the newer medium. In this case — whether because the writers felt a sense of fidelity to the game play, or felt that Doom didn’t have a story to embellish, or were trying to be funny, or just didn’t care — this is not only a transfer of the game’s narremes but an attempt to transfer its reading (playing) experience or mechanics, and the result is absolutely wretched.
Tom: I am not playing the Death Star trench run when I’ve already destroyed the Death Star in LucasArts games about 10 times. “Rashomon” had fewer permutations than this.
From “Gameboys” on Salon (ad viewing required).
Software testing and release time, like a cultural holiday, brings its own traditions and, even if software development is your full-time job, takes you into a state that’s outside of your daily existence. I’m back in school this year, of course, but last year and the year before that I was doing fairly (emotionally, if not cognitively) stressful development around Christmas, and it’s interesting how Christmas season and debugging season can seamlessly mesh into one another, creating an ascetic state of heightened stress that is both frazzled and strangely fuzzy. After about one-half to one week of hammering anxiety and sleeplessness, your nerves become mercifully burnt; you achieve both Zen mind and an odd delirium. Once you experience it, you kind of understand why geek humor tends to be so weird.
The frazzled nerves tend to come more from the ambient business stress than problems in the code. Even the smoothest of releases is a tense thing, with lots of business interests at stake, while debugging these days, at least for Web applications, is often pretty easy. It’s not like the old days — at least, it’s not like the mythology of the old days that I hear about all the time, where you apparently had to decode binary regurgitation on punch cards or something like that. Most development environments and application servers nowadays give you rich and meticulous stack traces that point you exactly where you need to fix the problem.
This is not to say that debugging is never hard work — there are always the invisible goblins, the bugs that mess it all up while expertly hiding themselves from your view. These usually pop up when the system is smoothly executing what you’ve told it to do — it’s just not what you intended to tell it to do.
Then there’s just the crap that happens when your application server, or your Web server, or your third-party libraries are doing things they are not supposed to be doing, and the documentation doesn’t say anything about the error. When I hit those I just have to read this comic over and over until the anxiety goes away.
Great article on Salon (ad viewing required) about The Alphaville Herald, its journalism on The Sims Online, and Maxis’ reaction to it.
Here’s a Mercury News article about the “Sims Shadow Government,” which is also part of the story.
James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
I reviewed this one for the lab.
but first:
deleuze and guattari
You are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari! That’s right! You’re two people! Actually, you’re probably a lot more than that, because you argued that all of us are, fundamentally, schizophrenics. Your notion of the rhizome is far too popular amoung people who fantasize about digital technology. You are, however, both dead.
What 20th Century Theorist are you? brought to you by Quizilla
Might as well make this useful. Here’s a Deleuze and Guattari page, a second d/g page, and a third d/g page.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Contextual note: I have to read (skim) Gates’ work very quickly, because it’s been recalled by the library. Please read my notes with that in mind… I’ll return to this entry and give a more detailed reading when I get the book back.
each literary tradition, at least implicitly, contains within it an argument for how it can be read (xix-xx).
I think that, for my stuff, the most valuable parts of Gates’ text involve meta-discourse and the vernacular: the idea that a discourse can discuss itself in a coded meta-language.
(more…)
