earthx.org blog

Some dissertation defense prep…

T.J. Clark. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

I don’t have any academic interest in the Impressionists (I mean, I do, of course, they’re lovely and fascinating, but they aren’t a topic I write about). I’m looking at this to get a sense of Clark’s theoretical framework, so I’m mostly milling around the opening and closing ideas.

In The Painting of Modern Life Clark gazes at the Impressionists through the lens of Marxist and Situationist criticism, but attempts to maintain a coupling between the historical materialism of Marxist theory and semiotics. Clark warns against labeling material culture as “more real” than representation and instead proposes a “hierarchy of representations.”

One of the main points I make in the diss involves the inertia or stasis of a brand (an object-code that means in a system of material culture) in comparison to the dynamics of a fiction or utterance. It’s a point that extends Grant McCracken’s observations on material culture in his Culture and Consumption (9 Sep 2004: just found McCracken’s blog). I think I agree with Clark, but I also think he and McCracken are of closer minds than first glance might suggest.

Material culture is a representational system, but it’s not like every other representational system. Clark’s right in stating that material culture is not “the bedrock of matter and action” (6) that undergirds the more flimsy world of signs; however, material culture operates differently, and has different combinatory potentials, and shouldn’t be indiscriminately lumped in with utterance and language. Clark speaks of ideology as “a kind of inertness in discourse” (8) and describes ideology using ideas very similar to those I invoke to describe brands in the market.

Clark locates both material representation and artistic and literary representation within the bounds of social practice:

Society is a battlefield of representations, on which the limits and coherence of any given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt. Thus it makes sense to say that representations are continually subject to the test of a reality more basic than themselves — the test of social practice. Social practice is that complexity which always outruns the constraints of a given discourse; it is the overlap and interference of representations; it is their rearrangement in use; it is the test which consolidates or disintegrates our categories, which makes or unmakes a concept, which blurs the edge of a particular language game and makes it difficult (though possible) to distinguish between a mistake and a metaphor. (Clark 6)

The big draw of this book for the defense is Clark’s association with the Situationists and his discussion of spectacle. I discuss spectacle in the diss in terms of Christian Metz’s semiotics of film, but it has very different meanings in Situationist theory. The spectacle is, in Clark’s words, “the marketing, the making-into-commodities, of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday life” (9). Spectacle marks the commercialization of the life and leisure that was once outside capitalism.

MMOGs can be, of course, provocatively read against the theory of spectacle. Our human interactions are now mediated by commercial simulative constructs, our social practice circumscribed by terms of service contracts and our performances owned by a media company. I’m more interested in negotiation and resistance than oppression, though, and I don’t think it’s accurate to ascribe too much passivity to consumers/players in this framework. Consumers have and use authority within “spectacles,” and while the “society as battlefield” metaphor is a little agonistic for my comfort, it gets closer to the back-and-forth between producer/developer and consumer/player that I see in MMOGs.

Clark likes to link sentences together ad infinitum with colons and semicolons, just like I do. I’m in good company.

Retrospective on Guy Debord that invokes Clark.

Thanks to The Beat for a link to a I Love Bees, which is an entry to a new alternate reality game based on Halo 2. There’s a wiki for the game.

Seems a good time to review old ARG posts.

• Fictional Hosts
• Metacortechs ARG: Code and Genre
• Metacortechs ARG is Fan Fiction

Update: It’s all about ARGs and unfiction today. Slate article on fictional record label called Clubbo.com.

1. The ideographic language of Tabula Rasa, which is not only a cool component to flesh out the world but potentially very interesting in terms of MMOG play in a multilingual global market.

2. A nice writeup on the food and weight management system in GTA San Andreas
.

Speaking of the amplified artifacts of use and poaching… we got to see Brad Neely perform Wizard People, Dear Readers last night at the Draft House. It was hysterical and brilliant. Set up your own viewing and experience it for yourself.

So I bellyached a little about City of Heroes the other day and immediately felt conflicted and guilty about it. I mean, I wasn’t complaining all last month, when I was playing it all the time. My inner Arnold tells me to stop whining and honestly appraise my investment in CoH.

I think CoH is a fairly compelling challenge to some of the assumptions many developers and academics have made about how MMOGs and virtual worlds do or should work. The topics that draw us to MMOGs — virtual economies, narratable experiences, guilds and social networks, multimodal use of virtual space — rely on a degree of complexity. They focus on the more sophisticated components and performances in MMOGs and look to more complexity in the future: a maturation of the form in which these theories will really bear fruit.

And then CoH comes along: it has the barest of economies, teaming is casual and fleeting, supergroups are pretty much just a chat channel, narratable experiences dwindle rapidly after character creation, and activity is fairly exclusively directed toward blowing stuff up. And it’s a very successful game — and by “successful” I don’t just mean “popular.” I don’t think that players of the game are being duped into playing something uninteresting.

The game is succeeding because it does key things very well: it generates engaging, stimulating play. It delivers immediate pleasures and does not require undue investment. It presents satisfying casual socialization somewhere between beginner alienation and the ties-that-(can)-bind of a guild. The play is not widely varied, but what is there is solid and smooth. It’s an amalgam of a shooter and an RPG, really, with more emphasis on the shooter genre — and as a shooter it’s quite pleasant.

So we, as proponents of immersive and sophisticated virtual worlds, have to digest what the success of CoH means, and it might be difficult at points. Surely it’s got to diminish social interaction as we know it in virtual worlds? Surely it can’t keep growing without more robust imaginary engagement?

I would still say “yes” to both these questions. But I would also posit that complex experiences, so rich with potential for research and design, aren’t always the magic formula for a successful MMOG. There’s also marketing: the timing of a release, the timing of expansions, the making distinct of a product to a consumer. There’s also the appeal of the simpler experiences and good meat-and-potatoes gameplay; sometimes we just want combat and spectacle, and that’s very OK.

Or, maybe City of Heroes can’t just be situated as a success driven by external variables, or as the exception that proves the rule, the “beer and pretzels” that makes the nouvelle cuisine of Second Life even more delicious. Maybe City of Heroes presents something new that needs to be accounted for, something that forces us to revise our paradigms a little.

Breakdown of MMOG subscription rates. Thanks to Tom at Plasticbag who also linked to this delightful entry on celebs and hipsters at the Brooklyn Target opening.

So, I’ve become a little fried on City of Heroes. I was pushing with vigor to get my fire blaster, Gates, up to level 14; at 14 you can pick up the flight power and that’s when the real fun begins, right? Actually, at 14 you realize the flight power is fun for a bit and certainly convenient, but doesn’t exactly shift your paradigms.

The CoH expansion, City of Villains, can’t come fast enough. The current game is full of people starving for new ways to make meaning of the space. The new dance emote stuff in CoH is a strange, peripheral new batch of functionality: it’s more elaborate than the other emote animations, but not qualitatively different. It’s also just odd for the game: what superhero dances? (Okay, Dazzler. But no superhero does these dances, which can be described in terms like “hoedown” and “white boy overbite.”) Yet, dancing is confoundingly popular. Because it’s something different to do. I sound like a broken record, but the extraordinary avatar creation interface in the game creates an expectation that the ongoing gameplay will have related outlets for creativity. It doesn’t, not yet. And so players turn to fan fiction and dance emotes.

Speaking of dancing, this is some good MMOG dancing. The entertainer profession in Star Wars Galaxies is really quite a thing, maybe one of the most innovative components of the game. And this artifact from it speaks to the impulse in fans to turn a game, a text, or what I describe in the diss as a fiction network, into something that is theirs. This is what Henry Jenkins talks about in his Textual Poachers, and what Michel de Certeau talks about in his The Practice of Everyday Life.

Things are different now from when these books were first published, of course, because we have the technology to a.) enter a stylized simulation and enact a text within a fiction ourselves; b.) capture that enactment, set it to music, and edit it with sophisticated video production software; c.) publicize that video on boingboing and dozens of other blogs and sites, and distribute it to thousands of viewers. The digital artifacts of our use have much more social and transformative potential than the “invisible poachings” of de Certeau ever could. And we now have simulations like MMOGs where meaning is made almost entirely through the act of use, where the distance between product and poaching is dissolved.

But the impulse to make Cantina Crawl VII is, I believe, not that different from the impulse toward fan fiction, or the childhood impulse toward creating elaborate narratives with toys. Or, the impulse to really inhabit CoH, instead of just killing baddies in it. These are all impulses toward meaningful use, an impulse which drives a lot of people toward MMOGs as spaces. SWG is getting some grief this week because of a development delay, but I’m drifting back to it these days because it’s done a cool thing by actually supporting this impulse.

The Oulipo introduce arbitrary structural constraint and principle to the composition of texts. They make literature within explicit rules or rule systems.

Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards is a combinatory poem machine that can make one hundred trillion poems (I cite it in the diss to raise some of the questions regarding the literary study of texts with prohibitive scale). Cent mille milliards de poemes on the Web.

An Oulipan (Oulipesque?) blog and community site (from grandtextauto)