The Yes Men

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

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

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

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/

Academic Search Premier

Here is the link for the search engine for academic journals. If you click "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed Journals)" you will include academically suitable material for your papers:

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/search?vid=1&hid=2&sid=1cf345b8-20f4-4f31-8155-4996308895db%40SRCSM2

You can also get to this page by clicking "Databases" on the Library homepage, then scrolling to the bottom and choosing "Academic Search Premier."

A lot of this material is free to be downloaded as a .pdf, so you don't have to make xeroxes or even go to the library. How easy can it be?

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

http://allyourbase.planettribes.gamespy.com/video1_view.shtml

"Database Literature" reading links

Following are links for the next online reading assignments.

For Wednesday

This is for everybody to read (there won't be a presentation on it though we'll talk about it in class).

Raymond Queneau, "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems"
http://www.bevrowe.info/Poems/QueneauRandom.htm

Scott McCloud, "The Carl Comix"
http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/carl/index.html

For Friday presentations

These are presentation links, but I would like everyone to take a look at these links so that we can have some discussion.

Geoffrey Ryman, "253"
http://www.ryman-novel.com/

Christian Bok, "Eunoia"
http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/eunoia/text.html

Leevi Lehto, "Get a Google Poem"
http://www.leevilehto.net/google/google.asp (regular) http://www.leevilehto.net/google/patterns.asp (patterns)

Noah Wardrip-Fruin et. al., "News Reader" & "Regime Change" http://turbulence.org/Works/twotxt/

Daniel Howe, "Text Curtain"
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/textcurtain/ (description)
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/textcurtain/applet.html (applet)

The Book

Another silly video:

http://www.devilducky.com/media/57946/

Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Neat YouTube video that is like a crib sheet for this course:

Internet Research Methods

I'd like to spend some time in class talking about internet research methods. I don't have any clear outline of how I do research on the internet, so we will have to put this one together ourselves. There isn't much writing available online, either, but I found a pretty good site that has exercises, and of course there's the ubiquitious Wikipedia:

Teaching Internet Research Skills
http://www.virtualchase.com/researchskills/methods.html

Internet Research Methods (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_research

David Clark, Meanwhile

Here's the link to David Clark's "Meanwhile":

http://www.habitatstudio.ca/~cmendis/meanwhile/

Research Related Links

Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/

Wired
http://www.wired.com/

Rhizome
http://www.rhizome.org/

Electronic Literature Organization
http://eliterature.org/

Electronic Book Review
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Grand Text Auto
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/

Two Introductory Essays

Below are links to two short essays that I wrote for my class in Electronic Writing at Brown University. I'd like to include this in our syllabus, so please take a look. I'll be printing them out for you soon, so don't print it out yet. The online versions are better anyway as there are a lot of live links:

What is Electronic Writing?
http://www.arras.net/brown_ewriting/?page_id=54

Themes and Concepts
http://www.arras.net/brown_ewriting/?page_id=20

Game Writing

Just heard about this, the first entire book devoted to the subject of writing for video games (or at least that's what I was told, I seem to come up with a few more at Amazon).

Here's a review:
http://books.slashdot.org/books/07/01/31/1445235.shtml

Those of you interested in writing for video games should check out Grand Text Auto:
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/

Experimental Websites

Sodaplay
http://www.sodaplay.com/

Floating Sushi
http://www.andrew3000.net/floatingsushi/

Modifyme
http://www.atomless.com/projects/modifyme/site/

Recube
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/recube/

Pianographique
http://www.pianographique.net/

Starry Night
http://rhizome.org/starrynight/

They Rule
http://www.theyrule.net/