Cultural Technology

Samuel, via Potts and Murphie, wonders where culture ends and technology begins. I think today, certainly in the first world, to think one is separate from the other has all the hallmarks of a myth of a golden age. Christopher uses the analogy of the city to think about technology and culture by making the city literally a CPU. Speculative thinking anyone? Rebecca on ‘technology as the habitat we live in‘. Georgia on how there is no clear definition available for culture or technology (which might suggest the best way to approach them is as systems, not objects).

Pottering

Kate writes about the Potts and Murphie reading and wonders how we might even separate culture from technology. Increasingly I think the same thing, it just seems a romantic myth to think there is some ‘pure’ culture that lies outside of technology. What (seriously) would or could that be? Brittany makes the point that since technology is ubiquitous we live in technology, and is “an overarching system that we inhabit”. So, how over arching do you really think it is? Olivia pick up how the reading distinguishes between technique, technology, and culture. This is good as some key theorists in this area made a distinction between technique as a way of doing, and technology as machines that require techniques. Monika argues that culture is individual to the extent that “each individual following his [sic] own culture”. I’d suggest Potts and co don’t say this, and that culture to be culture has to be social and so shared. As individuals we might have ‘it’ but it is not an individual’s thing. We come into culture, we don’t create it as we wish it. Holly goes via the Romantic artists to think about technology (with a nod towards The Young Ones, what I would describe as punk TV) and culture. It’s a good way to approach it, and it also illustrates a range of political and cultural changes (the factories are now ‘somewhere else’, but technology is less of an outside evil than something well and truly inside). Denham provides a very good summary of the introduction, and yes, culture is a joyously dense word. Patrick recognises that the way we understand the word ‘technology’ has changed, as these things do, so an interesting question now is, in this sort of digital society, just what sort of work does the term now do for us? Why? Lina, as have several others, very much like Eno’s definition of culture as that which we don’t have to do. This is culture as what some others might define as luxury, not luxury as in a Rolex watch but luxury as in not essential to anything. Anna D has a summary of technology, technique, and culture. Alois wants to get into the details of older views of definition of culture that are premised on hierarchies. Good with that.

More Richness

Denham has a post about the 80/20 rule and the inequality of the power law. Though the thing to take away is the long tail point, what lies in the tail is greater than what lies at the big end, so for online stuff something important is that while it might seem obvious that there are hubs (though it isn’t, why link to Google?) what is less obvious is the scale, and complexity, of the tail. Nga has a simple and useful account of why earlier web sites end up with more links to them than later ones (part of the explanation of preferential attachment). Lucy has a simple and elegant account for networks, centres and scale free networks.

Is It a Game?

Jake talks about how some games aren’t about winning. I’d suggest they aren’t games anymore. At some point an interactive narrative driven ‘game’ isn’t really a game, it’s an interactive narrative. Just as an interactive narrative that has a small moment of game play in it probably doesn’t make it a game. While Gone Home is narrative driven it is still a game – we don’t need to describe a novel as ‘narrative driven’. So what happens here is there is a strong narrative thread as it is a classic style puzzle quest game. I haven’t played it, but if the quest needs to be completed, it is a game. If you just explore a story world, then in my argot it is more interactive narrative than game. If people talk about it in terms of how you play it, and what you need to do in room X to be able to do thing Y, to discover Z, then it is a game. Play is play. Play that is orientated towards a measurable outcome (a result, however conceived), becomes a game. Reading narrative is not a game because we can’t measure the outcome, and we don’t.

Losing, Winning

Ajeet has a very good post. Questions, thinking out loud, joining ideas. Good questions open ended answers (it’s a fool’s paradise to think there are yes no answers to many of these questions). Play is not the same as a game, a game is, basically, competitive play and it becomes competitive because there are some sort of rules to determine an outcome. You can play mum’s and dad’s as a child, and that is so NOT The Sims.

Last Week.

Denham’s post from the unsymposium is worth a read, not just picking out the key take aways but providing some commentary on them too. The observation about film and hypertext and so much digital media making as a relational media is, I think, exceptionally important. The role of recommendations, and those systems that now elevate some people over others is what I meant about trying to work this out algorithmically. We know how to make recommendations based on things like what you buy compared to other people who buy similar things. But to do this just on comments we make is much harder – how do you tell who is more authoritative than someone else? The most common way this is being done at the moment is through peer review. I rank other people’s comments and those who consistently seem to be highly rated by others will be elevated in terms of authority in, and by, the system (this is essentially a slashdot system as they invented it). But there is a lot of time and money being spent on trying to solve this just on the stuff that’s already out there, without needing people to vote and rank.

Games

Prani on games, winning and narrative. Re The Sims, you play it as a game, it has rules, and winning (as much critical writing points out) equals maintaining a family in ‘health’ etc. You can game it, but it is not a story. It is trivial to make games that you can’t necessarily win, but they are still rule governed, procedural (e.g. turn taking) and about the accruing of points, even where the game doesn’t call them point (in The Sims it is a house, income, job, and other middle class things). Stories don’t let you accrue health points, gold, power up, form clans or guilds, barter, and so on. And while some games have narrative the issue is whether narrative is fundamental to games. That is the debate, not whether a game might use some narrative but whether it is fundamental (can you have a game without a narrative, if yes therefore narrative isn’t what we need to use to understand what games really are).

Kimberly picks up similar points and uses Mario Bros as an example. The issue though is that saving Princess Peach doesn’t
‘matter’ to the game play. In other words Mario Bros is a successful game not because of its story, but because of its game play, which uses some very simple things to provide a frame for the game play. Afer all, it’s a pretty long reach to claim that Mario Bros is a good game because it is such a good story. It’s a good game because of the quality of its game play, the story, if we treated that as legitimately a narrative we’d have to recognise pretty quickly it is even less sophisticated than most stories told to children. (We have to save Princess Peach – why? i.e. as a ‘story’ what is the narrative motivation and justification here?) Similarly the motivation is to level up, not save the Princess, levelling up comes first (who asks how many characters have you rescued versus what level?) and the Princess is some decoration. Finally the multiple endings described by Kimberely are not hypertextual (this post and another on Maths and English and finally the one on Ted Nelson where I use some diagrams to explain hypertext are useful.

Ella too, suggesting Tetris is a narrative because there is a goal and you need to progress toward it. Let’s get academic here, there is no viable definition of narrative that says it is progression towards a goal. This is, though, a strong definition of what a game is. When we read we might aim to finish the book (a goal), but that is not what a story is, that is what you need to do to read the story. To think finishing = story would be the same as saying reading (since we need to read the novel) = story. It doesn’t. The phone book is not a story.

Recommended

Molly picks up my post about recommendation systems and notes that she hates the ads on Facebook but likes Spotify. Exactly, the former is only selling ads, not recommendations of what other people like you liked. (Though imagine an ad engine that worked like that?!)

Anna D has notes from the unsymposium, including reputation networks, games and narrative. Gabrielle has three take away ideas. Hypertext and games, writing hypertext, and IBG (Internet before Google).