earthx.org blog

Drehli Robnik, “Saving one life: Spielberg?s Artificial Intelligence as redemptive memory of things.”

I liked this article a lot. I have to like any article with this quote:

My discussion of Spielbergian intelligence does not relate to a man/author but to a cinematically defined project recognizable in global mass culture by Spielberg’s name.

I especially liked Robnik’s comment on the ad lines of Spielberg movies and their power as memes:

A film?s ad line provides an iron ration of sense in a highly abstracted and shareable form suited for maximum circulation in public spheres and popular memories. Seen this way, the abstraction performed by high concept enables the blockbuster?s “connectivity,” its ability to attach itself to various media and consumer cultural events.

This isn’t just the practice of good ad copy… in its more prevalent or comprehensive form, this is branding.

GameSpy comes back to FF XI a couple of months after its initial review.

I was recently bagging on Final Fantasy for their copious use of cut-scenes, so I would like to check it out and hopefully broaden my opinion a little. I also like the idea of playing in an environment where the player base is neither homogeneously Western nor English-speaking.

A riff on that most helpful of second-level gaming artifacts, the walkthrough — in vernacular, a “cheat sheet” of sorts, but for our purposes let’s call it a retelling of an ideal gaming experience.

I’ve been reading a little bit this morning about ongoing debate regarding ludology and narratology in game studies (one of the issues under debate being whether there is a debate). Without getting into that just yet, I do think it’s useful to consider the genres that emerge to narrate the experience of playing a game, and how something like this Ikea walkthrough can comically shed light on the mechanisms of these gaming narratives.

I haven’t owned a Nintendo console since the first NES. The Craigue/Craft household is a XBox and PC game household. But…

I got a chance to check out Animal Crossing with my friend Kari on Friday, and Clay has written about Zelda recently, and James Paul Gee writes about Pikmin in his book. So I’m thinking about Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo recently.

The practice of game creation has its “greats”: Miyamoto, Molyneux, Wright come to mind. I’m going to shake my particular stick and reassert that the individual agencies we attribute to these figures are myths; these guys don’t create the games themselves, any more than George Lucas created all the hundreds (if not thousands) of artifacts in which Star Wars is realized. They conceptualize games, but there are artists, programmers, writers, designers who all get elided when we attribute the Romantic poet/Great American Novel paradigm of production to mass media artifacts.

(Just found this… a quote from Miyamoto in an interview this month speaks to these warring paradigms:

We aren’t denouncing the way games are made now but we did not plan to create a game where 30 to 50 people get involved spending several hundred million yen. That is alright as well but with a bigger scale, each task gets divided and we felt that the game designer’s originality gets lost in this process. I was against creating something where I did not know if I was the creator or not.

The lovely part: he was speaking about Pacman vs.. Since Miyamoto didn’t create Pacman, this is a game in which claims of creation would, I’d imagine, always be fraught.)

Still, each of these names (including Lucas) denote styles of story making or game production. These names are signifiers for genres, and I’m particularly interested in Miyamoto’s genre right now.

The wildest thing about Animal Crossing is its simulation of an online, networked social system in a non-networked environment; you’re interacting with NPCs with asynchronous messaging and chat, just like they’re your online friends. It fictionalizes the modes of interaction common to a persistent, real-time online world.

I have mostly half-formed thoughts right now, but I’ll write more later.

Marvel’s been licensing properties for games for a long while, but now they’re giving it organizational presence. This release summarizes Marvel’s future game plans and does so with all the fabulous marcom rhetoric that I love so, so much. Powerful Entertainment Category!

I said I wasn’t going to spend all my time on the web log, darn it.

There are rogue versions of multiplayer games out there.

There’s a “really massive” MMOG in development that plans to host everyone in a single world, but most popular ones are multi-instanced… you’re not “on EverQuest,” you’re on one of the Sony servers that is hosting EverQuest. People associate not necessarily with “the game” but with one particular server on the game. If, by hook or crook, you can get your hands on the software and host it, then people can associate with your server, too.

As I noted earlier, narrative synchronicity has been enforced across servers in MMOGs for the sake of keeping consistency across the game as a branded and, I’m guessing, organizational entity… in other words, to obviate the questions: “Is it still Asheron’s Call if in-game events are different on that server?” and “How could we possibly maintain multiple divergent storylines across servers when it’s expensive to maintain just one?” You can answer issue number two with user-generated content, I’m guessing, but, again, there’s still the brand equity question. Of course, if you don’t work for the company, then you can let the world be whatever it wants to be.

Obviously, I have a lot of affection for comics universes and the multiple divergent iterations of core narratives they allow (“multiple earths”) and I consider that divergence a narrative pleasure in itself: seeing how environments with identical initial states grow different, given subsequent events. Rogue servers can create this divergence. Of course, ideally, a game could present instance divergence under its own auspices, giving the player a “legal alternative” for this sort of fix.

If the networks that generate and maintain MMOGs — and the ephemeral data that they accrete — could be said to have a canon, then the killing of Lord British is arguably a prime text of it. Got the link from GameSpy’s MMOG series.

The servers had just been taken down to prepare for the huge influx of players for the speech Lord British and Lord Blackthorne were giving throughout Britannia. When the servers came back up, I strolled through Britain with Helios, my fellow guild member. We headed to Blackthorne’s castle where the first speech was being given. LB, Blackthorne, and their jesters were up on a bridge orating to the masses. Unfortunately I wasn’t playing my mage character, so casting spells from a spellbook was out of the question. Luckily my character was a good thief who had high “stealing” skill. I desperately searched the backpacks of those around me and eventually came upon a fire field scroll. After that it was pretty simple, I just cast the scroll on the bridge and waited to see what would happen. Either LB or Blackthorne made the comment “hehe nice try”, can’t recall exactly who. It was a humorous sight and I expected to be struck down by lightning or have some other evil fate befall me. Instead I heard a loud death grunt as British slumped to his death. After that it was just pure mayhem, Blackthorne or another force summoned 4 daemons into the castle and people were dying left and right.

The site this comes from, Ultima Online travelogues, is this great artifact, a second-level fiction: narratives of game play and of community events in the game.

The CWRL’s Web server had an outage, so this weblog’s been down for a few days. I’m trying to finish a chapter draft, so it’ll be fairly static for a few days more.