prosthetic knowledge

danielrehn:

During my research ritual for wwwtxt/@wwwtxt on Tuesday, I stumbled upon a fantastic observation from November 1993 about the decline of [creativity in] computer games:

It was bound to happen. After years of more or less blissful innocence, artful drive, and altruistic passion, corporate America has found, captured, dissected, and degraded the Computer Game. It was a noble thing once: half way between Art and Science, it amused and challenged like no other pasttime. It brought people away from boredom or frustration to alternate worlds, vivid and alive. It was programmed with love, diligence, and a vision for excellence. The Game was meant to be enjoyed. It was crafted to stand alone and independent from its creator, to be sent out into the world with a value all its own. It was forward-looking, progressive, and challenging. 

But now, all that has changed. The Game has been broken. It was pressed into a mold of verifiable and uninteresting funness, marked with a price and passed to the masses. They gave willingly to have it, because it was now a drug to them; a lifeless, empty drug. It helped them to escape for a while, but its mediocrity left them wanting more, though they did not even know how mediocre it was, since they had nothing with which to compare.  What would become of it?   […]

The original poster faces a heavy thread rife with flames—mostly naysayers who feel games were always creatively lackluster and always will be.  But there’s a small minority who agree, and point out that games to less inspiring and requiring less imagination.

It’s almost 20 years later and only a few bright lights have illuminated us since. There’s a substantial indie movement of course, but, mostly, there’s still a largely unexplored potential in the Game medium.  LA Game Space—a project I’ve been developing with Adam Robezzoli over the past 3 years—is largely a response to these concerns.   We aim to set games free, to stoke the creative and experimental fires that have already been started.  Our space will provide the opportunities for games to be created and played without needing to worry about popularity or sell-ability.  And, crucially, our interdisciplinary artist-residents will experience creative friction that will demand the development of new, hybrid forms.

As for the original poster, Jeff Wofford, he’s alive, well, and posted this recently (6,744 days later):

We have to make games. We think about them. We draw them. We write about them. We replay images in our minds—incredible images that we can’t stand for the rest of the world to never see. We have to design games. We long for them to get made.

Some dreams never die.  Here’s to making this one a reality.

images from Christopher Locke’s “Modern Fossils” (2009)

In the boardrooms of corporate America, profits aren’t everything - they are the only thing. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers’ living standards, but their decisions are neither coordinated nor intentionally harmful. Call it the “paradox of profitability.” Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders’ best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company’s income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities.

More here at TruthOut

Entertaining and interesting as always ….

… 2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

… 30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions

The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why well-trained dogs at shows are still led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.

Dysfunctional mental states stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “not good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.

… 44) Your dream life will increasingly look like Google Street View

More here

Some interesting points, a couple here:

Jesse Schell, Assistant professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and CEO of Schell Games

Marcel Duchamp once said, “I have come to the conclusion that while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists.” Gaming and play bear an interesting relationship to art. Like art, play is experimental, creative, flexible and immersive. It is done for its own sake. And like art, games can challenge and transform us. So can video games be art? They certainly incorporate many artistic elements: painting, architecture, music, sculpture, acting, writing, animation and dance.

The games that feel more like art tend to have qualities in common. They do not pander to the player; they are mysterious; they feel more serious than most games; they have a complete, holistic feeling. Such games are rarities, but they exist, and as the form evolves, just as cinema did, more and more of them will appear.

Ian Bogost, Game designer, critic, founding partner of Persuasive Games and author of Newsgames (MIT Press, 2010)

The 20th century saw the following celebrated as art: a urinal placed on a stand, a painting of a coloured square, poetry made of words taken randomly from a hat, an audience cutting the clothes off an artist, industrial paint thrown onto canvas, reproductions of commercial advertisements, a telegram asserting that it was a portrait of its recipient, a barricade of oil barrels on a Paris street and live television images of a Buddha statue. Lest we conclude that these are outlandish examples, consider the artists who produced them: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Tristan Tzara, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Nam June Paik, respectively. All are celebrated, their status as artists never questioned.

Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century it has primarily tried to provoke us, to force us to see things differently. So maybe we should ask, “How are video games changing our ideas about art?” If the purpose of art is indeed to force us to see something we thought we understood in a new light, perhaps the most fundamental move video games have made in the artistic tradition is in the very eliciting of the question, “Can video games be art?”

A good read …

I guess I should divulge what got me thinking about writing this post. Just this morning I read the news that the British government is shutting down the UK Film Council as a broad scale cost-cutting measure. If you recall from my previous posting, I contended that Europe made more sophisticated and challenging cinema because the federal governments supported the arts, unlike the United States. Well, it looks like I’m going to eat my words.

The UK Film Council was probably the most successful government film program in the world, and for it to fall does not bode well for other successful film programs like the National Film Board of Canada. As countries tighten their belts because of poor financial decisions and mismanagement, consistently the first items to be cut are education and the arts.

As these institutions crumble it leaves independent films in a vulnerable state, as more attention will be turned to the major studios to provide art and culture. The major studios, however, are not in the business of art and culture, they’re in the business of entertainment, and they will continue to increase the price of entertainment because a) they lack competition and regulation, and b) because they can.

More here