I just got done indulging myself and taking a little extra time doing my assignment for game design this week, which was an analysis of heralded narrative game Façade. (Too tired to fix cedilled C. Imagine it’s there.) I then went back to look at an earlier analysis of Zork I did, and realized that even though I thought GDC had marked a huge revolution in my thinking, I was saying pretty much the same thing I was saying then. Nota bene, though, that where I was previously concerned only with the limitations put on the player, I’ve now flipped the script and have started thinking about the limitations on the game producer’s side. Here are both analyses:
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I had this great talk with Broughton yesterday. Here is a man whose career has ranged from military to medicine to art to society. I went in paranoid that the paper I am supposed to be presenting at his conference Saturday is a lumpen mass of statistics, nothing more, which in my understanding of the Frankfurt School (the goggles I have been wearing all semester) amounts to a potentially evil means of extracting meaning from humanity. We talked about things that came up at GDC — the ways in which games are narrative, are systems, are realistic; more on that later.
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Today in the course of other pursuits I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for African American Vernacular English, and was duly bowled over. AAVE is also known as BEV or Ebonics. My first exposure to the topic was William Labov’s seminal book on BEV, which quickly became a central pillar of the way I think about education, class, and intelligence. I am so, so pleased to find that thorough information on the topic is up online. I just wish it was easier to google.
While most of my professors only dream about transforming research for a digital age (Chuck’s exempt), Lalitha Vasudevan, the professor leading my Digital Geographies class, lives that dream. Today she had us discuss our field observations, which we will be presenting a few weeks hence, under the stipulation that we may not use a simple print format. We as a class were supposed to develop additional criteria for the presentation. The ones we came up with reminded me of Dogme 95. So I wrote a parody. Roger and Mack, this bud’s probably for you. I was channeling. :D
Today for the first time in years I returned to a gathering of New York independent media producers — the Grassroots Media Conference down at the New School. I left work in the city’s media nonprofits in roughly 2002 feeling alienated, as if I’d made no good friends, and frustrated with some of the trends I saw in the orgs’ thinking. But today I saw my former boss Abby, who no longer has concrete cause to be peeved with me as she is no longer at the IPA; and I saw Arun and Ana and John T. from my IMC days — and I guess I missed out on talking to Eileen, who I used to do legal video with — and Prometheus Radio people, and a small handful of Hampshire alumns along with a few folks from my current school, and it did feel like a homecoming. I guess the friendship-building process isn’t over yet.
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