Paper Formatting

I forgot to mention that I'd like you to use MLA formatting for your foototes and bibliography. This is especially important for web sites you are citing. Here is a good site that runs down the formatting options for your sources:

https://webmail.stockton.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/

The Yes Men

Final Papers and Presentations

Your presentations should be from 10 to 12 minutes long.

• Start by giving a summary of what your paper is about. The first thing you should do is let the class know your thesis -- what theory you aim to prove, or what range of work you are analyzing and what questions you aim to answer about it. If you are reading your thesis right from your paper, be sure to rephrase it in more conversational terms after reading it. Your thesis should be about questions, not answers -- get us into it by showing there is a problem that you are seeking to solve.
• Then, you should go through a few examples from your paper that support your thesis. For instance, if your thesis involves the fact that education in the classroom has been transformed, for better or worse, by the use of technology, you should have about three solid examples of this. You should have pros and cons -- you should try to look at your examples from different angles. If the examples are not answering questions for you, they will not be interesting to anyone else.
• For your conclusion, you should return to your thesis -- rephrase it if you'd like once again to remind us what you said earlier. Then show how the examples support or negate your thesis, and tell us what you've concluded.

The easiest way to think about is that you are telling a story. Try to make it conversational. Make eye contact with the class, use your own speaking voice. Your presentations in class have been pretty good so far so don't worry too much about it.

New terms: it is a sign to me that you have done a lot of work on your paper if you introduce terms that we are unacquainted with. Sometimes, these terms might seem quite simple -- the term "cool," for instance, has a very different meaning for advertisers than it does for us -- so you have to let us know that you are using it in a different way.

If you are using multimedia: don't show any videos or anything that lasts much longer than 3 minutes unless necessary. Make sure it is well integrated into what you are saying about your thesis. Make sure you introduce the video properly, and also comment on the video after it is done. This also goes for long passages you are quoting, etc. Put the videos on your blog so you can access them quickly.

Hand-outs/PowerPoint: you can use hand-outs for items that need to be seen visually, or you could use a PowerPoint presentation, but don't rely on the Powerpoint to do the work for you. Don't use silly graphics with PowerPoint for the sake of it, only if you think it helps set the mood for your presentation.

Question and Answer Period: Every student in the class should pay close attention to the presentation and I expect everyone to have a question for the presenter. Please don't be absent for class on these two days. You don't have to ask a question for every presenter, but I'll be keeping track of who is asking questions during the two days of presentations.

Research Papers: These papers should be well researched and constructed like a proper paper, with an introductory and concluding paragraph, etc. The style need not be academic or dry, but should be thoughtful and coherent. These papers should be from 6-8 pages long (visual supplements do not count in the page count). Please don't use any filler; stick to your points and keep it lean. Put any visual aids for your paper on your blog so I can refer to them.

Format style: All papers should be in 12 point type (in Times Roman or similar font with serifs) with 1.5 spacing and 1 inch margins. They will be marked down if not in this format. Research papers should have the proper biography and footnotes where applicable.

On Worldbuilding

I found this on BoingBoing and thought it was interesting in relation to narrative and video games. It's from a blog by some guy I've never heard of:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

Links for Monday

Next week, we'll be covering web parady, hacktivism, memes, machinima, mash-ups, detournement, and other forms of unofficial "net art." "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" falls under this category.

Here are the presentations that I assigned last Friday, including the links that I've associated with them (but you can add other material if you find it):

Monday:

Joanna: mash-ups
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_pop
(there are tons of mash-up projects about this, but one of the most famous is The Grey Album http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grey_Album)

Alyssa: machinima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima
(again, there are tons of examples, but the most famous is probably Red vs. Blue -- you should plan to show some of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue)

Wednesday:

Melissa: memes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memes
(find a few good examples to illustrate the concept and plan to show some -- this website actively tries to propogate them: http://www.fark.com/)

Danielle: detournement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detournement
(this is a concept that was conceived by the Situationists -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International -- but I don't expect you to report on them, just find examples of detournement that you can use)

Friday

Annalysa: hacktivism, "Blackness for Sale"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacktivism
http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html
(try to talk about another example of "Hacktivism" that you find through the wikipedia entry, but concentrate on Keith Obadike)

Kathryn: outsider art
Outsider Art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
(try to find one or two good examples of "Outsider art" that you find through the wikipedia entry)

Stuff I will probably talk about:

The Yes Men
http://www.theyesmen.org/

MyBall
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/rider__myball.html

Found Art at Ubu.com:
http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/

Hillary Clinton Meme
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2412676&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

Snakes on a Plane Trailer
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=snakes+on+a+plane+trailer

Final Presentations

Wed., 25
Ben Esser
Brian Sullivan
Tom McCarthy
Jackie Dunay
Melissa Garafolo
Megan Errickson

Fri., 27
Annalysa Coleman
Kathryn Tomlinson
Joanna Christen
Danielle Sanzone
Alyssa Machado

Second Life and Education

From (where else?) Wikipedia:

Education in Second Life

Second Life has recently emerged as one of the cutting-edge virtual classrooms for major colleges and universities, including Harvard, Pepperdine, Elon University, Ohio University, Ball State, New York University, Stanford University, Delft University of Technology[32] and AFEKA Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering.[33] Second Life fosters a welcoming atmosphere for administrators to host lectures and projects online, selling more than 100 islands for educational purposes, according to a New York Times article.[34] The article quoted Rebecca Nesson, an instructor at Harvard who brought her Legal Studies class to Second Life in the second half of 2006. "Normally, no matter how good a distance-learning class is, an inherent distance does still exist between you and your students," she says. "Second Life has really bridged that gap. There is just more unofficial time that we spend together outside of the typical class session." Joe Sanchez, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin evaluated the use of Second Life in education in an interactive qualitative analysis, finding that once students overcome the technical and interface difficulties with Second Life, they "indicate a preference to social learning activites and find it enjoyable to interact with other avatars while learning in this space".[35]

Issues and criticisms

Because it is under constant development, and is an open environment that can be used by almost anyone with broadband internet access,[40] Second Life has encountered a number of challenges. These range from the technical (Budgeting of server resources) and moral (pornography) to legal (legal position of the Linden Dollar, Linden Lab lawsuit).

Prior to June 6, 2006, all Residents were required to verify their identities by providing Linden Lab with a valid credit card or PayPal account number, or by responding to a cell phone SMS text message.[41] (Residents providing information were not charged if their account type cost nothing to create.) After that date, it became possible to create an account with only an e-mail address; even standard verification methods such as e-mail reply verification are not used.[42] Access to Teen Second Life still requires credit card details. Linden Lab has the ability to ban Residents from Second Life based on a hardware hash of their local PC,[43] preventing them from returning with other accounts.

In January 2007, two articles were published on the Internet which compared the economy of Second Life to a pyramid scheme.[44][45] In the same month, a "virtual riot" erupted between members of the French extremist party National Front who had established a virtual HQ on Second Life, and opponents, including Second Life Left Unity, a socialist and anti-capitalist user-group.[46][47][48][49] Since then, several small internet based organizations have claimed some responsibility for instigating the riots.[50]

Video Game Links

Sissyfight 2000
http://www.sissyfight.com/

Pac-Mondrian
http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/

Legible City
http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_main/show_work.php3?record_id=83

Video Game Auteurs

"Video games do have their auteurs -- Wil Wright, John Carmack, Sid Meyer and Shigeru Miyamoto are examples -- but what they do and how they do it is frightfully opaque."

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004301.html

Video Game links for Freewrite

I put these links together for those of you who might have problems with the next freewrite. You should be sure to read the other articles, by Aarseth and Zimmerman, before writing your piece.

This link has a very brief rundown of how the Frogger piece relates to Basho:

http://pbfb.ca/bashos_frogger

Here's a web version of Frogger for those you who have never played it:

http://www.download-free-games.com/online_games/frogger.htm

Here's the link to download the Columbine game if you couldn't figure it out from the site:

http://www.columbinegame.com/download.htm

Here's a good series of discussions about the game (and if you can't get the game to run on your computer, reading some of this might be enough to discuss the moral issues as related to narrative). It has the open letters written to protest the Slamdance festival:

http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/index.php?s=super+columbine+rpg

Here is a short article by the game designer about "The Marriage":

http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames

Here's a short article on the game with several reader's comments (some of whom hated the game):

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/20/the-marriage-unties-the-games-as-art-argument

Freewrite #5 (last one!)

For this last one, I'd like you to look at the following three "video games" and discuss them as literary objects. These are due on Monday, the 16th.

Basho's Frogger
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/hennessy/frogger/basho_frogger.html

Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC only, has to be downloaded)
http://www.columbinegame.com/

The Marriage (PC only, has to be downloaded)
http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/

The questions I'd like you to consider are the following:

• what is the purely literary "content" of the piece (i.e. what does the text, setting, context, etc. provide you about the game)? is it more like a poem or a story?
• if you were to describe these games as "narratives," which of Henry Jenkins types of narratives would apply (please quote from the text)?
• how do the "game" elements contribute to this literary content (for example, the GUI, the interactivity, the rules of play, the goals or "dramatic need" of the player)?
• how does the content of the game relate to elements of the world (i.e. its specific analog: poem, news event, marriage)? does it tell us something new about the thing it is commenting on?
• how does this game challenge or confirm values and morals of our present society? does the game have a deeper philosophical component?
• is the game art?

Please be sure to read all of the assigned video game readings before writing this. Also, be sure to do some research on those pieces that require a bit of background info (Basho and the Columbine Massacre, for instance).

The Super Columbine Massacre RPG was banned from a recent festival of independent video games on moral grounds, so that is worth reading about as well (the link above brings you there, but also Google it). It also has some problems on my computer -- it seems to double-up on my screen, so I have two very short versions of the game screen at the same time -- but you can still play and read it.

11 Weirdest Video Games

If the "story" doesn't mean anything and it's all about play, then why are these games "weird"?

http://www.ugo.com/channels/games/features/weirdestgames/default.asp

Friday's Class

Just a reminder... on Friday, we will:

• see two presentations, by Jackie and Megan
• go over the quiz (be prepared to answer all of the questions on the quiz when I call on you)
• discuss the paper outlines
• assign next presentations
• discuss the next freewrite

Sorry about the confusion regarding this most recent freewrite. I had switched the date for one of my classes and thought I had done it for yours.

The Restaurant Game

This is a game that is created by the users who play it -- you are credited as being a "game developer" once you have played it a few times. I can't explain much more than that, except that it is like Facade and runs on an artificial intelligence engine.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/restaurant/