Blog #2: Chapters 1 and 2

To me, the main point Weinberger is trying to make is that we have exited the realm of the physical, the paper medium. Atoms are limited; digital organization is better in every way. "We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory" (22) is sort of the thesis of the first chapter in that it revels in the miscellany of the new digital order. It praises the digital and how being miscellaneous is better than the limited structures of organization we used previously. Digitized access to things makes for a far more wholesome experience when it comes to the hunt for information. The third order of order removes the barriers we've seen previously.

One thing that I've personally pulled lots of hairs out over keeping organized is my music library. I've labored away so many tedious hours of my life making sure I have incredible, instant, and very "third-order" access to my own musical collection. Interestingly enough, while the physical medium may have been almost completely phased out by the "beauty" of the digital that Weinberger is so quick to put on a pedestal, it has so many issues. The biggest qualm I've had with the replacement of physical data with digital data is that the platform we access and centralize our digital data with, the computer, is very unstable. Far, far too many times has some virus, upgrade, server failure, or other issue with the inherent fragility of computers caused me to lose access to my entire collection of music. Viruses rendering my system unstable cause me to format my hard drive, bam there goes my music. Getting a new laptop for my birthday causes the issue of having to transfer 17 GB of data, re-organize and re-sync it with an entirely new machine. The unfortunate reality of iTunes is that it tends to format files so that they don't take their metadata with them from place to place unless you continue to use iTunes, etc. etc. I could discuss the merits of various music players at length but that's irrelevant; I've unfortunately coordinated my entire music library around the familiar iTunes platform and that makes it a gigantic pain to move digital data from machine to machine, hard drive wipe to hard drive wipe. Especially when the alternative is to re-rip over 100 different CDs and deal with tagging metadata on all of it. It's quite a pain.

Thus the physical realm, with its limitations, has its advantages. Though Weinberger argues up a good storm for bits vs. atoms, I'm likened to the discussions in my DTC 375 class of the advent of the camera and how there was quite a movement around it. The idea was floating around that it was this new way to capture reality far better than paintings or art ever could and that art was thus invalidated; but it remains. As do our physical libraries and CD collections. Data is not the king, even in all the glory of the "unfulfilled glory" of the miscellaneous. 

Sorry it's late!

I understand the repercussions but my Weinberger book just came in on thursday and by this point I've only got half of it read. I hope to finish it this weekend; the accompanying blog posts will shortly follow!

Blog #1

With Web 2.0 swiftly becoming a tired-out buzz word that really only offers a bunch of basic tenets of our generation's expectations of the web, there are more and more ways for money to be made online. Being intensely interested in graphic design (hence me being in the DTC program at WSU), I take from this article a number of things.


Regarding the Web as a platform, I wonder if one day perhaps there will be a premium industry-standard way of designing imagery that's available on the web as opposed to programs that are run off of a hard drive. It seems implausible, unlikely, and unusual, but that's what Web squared is all about- defying convention and really pushing the envelope with what services are available online. We're already seeing mass-distributed ways to teach and profess the finer arts and nuances of using the current standard creative programs, all available as video streams online. It's making the self-taught freelance graphic artist much more likely to succeed. A big social movement to develop an open-source, web-based design program would be a dream come true for the strapped-for-cash design wannabe like myself. Gimp is a great alternative, but far from the industry standard that is Photoshop, and not web-based.

Unfortunately the web probably isn't a good medium for design, unless applications somehow gain a level of fidelity that we're not familiar with from the internet. It's a pipe-dream I suppose.

The coolest web application I've seen lately is Prezi. I bet microsoft has lost a lot of business from Powerpoint because of it. In retrospect, Powerpoint has always been great but I can't see why it's taken this long for a web-based, free application to take its place.

DTC 356

From here on out, all posts on this web site will be pertaining directly to dtc356 required postings. All posts on this website previously pertained directly to DTC 375 required postings.

Final Paper Proposal

My proposed thesis for this paper is that any plot or story-driven video game is essentially a form of remediated film. My goal is to deeply analyze the relationship between films and video games and how they've worked off of each other.

My outline is as follows: 

Introduction broadly connects how we consume and digest media; what we seek out of it, what we get, how we get it, and show how these things might obviously tie film and video games together. Ultimately talk about the connection between film and video games, especially concerning their narrative.

aybe an extended introduction or the first part of the body might involve a more intense looking at remediation and really reifywhat it means for something to be remediated. Or compare/contrast it with evolution. This could possibly be saved as the last part of the body, and should be brief because it's not the main point behind the paper.

In the body video games would need discussing in detail. Not necessarily games themselves, but sort of the mechanics of the storytelling, the narrative they use, the messages they can convey, theatrics in games, and the relationship films and games have.

Ultimately I would try and show how video games have borrowed a lot of production values in film, and how they convey a plot, and through their own production values they can be especially theatrical But as in remediation, they are more and different than film in that they engross the player on a more intimate level. The control of a character(s) can provide an intimate relationship with the plot unlike films, and of course interactivity is a very different medium all around.

Works Cited

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Print.

This class reading is the defining work on what exactly remediation is, and will prove crucial to understanding the difference between remediation and evolution, and is necessary to differentiate what video games do versus what films do.

Galloway, Alexander R. "Social Realism in Gaming." Game Studies 4.1 (2004). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.

This article discusses the realism developers strive for in many games of this and last generation. Though he refers not only to poly counts and anti-aliasing, he discusses the tendency to make cultures, locations, and peoples represented in games as accurately as possible. This is vital to the idea of video games and films being close relatives.

Hanson, Matt. "Film Futures in the Digital Age." The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age, by Matt Hanson. RotoVision. Web. 03 Dec. 2010. <http://www.endofcelluloid.com/>.

This is the website of the book by Matt Hanson that allegedly challenges and redefines film. It mentions video games several times in relation to film, and discusses the relationship between the two; what I seek to do as well in my paper.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Beyond Myth and Metaphor." Game Studies 1.1 (2001). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.

Marie-Laure Ryan describes narrative in detail, specifically its function in digital media. As the majority of this paper will be analyzing just that, this article is perfect.

Sisler, Vit. "Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games." Digital Islam. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. <http://www.digitalislam.eu/article.do?articleId=1704>.

This article discusses representation, the construction of meaning through words or symbols. It's mainly a cultural studies article about how American and European games portray Arabs, but underneath that meaning is a secondary subtext that describes the power of video games to represent and convey meaning through narrative, a powerful tool for this paper.

Revisiting Remediation

Video games have been a pretty big portion of my life since I was little. I really loved escaping into a world surreal and unlike mine own. Having vested a large amount of money and time into them, I have come to know a whole lot about them and their implications in society. I find them to be a form of art not unlike other texts, books, novels, paintings, or films. Personally, I feel that the element of interactivity makes many video games far more engaging and powerful than films. Obviously various media have their advantages, but for our final paper I would like to argue that certain styles of video games can be remediation of film.

This is such a big step to take, and thus I think appropriate to tackle in a final paper. Remediation and Evolution have a close relationship but both are fundamental on the same idea- something has been developed from, or in direct opposition to a current idea and attemps to expand on it or better it. Saying that video games are related to film and improve or differ from them in certain ways inherently ties them to film. I believe this to be a very rich topic with a lot of possibility for expansion, discussion, and argument to be made. To unfortunately expose a lot of my rather embarrassing childhood, I have been discussing video games with a whole plethora of people in person and on the internet since at least 2003 and have seen a whole range of arguments made. In my memory I've never quite seen a fully-composed argumentative thesis comparing film and video games, their development, relationship, and how video games are essentially a remediated form of film. For this reason I think the topic can be unique, deep, full of different angles to explore, and intriguing.

Communications redefined

One major aspect of Darnton's Communication Circuit that has been redefined today is the interaction between booksellers and readers. In our age of instant gratification, immediacy, access, and digitization, we've developed new ways of purchasing and reading books, especially since the advent of the world wide web.

No more are we restricted to getting books from bookstores, libraries, second hand stores, or local book exchanges. With web sites on the internet and internet-capable personal devices, we can acquire whole books without leaving our homes. Previously, books were sold at the traditional "brick and mortar" locations, where the buyer's presence was required for the transaction to take place. Often times, according to Adams and Barker, books weren't even bound and that was the duty of a third-party entity.

The difference in today's first-world society, especially since the advent of the world wide web and electronic banking transfers, we can transfer funds over the internet and purchase a copy of a book from the convenient location of… anywhere that has internet access. The social and official infrastructures our society has put in place allow for an expedited service to deliver the book to the purchaser with almost no effort whatsoever on their part. Giant corporations like Amazon, Half.com, Hastings, and Barnes and Noble all allow books to be purchased electronically over the internet and subsequently shipped to whomever.

Another, even more modern evolution of the communication between booksellers and readers is the recent take-off of electronic "readers." These are small handheld devices that use advanced vector technology to display text on small screens that very closely imitate the look of paper. Internet-capable, they also allow readers to purchase books from almost any location, but have the advantage of receiving a digital copy of their book of choice, allowing them to read the content immediately. This offers tertiary benefits as well, namely being able to browse large selections and storing multiple books on the same small device but these are very much unimportant and irrelevant to the communications circuit and are largely hyperbole. The e-books or e-readers don't offer the advantage of aesthetic appeal, unfortunately, as Adams and Barker elaborate on. They talk about many figures throughout history who used books to display certain things about themselves, because of the books' beauty or subject material. All of that information being lost in digital copies stored on a magnetic platter, the content and messages any book has to convey can still be done digitally. This still allows for the same reception and survival aspects of the newly proposed model Adams and Barker come up with, and arguably these digital copies will have greater impacts and survival because if the aesthetic and lustrous appeal of the books are lost then more likely their purchaser will have more intent to actually peruse their content than the purchaser of a standard physical book.

Ultimately the electronic purchasing system coupled with digital distribution and worldwide shipping allows books to be purchased far easier and by far more people than the previous system of actually traveling to a bookstore, peddler, or pirate. This aspect of the communications circuit, while still structurally the same, has been redefined since before the advent of the internet and electronic book distribution.