Regarding the 'Rhetoric of Failure'

Is it a Product of Time, Frustration, or Indifference?

This was the question that occurred to me in regards to Ian Bogost's theory of the 'Rhetorics of Failure.' Namely, what is it that produces failure in a game more specifically then the games abstracted design; why does it fail? And how does the way it fails (a 'technique of failure') reflect the rhetorical argument made by the game?

Let's review the concept of 'Rhetorics of failure' for a moment. According to Bogost, "If procedural rhetorics function by operationalizing claims about how things work, then videogames can also make claims about how things don't work" (85). Or as Bogost quotes of Shuen-shing Lee, "A you-never-win game could be considered a tragedy, for example, a game with a goal that the player is never meant to achieve, not because of a player's lack of aptitude, but due to a game design that embodies tragic form" (85). Finally, near the end of the chapter, Bogost explains "Videogames that deploy rhetorics of failure make a subtly different statement than those that are simply unwinnable, or that actively encourage play loss. In Kabul Kaboom, the rules inscribe a playable game that eventually and inevitably end in loss, similar to arcade games like Pac-Man. In September 12, the rules depict the impossibility of achieving a goal given the tools provided" (87-88).

So what the 'rhetorics of failure' seem to be essentially, is a style of conclusion, like "tragedy" as Bogost writes, because it preordains and requires the game to end with failure. Not because of "the player's inepitude" as Lee argues, but because this is the form of the game, and this prewritten failure is part of the game. This act, the eternal manifestation of failure at a game's end, according to Bogost's implications, is a subversion of the standard gaming conclusion where the objectives are attained, and the game is solved, beaten, completed. Against this standard that unwinnability of a game seems to make the game like a pair of loaded dice, unerringly progressing to the same conclusion.

To return to my initial questions: how is that you fail a game, Bogost provides several examples of differentiated categories but does not create a taxonomy. What this leaves unresolved is the idea that the way you fail is important. That the logic of failure or the propulsion to lose is the most important element of the 'rhetorics of failure,' a conclusion that Bogost never gets around to. Briefly, I'll try to sketch some categories and show what I mean.

1. "The Onslaught Failure" - As in Space Invaders, pushes an individual to the point where their ability is overwhelmed by the progressive betterment of the program they play against. This sort of rhetoric of failure produces the understanding that no matter how vigilant you are, you cannot keep the enemy in check. Growing bored, or becoming overwhelmed (as in onslaught) the game defeats you, leaving nothing but a score, or in the case of Kabul Kaboom, nothing at all. The speed at which you are defeated, and the inevitability of your defeat produce a sensation of futility, which is a common message of political satire. The message: Nothing can be done to win (bring peace, prosperisty, etc.) until the conditions of the game (government, war, environment, etc.) are changed.

2. "The Immoral Failure" The McDonald's Game makes you think you can win, but it never reaches an end game, as the game's clock just keeps running, and the ways to stay ahead of the game's drive to make you lose keep shrinking. So you are forced, out of the conditioned drive to win (which Bogost does not discuss, but deserves attention), to perhaps do the the immoral thing (if you haven't already) to try to win. But even this is not enough. You still lose. And though you continue to change the variables and strategic approaches to the way you play, you continue to lose. Here, the game is playing you, as your engagement with the game causes you, the player, to change, while the game remains the same. The morphing of the player, all in the attempt to win, is revealed when the player understands that the game is unbeatable, and then must assess all of the ways he/she changed to try to win, and consider those actions, or more importantly, that drive. I think the most important conclusion of the McDonald's Game 'rhetoric of failure' is how capitalism is embedded within the concept of the game, exemplified by the player assuming he can win, and changing strategies multiple times before realizing otherwise.

3. "The Wrong Tools Failure" This is the one 'rhetoric of failure' that Bogost does engage with, as he suggests that the conclusion of September 12 (or one conclusion) is that you cannot do your job of ridding the world of terrorist with an oversized bomb that is time delayed and kills other, innocent people in the process. Therefore, the argument is that the game, or more metaphorically, the American Military does not have the adequate approach to defeating terrorism. If we want to defeat terrorism, we must change our weapons entirely, perhaps even stop using weapons altogether.

Bogost

Most of the problem I have with Bogost’s chapter on political gaming is that it does not acknowledge that it itself operates within or is affected by ideology in a very material way and that the interrogation of political issues as procedural systems is as well. He acknowledges or seems to subscribe to the various interpretations of ideology that identify the ability of ideology to distort material practice in a totalizing way and yet offers the claim that by playing games and unpacking their claims about political rhetoric, “we can gain an unusually detached perspective on the ideologies that drive” the games (75). A very clear example of how ideology operates in the article is his unabashedly liberal interpretation of Hurricane Katrina, and his also left-leaning interpretations of laissez faire political philosophy and practice and “America’s Army: Operations.” His offhanded criticism of laissez faire politics, for example, I believe, would not be possible without the Rawlsian-esque liberal ideology that succeeded such things as the Potato Famine and laissez faire politics. In his interpretation of America’s Army (which again is suffused with left-wing interpretation) the ambiguous task of interpreting ideology manifests itself when Bogost acknowledges the two main possible interpretations of the lack of realistic deaths: that the game is aimed at teens and therefore kept the gore to a minimum for rating purposes or that the Army does not perceive battles to be macabre. This task of interpretation seems to be far from removed from the influence ideology and certainly not detached. Thus, I have several questions. One, is gaining perspective on political institutions and ideologies itself driven by a specific ideology? How is interrogating political issues as procedural systems affected by the same ideologies it seeks to interrogate? Is it possible to have a detached perspective on ideologies, especially? Considering these questions, what is the value of specific claims made by video games about interrelations between political processes? How can we most effectively interpret them?

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

The Control Allegory

In Galloway's "Allegories of Control," a shift occurs between non-computerized culture and computerized society. This shift, highlighted by Deleuze, is "characterize by a movement away from central bureaucracies and vertical heirarchies toward a broad network of autonomous social actors" (88). We study this as a move from a disciplinary society to a control society. We are not forced to live within one system, but instead we are controlled within a vast set of systems.

Games contain a form of control known as informatic control. Instead of imposing a single ideology on the player, they impose a total system of control that the player must live within. Interpretation of video games involves canning a game for large patterns instead of recognizing a dominant ideology. Games "flaunt informatic control" therefore we must "Interpretive patterns".

Specificities, such as the racist use of nationalities in Civilization, give way to the variableness that can just as easily swap the inferior Iroquoi nation for the Soviet Union or the Babylonian empire. Yes, while a game can still have a racist undertone, the actual material history that formed that racist undertone is swept away since "informantic organization... recolonized the function of identity" (102). We play according to the "synchronic" or multiple mathematical equations/controlling code of the software system, not the "diachronic" or single/static point of the Iriqoi game character icon.

This variableness highlights flexibility within informatics and late-capitalism. Just changing the variables of the system does not change the control system of the game: "To be entirely clear: mine is an argument about informatic control, not about ideology; a politcally progressive 'People's Civilization' game, a la Howard Zinn, would beg the same critique" (103).

If the individual variables do not matter, how do we interpret or scan the text?

First, we must understand that playing a game involves understanding the system of control. Galloway states that our desire to win the game leads to our desire to master knowledge of the game algorithm. The only way to win a game is to live perfectly within its system of control. "The digital can't exert control with architecture, so it does so with information.... I see this fetishization of the "knowledge triumph" as a sort of informatization of the conspiracy film" (94). Playing a game in any manner (such as a suicide player, a PKer, an explorer, etc.) forces one to learn the rules of the system.

From there, if we understand that a game is an allegory, we can interpret these processes correctly. By constantly following these rules and acting within them, we can try to understand the larger system working behind the game: "When one plays civilization, there is action taking place, but there is more than one significant action taking place" (105). We constantly do this while playing a game- we do not always fixate on the racist Iriqoi icon but the implications of starting off the game as any "nation" throughout history. "There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later" (103).

Questions:
When a game designer creates a game, is a system of control always implicit? Is it even possible to make a game that does not have a system of control? In what ways can this control system prove beneficial? If Zinn's Civilization game just changes variables, what are some examples of game changes that would alter the system of Civilization?

If we focus on informatics as opposed to ideologies, does it even matter how "racist" a game is? Commercial game makers built Colonization, but there was a much larger public outcry against that game than Civilization. While I do not think Galloway dismisses the analysis of individual ideologies within a game entirely, it seems like the public still analyzes ideology within games with much greater scrutiny than Galloway proposes we should.

Galloway critiques informatic control as creating false realities and ignoring actual material conditions. Because of the computer age, he says, Bangalore has a booming economy but also a giant economic gap. He then goes on to say "the claims I make here about the relationship between video games and the contemporary poltical sitatuions refer specifically to the social imaginary of the wired world and how the various structures of organization and regulation within it are repurposed into the formal grammar of the medium" (89).

How might one take apart the imaginary wired world (e.g., Bangalore as an outsourced workers' paradise) and rewrite the grammar video games (i.e., alter the political context of video game)? Is the McDonald's game an example of this rewriting in action? Or is the McDonald's game just another imaginary construct of the digital world?

Galloway says games "solve the problem of politcal control, not by submiating it as it does the cinemea, but by making it conterminous with the entire game?" (92).

What is Galloway's "problem of political control here"? Is political control the same as informatic control? Does Galloway see political control as completely negative?

Simulation Games: Interactivity and Discovery

In reading Friedman, I find myself agreeing with most of what he says, but at the same time wanting to challenge the limits of some of his arguments. For example, in the section titled “The Power of Interactivity” Friedman talks about how games can restructure perception. While I agree that a game may temporarily alter ones way of looking at the world, I don’t think it can become dangerous. Friedman says that video games may make us lose our grip with reality and become desensitized to the human consequences of violence and war. It is here that I think he is going too far. Games like Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army may have been developed largely by the United States Army, but they certainly don’t make the impact of war any less horrific. Games, at least for now, haven’t crossed the boundary between the game world and the real world. The player doesn’t forget that he’s playing a game because it maintains the structure of a game. Even in Ender’s Game, the kids never knew it was real and that’s why it was so easy for them to do what they did. When Ender found out it was real, he was flooded with all the emotion that war brings. I don’t think this will change until the day comes that shooting a person in a video game looks like a video of someone being shot in real life.

Friedman also talks about how gamers form a cybernetic consciousness with the computer where gaming can be described by the constant back and forth player-computer interaction. I really enjoyed Friedman’s analysis of how powerful this experience can be. This is because it’s hard for me to describe to non-gamers how it’s possible to play something for 8 or more hours straight. Superficially it sounds extreme, but it’s something that I’ve done dozens of times. Friedman even alludes to that specifically when he says “It’s very hard to describe what it feels like when you’re lost inside a computer game, precisely because at that moment your sense of self has been transformed.” I want to add that this has actually been a dangerous for some people. Forgetting to eat or even sleep is a common result of this level of gaming. A great example of this type of danger is the South Korean men who played Starcraft for 50 hours with very little food or sleep and died.

I don’t really have much to say about the Galloway reading besides going over a two points that I liked and agreed with. He started off briefly predicting a golden age for video games in the next decade and alluded to how very few media critics consider it as a worthy art form. I find it especially interesting that video games have gotten a lot more media coverage and annual industry revenues have risen significantly since he wrote this in 2006. The other point that I wanted to talk about goes back to a few classes ago when we debated how much play was needed to really understand a game and critique/analyze it. Galloway writes that in games,

“The game is learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm).”

This argument that we should try to understand the allegorithm of a game is dependent on extensive play. He goes on to say later that doing this allows us to “understand contemporary political realities in a relatively unmediated form.” I wanted to mention this because I feel that this is a strong argument for why there should be a “close playing” of video games.

Separating Simulation and Reality

Late in the chapter Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity, Manovich says:

Games modeled after simulators - first of all, first-person shooters such as Doom, Quake, and Tomb Raider, but also flight and racing simulators - have been quite successful. In contrast to interactive narratives, such as Wing Commander, [... ] first-person shooters are based on the coexistence of the two states - which are also two states of the subject (perception and action) and two states of a screen (transparent and opaque). As you run through the corridors shooting at enemies or controlling the car on the racetrack, you also keep your eyes on the readouts, which tell you about the "health" of your character, the damage level of your vehicle, the availability of ammunition, and so on. (Manovich 210)

This mention is brought out in reference to systems which blur the line between the illusion and the periodic breaks out of it. I find the case of the racing simulator particularly interesting. Many racing simulation games offer an in-car view of the race, and have options to disable readouts such as relative track positions.

In this case, the simulation presents the same point of view, and the same sort of split action cycling between simply driving and checking gauges like the speedometer required in real driving. The user actions in the simulation and in the real life action being simulated are the same. With a pedal/wheel accessory for the system on which the simulator is run, even the physical actions are the same. But Manovich touches on this interesting point but drops it (or misses its value), even though it bolsters his point. It supports him in his argument that the oscillation between the system and action is not necessarily a limit of current technology; in the case of a driving simulator, this arrangement is an ideal goal for the game designer.

It also complements his notion that "the user invests in the illusion precisely because she is given control over it" (209) because this argument is a rationalization for why users surrender to illusions which break themselves periodically, while since there is virtually no break in this case there appears to be less need to rationalize the user's acceptance of the illusion. The readings we've gone through of late all seem to agree generally with, for example, one of Bogost's definitions of simulation, that it is "a representation of a source system via a less complex system that informs the user's understanding of the source system in a subjective way" (Bogost 107). But when the simulation is simplified in only obscure ways - such as the inability to open your door and evacuate a vehicle at 80 miles per hour - both Manovich's and Bogost's discussions seem as if they might lose relevance. Both are predicated on significant differences between simulation and source system. How closely can the simulation approach its source model before the distinction is too small for the discussions of submitting to illusion to be relevant? How close can they become before the more relevant factors become which exact points the user relies on to distinguish the two?

Some Cool Digital Art

Two cool things I found in the past day:

flickrvision displays photos uploaded to Flickr as they go, correlated on a world map.

Alex Dragulescu's Malwarez is a visual rendering of a few internet worms, based on analysis of their code.

One part I found interesting about this first part of Bogost's book Persuasive Games was hisdistinction between persuasive games and persuasive technology, later termed "captology," a subject that he seems eager to critique. I'm not sure I agree with Bogost in giving this field of study/practice the overtly negative label "manipulative technology." Nevertheless, there seems to be a somewhat dramatic distinction between persuasive technology and what Bogost chooses to focus on in this book. The way I would try to summarize this difference is by saying that while persuasive games try to persuade via some form of rhetoric, persuasive technology persuades via psychology, methods that one might use or study within a controlled, experimental environment.

On perhaps a less trivial note, I think it's particularly interesting to look at this book in light of what we talked about in Tuesday's class, namely software and games as allegories of social structures and processes. Because of the computer's increased ability to create representations of processes, Bogost chooses to focus on games and algorithms ("procedures") that "present or comment on processes inherent to human experience," such as processes that affect economic, political, social, and cultural conditions and behaviors. In other words, his focus seems to rest on games that stand as allegories for social processes (maybe more explicitly than the processes at work within software in general). As he argues, "procedural expression must entail symbol manipulation, the construction and interpretation of a symbolic system that governs human thought or action" -- a definition that I think one could apply not only to procedure, but also to ideology.

A quick look at the other sections of the book suggest that this connection isn't all that far-fetched. Bogost separates the rest of the text into three categories -- politics, advertising, and learning -- all of which correspond to the ideological state apparatuses presented by Althusser. Therefore, I think one could make the argument that an important part of procedural rhetoric is the mirroring and, in effect, critiquing of the processes at work in certain ideologies, or in ideology as a whole.

Intense Processing

Crawford's Process Intensity article brings up an interesting distinction that may have gone un-parsed in class up until now: the distinction between process and datum, or, more generally, between actions and things. The most interesting thing about this distinction is that it allows us to use the vast body of texts dealing with those distinctions on a metaphysical/philosophical level with respect to gaming. As we could see from Galloway, computer gaming has no real physical 'game.' It is always dependent on auxiliaries, intermediaries and the very act of playing a game for a game to emerge from the disparate elements of executed code, twitchy thumbs and eyes glazed-over.

This points to a conclusion: that the subjective experience of playing a video game can be understood as an property emergent from material components, like art or life, whose emergence can not be understood. Crawford's concept of process intensity qualifies the strength of this emergent property, the enjoyability of a game is directly dependent on its own strength of action.

Bogost seems also to be pointing at this kind of analysis of gaming as process, as his concept of procedural rhetoric serves to emphasize the game as action.

Then, with this in mind, we may have new powerful tools in our theoretical arsenal to defend game studies against those who would relegate it to methodological analysis, as Aarseth does. Methodological approaches presuppose that their subject matter is already a 'thing' or a cohesive unified single entity capable of being analyzed like any other 'thing.' However, if what makes a game a game is its process intensity or emergent properties, such an analysis can not assume objective properties in games and thus the entire method of inquiry would be called into question.

Code, Games and Skillz

I throughly appreciated Aarseth's discussion of the level of skill a game analyst should bring to the scholarly interpretation and analysis of games. As he says "For the playing analyst, the question of which position and stratum to attain is a question of skills, experience, ethics, motivation, and time. Although expert and innovative play are always hard and sometimes impossible to reach, they do imply that the (successful) analyst has understood the gameplay and the game rules better than others."

Throughout our discussion of the role of software and code I naggingly wonder at how my almost total lack of programming skills affected my reading and interpretation of the theory of code. While none of our readings address this issue in particular (that I recall at least) I read recently, though I forget exactly where, that Friedrich Kittler has made the claim that all students (sciences and humanities alike) should know at least 2 programming language. Aarseth's examination of how skill affects gaming reflects back on our discussions of code.

I was a little disappointed that Galloway didn't explicitly discuss this in his article. However I was very pleased to see our good friend Lev Manovich weight in on the manner, by way of the blurb on the back cover of Galloway's book. Lev lets us know that "Galloway is both a leading media scholar and an expert video game player, and this gives Gaming its special edge." Here Manovich is not so subtly conflating the strength of Galloway's analysis with his skills as a gamer.

I am at least comforted to know that in our upcoming discussions on games I have ample experience, in stark contrast to the sometimes overwhelming realm of code.

Dreamlines

It's pretty cool. As Max was saying, this would make the coolest screensaver ever.

http://solaas.com.ar/dreamlines/

Ceci n'est pas une pipe?

That felt like a nice little reunion episode; what joy to find all our friends from previous readings (Manovich, Hayles, Kittler, etc.) coming together in this article.

I was curious about Galloway's assertion that code has similarities to narrative (page 327). It seems odd to me that so many of our discussions of code come down to making it something else - that is, code as language, code as art, or code as narrative. I'm beginning to wonder whether you couldn't make the same arguments across the board, likening narrative to language and art to narrative (in fact, I think you could in both instances), and the cynic in me pops up to say, 'So what does it mean to re-classify code in the first place? Why can't we just call code 'code' and accept that while it has similarities to other, more familiar categories, it's something unique?' Well, it wouldn't be as fun that way.

Don't get me wrong: I think there's something to be gained from making comparisons. It brings our attention to the ways code works, by highlighting the ways it's the same or different from whatever it's being compared to. (For example, when we're talking about code as language, we have Hayles' argument that code, unlike spoken language, is 'performative.') I do think that trying to re-classify code at the end of the discussion is counterproductive, though, because now that we've talked about all the similarities between code and language, or art, or whatever, it seems like we're supposed to ignore or forgive all the important differences and go "Yep, gotcha, code is X." Code is code, dude.

All that said, Galloway cites Aarseth but doesn't really explain how he likened code to narrative, and as a narrative geek I'd be curious to hear more about that. So long as we don't conclude that they're the same thing.

A Mac Life

"A corporation like IBM of course has the clout to try and force its standard on everyone else, but in fact it is more likely to be the State in the form of the IRS or some other large bureaucracy,..."

Bowles goes on to describe Macintosh's strategy of enforcing its ideology through "absolute adherence to what are euphemistically know as 'the Macintosh guidelines'" onto its users in order to create a Macintosh community, rather than simply a Mac user. Apple's newest products heavily promote the idea of an Apple ideology. On the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes all interract in a manner proving most somewhat pressing needs and entertainment can be solved by a Mac product. The advertisements, while somewhat funny, let us know exactly what they think of people who don't recognize the Mac lifestyle as superior. While Justin Long is always portrayed as hip, yet secure in his dominance, the PC always tends to have those familiar problems that don't bother Macs.
It seems through advertising techniques, Macs have constructed what is a representative portrayal of the ideal Mac user: Someone who gets it. Similar techniques are implemented in cults and pyramid structured marketing schemes in order to flatter their unsuspecting recruits into liking themselves more . Those atop the hierarchy of the pyramid scheme or cult tell those they look to recruit that they have an answer to how to live better, how to "get it" even though others may not. Commercials on TV tell you how to work from home and quit your day-job all while making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just call the number on the screen and they will show you how to "get it". I am not saying that Macs products are shams and aren't as good as advertised. I am simply implying their techniques of identifying their target market utilize ideology to promote their products as a better lifestyle.

I really enjoyed, if am confused by, Galloway’s discussion of fetishism. He writes on page 319 that he is posing software as “an example of technical transcoding without figuration that nevertheless coexists with an exceedingly high level of ideological fetishism and misrecognition.” Drawing from Chun, he writes that “Software is based on fetishistic logic” and then poses the idea that perhaps it is an allegory for fetishistic logic instead. From Marx, he writes that fetishism is perceiving value in something that has none. Then he goes on to write that fetishism is derived from an empirical (he reads this to mean “technical”) set of relations and thus, he concludes, a dialectic of technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction has existed since the start (319). He then poses one of the central ideas of his paper, that the relationship between software and ideology is best understood as an allegorical one in which “ideological contradictions of technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction” are resolved within the software itself (319). His justification for this comes much later when he argues that software-as-allegory can only be understood in the “larger social context” as software’s dialectical movement between “fluidity and fixity” is the same as the “political problem” posed by ideology (327). Its forced divorcement between the poetic and the functional are, he writes, a “projection” of the “agonizing scars of fragmentation” of social life (327). I am having trouble placing fetishism in terms of allegory — in what way exactly are technical transcoding and fetishistic abstraction (of ideology) resolved within software? How are the dialectics of poetic/functional, private/public, fulitidy/fixity related to the “original” dialectic of transcoding/fetishistic abstraction? How exactly is Galloway using and defning the central term “ideological fetishism”? Do we agree with his definition of fetish as contrary to technological transcoding?

A Base of Femininity

What interested me the most about Chun's article was her exploration of gender politics in early computing and the gendering of computers in general. It seems that as software became more of an ideology, where higher levels of coding became more representational and further divorced from the "real conditions of existence". Yet this construction of software, the current system in which levels of software (a.k.a. 'onion') both create the illusion of transparency and control while hiding the automatic voltage switching drudgery from the computer. To be fair, I read the other posts before putting up my reply, and I must respond that I think Chun writes the article the way she does because she is trying to point out the evolution of early wire/switch flipping as being a gendered, clerical, mechanical female task that became automated and programmable with the advent of the first set of programming languages. This is where the ideology of software arises, for at that moment the physical action of "programming a computer" becomes represented by a machine language, and then in turn is later represented by a programming language. In this sense, the feminine clerical task is regulated to the computer, and hence the gendering of programming as "male" when the clerical voltage switching is regulated to the machine.

To what extent is programming language based off of the initial, pseudo-mechanical (almost assembly line work) of the clerical woman programmer? The cultural representation of programming has always been gendered (for example, Swordfish) in a certain way in that when computing was clerical and mechanical, it was women's work. With the advent of "creativity", "control", and "power" enabled by the programming language, programming is male. But what about the purely representational level? Have we reached a place of gender-neutrality when software has resembled nothing like it's reality of on-off switches?

I apologize for posting so late!

Wendy Chun’s article “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge” interested me on various levels.

The first section I would like to comment/concentration/question: “Programming’s clerical and arguably feminine underpinnings- both in terms of personnel and command structure- was buried as programming sought to become an engineering and academic field in its own right. Such erasure is key to the professionalization of programming- a compensatory mastery built on hiding the machine.” What Chun seems to insinuate here is that hardware’s role of hiding software and code is directly linked or influenced by a chauvinistic revision of history in erasing the role of women in programming and computer science. While I agree that such revision has taken place, I wonder if it is a strictly “chauvinistic” influence to blame. While I don’t want to go to into feminine theory, especially in the context of cyborgs and computers, Chun herself writes that there are “historical and theoretical ties between programming and what Freud called the quintessentially feminine invention of weaving, between female sexual as mimicry and the mimicry grounding Turing’s vision of computer as universal machines. (In addition, both software and feminine sexuality reveal the power that something which cannot be seen can have).” As a result, I begin to wonder that if we are to give an argument relating software and programming with female sexuality, if perhaps the very essence of female sexuality, the hidden, the unseen, the ultimate lack, contributed to the hidden role of women in computer science and consequently, the hidden role of programming in computers.

The other section I wanted to comment about was Chun’s comparing of software to ideology. While I agree that software and OS produces “users” as ideology similarly produces “subjects”, I thought an even more interesting argument could have been produced by a seemingly offhand comment Chun made in this section “Software is based on a fetishistic logic.” Rather than viewing the abstraction produced by OS and software as a form of ideology (which is somewhat problematic in Althusser terms as his ideology was constructed by his notion of interpellation- something which I don’t believe exists in the software-user relationship as there is no “pre-ideological user”), I think it may make more sense, and more useful, to see it in terms of fetishization. After all, my insistence on calling a computer folder a folder is not because software is trying to construct me, the user, in its own image, but rather my desire to attribute qualities to an inanimate object: fetish.

I have to say, I'm confused as to the reason for the presence of several sections of Chun's article, On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge. The overall article makes a clear point about the need to avoid considering software as merely a flat set of instructions with no life of their own, so to speak, unlike Manovich's proposed idea of transcoding. But between the two end points, the article takes several lengthy and seemingly unrelated arcs into areas I feel are interesting and worthy of further discussion, but seem to be left hanging in the article, and which I'm having trouble connecting to the main point of the article.

Probably the most notable of these is less of an explicit change of topic, and more of a narrative interwoven with other discussion: the role of women in programming's development. In the first third of the article (mostly throughout the Automatic Programming section), Chun frequently makes reference to the fact that many of the very early programmers were women. In the description of the history of ENIAC, FORTRAN, and early developments in compilers, Chun seems to stress the role of women, making several interesting points about the genders of typical descriptions of programming (calling it at times feminine and masculine). She even makes offhand comments about how ignoring the historical gender consideration is distorting history, and makes negative insinuations about Vannevar Bush who was cited as desiring the removal of females from the field of computers. Yet she never goes anywhere in particular with these comments, and upon reaching the Hiding the Machine section, the references fade without further deep consideration. I can't tell if this is just Chun's personal views about the importance of women in computing manifesting itself in her article, or if the intent was more focused than that, and I missed it. Either way, I'm surprised she didn't explicitly mention that Grace Hopper, discussed frequently in the article, built the first compiler - a fact which must have been unavoidable in her research. I feel that the gender issue probably deserves some amount of discussion, particularly as this is so far the only place we've seen it surface (the syllabus lists a week on gender gaming, but gaming and coding are more than somewhat different).

I also wasn't sure how the discussion of causal power contributed to her argument. She mentions Laurel's thoughts on causality (that it allows users to interact with the system more easily by making it easier to relate to), but this line of thought seems to dissolve as the discussion shifts to a general discussion of ideology in user interfaces, and at that point the causal power discussion doesn't seem to support any particular part of Chun's larger argument.

I'd also like to discuss in class the Software as Ideology section in particular, as I find it interesting (despite minor technical objections), and am curious to hear the opinions of others on this section.

WolfQuest

Educational games for school kids are usually designed to end in about 40 minutes (which fits into the typical computer lab schedule). That's not really enough to make an impression, however: studies show that people learn most from the period after the lesson, when they look back on what they saw or heard and discuss it. Commercial games often inspire this kind of reflection, because their players seek out things like online message boards where they can discuss strategy, ask questions, and talk about their experiences.

WolfQuest, the game, is something of a foil for WolfQuest, the community. Developed in partnership with the Minnesota Zoo, this project tries to get kids excited enough to study wild life and ecology on their own, after the game catches their attention and makes them want to discuss what they find in it. Helpfully, the website you can download the game from (for free) has plenty of links to wild life resources - and the official WolfQuest forum.

That said, the gameplay element of WolfQuest is key. It's not designed for short spurts in the classroom, but for the free time kids might otherwise be spending on commercial games - so it must be good enough to rival them. Yet the budget was nowhere near that of commercial games, and they had limited time. Yipes.

They also had to balance the game between reality and romanticism. A wolf's life is not that interesting: they hunt a lot, and they often fail to catch anything. Who wants to play that? Additionally, the developers wanted to tap into the emotional bond between (human) player and (wolf) character, but how to handle communication? It would break immersion to have the wolves speaking the words players type, but the players wouldn't understand the body language wolves do use to communicate. For that matter, neither do researchers: many of the wolf's behavioral patterns have yet to be modeled.

The answer was a lot of compromise, much of it shaped - handily enough - by the game developers' blog, where they attracted a small community even before the game was released, and often solicited their opinions about aspects of the game. (Should the wolves receive 'loot' as a reward for a successful hunt?) The result? On February 18, when I heard the speech, the game had received 110,000 downloads (since release on 12/20/2007); the website gets 2,500 hits per day, and there are multi-player sessions going on all the time. A lot of people have hit up the message boards asking questions about, for example, elk behavior (is it realistic for them to keep hanging around after a wolf hunts down one of their herd?). The gameplay raises these questions, but leaves them unanswered, so that players can figure it out on their own.

Anyone up for some WolfQuest?  I want to hunt elk.

• digression: 10+ years ago (when there was less publisher control?) programmers would pick up a topic they were interested in, like the life of a wolf, and make a game about it; now it's interesting to see many serious games duplicating these same ideas
  
• theme: designing a serious game for an unserious audience (school kids)
  
• idea: wolves, like people, are social animals with complex ways of communicating
  
• create an affective connection with wolves
  
• ambition: take an audience that already spends a lot of time on computer games, make a game about wolves, and inspire them to get out into real environmental studies
  
• reflection is a key part of the development process: no matter how well-designed the game, the player needs a chance to think it over/talk it over with others
  
• previous games were fitted to a classroom computer lab schedule, approx. 40 min, which wasn't enough time to foster that reflection process
  
• James Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us): point out that gamers (mainstream) do in fact spend a lot of time reflecting on the game, e.g. on internet message boards
  
• wanted: a "real" game, "addictively fun," with a realistic 3D world and novel gameplay
  
• situation: small team, indie budget, tight timeframe, free distribution so can't go overbudget
  
• encourages people to check out "unity," a user-friendly tool for serious game developers
  
• core challenge: finding the right balance between fantasy (wolves romanticized, wolves as demons) and reality (wolf lives a mundane life)
  
• developers kept a blog while making the game; one post about in-game loot (e.g. necklaces for the wolves) got 346 very argumentative comments
  
• another argument: should they show blood in this game, or is it too violent?
  
• problem: in real life, 80% of hunts fail for the wolves ("wolves always play on Legendary"), but can't frustrate the players that much ... if you make it easier, does it change the message?
  
• trying to model wolf hunting patterns, which even biologists haven't modeled fully yet
  
• how do you set wolves' wide variety of actions to programming verbs?
  
• wolf communication is subtle and cryptic, rooted (of course) in body language
  
• answer: create a dialogue tree, and when the player clicks it, the wolf adopts the appropriate posture - e.g. "I'm boss!" makes him raise his hackles and stiffen his tail
  
• note: in packs, wolf social interaction is functional and hierarchical, not conversational
  
• on the player-side, needed to ensure safe multiplayer chat so they developed a lexicon of 4,000 words that players can use to communicate on channels with each other
  
• most common question zookeepers get: who would win in a fight, a wolf or a grizzly bear?
  
• really, wolf would just avoid conflict with grizzly because he'd get his ass kicked
  
• gameplay answer: grizzly as a hazard; you can't beat it (though next month will see an expansion where a grizzly might come across as you're taking down an elk?)
  
• what kind of game an important question, because it helps the game fit with player expectations ... put it to their fans, and were told to call it 'Wildlife Simulation Game.'
  
• Game in action!
  
• allowed to customize your wolf, e.g. color and size, which he says players loved
  
• compass in the corner shows the way to missions, e.g. to W you see an elk
  
• wolf's default action is a trot; in game, they can run faster, but it exhausts their energy bar
  
• separate 'scent view' that helps you locate your prey
  
• look at the different elk; you can see their health bars and determine which to attack
  
• hunting takes a while; sometimes you get close enough to bite the elk, but it kicks you in the face! In the face!
  
• note: rock music :)
  
• WolfQuest is not just a game: it's located on a website with a lot of information about wolves
  
• their preview video was lampooned on "Attack of the Show," but it created a huge hits spike
  
• 110,000 game downloads since 12/20/07; 2,500 visitors to the site per day, etc.
  
• always several multiplayer sessions going (even during school day, tsk tsk)
  
• theory: much of the learning takes place in the extended experience, not just in the game, e.g. on the community forum (where players post walkthroughs, strategy tips, etc.)
  
• emergent behavior: one of the players figured out a way to make coyotes attack elk for you
  
• example: one player comments that it seems stupid for elk to resume grazing after the wolf attacks a member of their herd, but another points out that they really are that insenstive :(
  
• plot for the game (some episodes will be added later): find a mate and a pack, fend off grizzly hazard, establish territory with a den, protect your wolves' pups, raid a sheep ranch (oh dear)
  
• how to engage kids? emphasize emotional engagement, hone the verbs, design hooks - discrepant events - to prompt questions and discussion beyond the game, create opportunities for reflection and discussion (and facilitate it), make it fun!
  
• esp. with limited budget, needed to use as few verbs as possible and then iterate those over and over so they wouldn't be stuck spending their whole time on this interface