Speaking of distant sounds, my semi-trusty laptop has just supplemented its usual ‘distant sound of autumn leaves caught in ventilation fan’ with a ‘distant sound of low-flying swans over placid summer lake’.
Those poor MAC users out there just don’t have those kinds of unexpected pleasures.
Seminar this Friday
We are having an informal game research seminar this Friday, loosely themed around “Goals and meaning”.
Full program on Jesper’s blog.
This new-fangled book thing
Science writer Steven Johson interestingly imagines the response of cultural critics commenting on the recent invention of the book in the light of centuries of experience with video games:
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . .
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.
Quote from recent review of Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You ” in The New Yorker.
Technically different
You’ve made your way to the sparkling new WordPress edition of my blog. The principle is something like if you have no fascinating new content the least you can do is switch CMS once in a while.
But of course, Blogger was getting really slow and WordPress is a really excellent piece of (free!) software.
Final cut
My protracted battle with the department video cameras has come to a temporary end. Right this moment I’m transferring the final gaming session recordings to a hard drive.
This little project has taken longer than I had expected. Not in the sense that your supermarket shopping drags out but more in the way that your brief foray into World of Warcraft just-to-check-it-out is likely to destroy your RL social life.
Next is the final editing/rendering after which the actual transcription and analysis can begin. Considering how my time estimates – although pessimistic – have proven highly unreliable I’ll probably be hiring one or more students to help with the transcription.