What is Love?

Love is an online multiplayer game that seems to function in smaller communities than massive works like World of Warcraft. The idea is to build a civilization with the other plays in the game, rather than blow their faces off. To me, it looks like an impressionist painting mixed with a mid-90's super-polygonal world. The focus seems to be on creating relationships with other players, rather than killing them. Also, I like the whole aesthetic that developer Eskil Steenberg creates. All of my love to these types of aesthetic projects, especially when they are video games.

The Internet Eats Music

For a while now, I've been going on about the role the internet has played in the dumbing-down of popular music. My theory went like this- the internet has allowed people who really love and care about music to seek out new material from a multitude of sources. Whereas in earlier times, someone who loved music would turn to radio, MTV, label catalogues, etc., they now turn to the internet. With an audience made up of both serious music consumers and casual listeners, bands like Nirvana or Radiohead could become huge mainstream successes. With the loss, or relative loss, of the more serious audience, the main consumers of music through mainstream channels are casual music listeners. With this audience, there is less of a need to appeal to consumers looking for better music with more content (as subjective as these designations may be), because these consumers aren't listening, they are scouring blogs or getting music from friends through YouSendIt or Mediafire. The same basic idea applies not just to listening, but to buying music through physical media as well.

I'm not sure that I want to make any sort of value judgment on any of this, but it is sad for me that there are unlikely to be any more genuine rock stars, any major musical acts that are shared across large segments of the population. I used to be able to talk about Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins with nearly anyone. It's a bit more isolating to love Joanna Newsom or even MGMT. I purposely chose very large indie music acts, as even with their massive popularity (tickets to "indie" act Newsom recently cost me $45), these artists are anonymous to large swaths of the population (less so for MGMT). There is less of a shared music culture, and with this loss, communication and community with dissimilar people becomes more difficult, especially if one of the ways you connect to others is through music.

Tirade ended.

Anyway, I came across a fairly in-depth article about the current problems of the major labels and the ways in which they are trying to change. While the article's focus is not the same as my pseudo-thesis on the music industry, it seems to take the internet concept even further- they explore how the broadening accessibility of finding and creating music is killing the music industry. An interesting read: Record Labels: Change or Die

(How) Will Interactive Storytelling Alter Our Perception of Ourselves?

For the past few weeks, I've been following stories about the new Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain follows the story of a serial killer told through 4 different perspectives. The story unfolds through video clips rendered in a real-time graphics engine that is stunningly life-like. Sort of like the old Dragon's Lair games or Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you use the controller to make decisions for the character or perform certain actions. Depending on how you choose, the story alters, but never stops.

Heavy Rain is being described as a much more immersive and engaging experience than most games, blending genres and mediums to create a new form of storytelling- a type of story that many people have envisioned as a perfect project for video games- taking a cinema-esque experience and making it interactive, creating a world in which your choices count, making you a part of the experience. While Heavy Rain doesn't seem to fully realize this gilded dream quite yet, it is a step in the right direction. BTW- Gizmodo has an excellent editorial up about the successes and limitations of the game.

What I am wondering is how things will change if this more interactive form of storytelling becomes a dominant media format. In the nineteenth century, novels emerged as the dominant method for expressing the values and beliefs of our selves and our culture. For the last seventy years of so, film has taken on this role. These are the mediums through which we understand the stories of our lives. We imagine ourselves as movie characters or novel protagonists. We subtly create soundtracks in our heads to different moments, we think in lines from books from time to time, we imagine our prom night the way we saw it in Sixteen Candles, or we expect the type of love John Cusack encounters in a thousand and one romantic comedies. These expectations alter our perceptions of the world and reinforce, or create, in our minds the notion that there is a story to our lives, one to be played out in a certain way, with certain essential events occurring in line with story arcs at least somewhat dictated or influenced by the media we consume.

Mark Wilson, in his article on Gizmodo, has already discussed how video games could come to later the way stories are told. He writes,

If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it's that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they're somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.

Building on his point, if this genre develops into an art form in which we experience a multitude of consequences, in which there is not one path through which we progress, but a multitude of paths based on our own choices, will our concept of narratives in our own lives alter? Instead of imagining the perfect prom that we saw on a TV show, will we imagine a plethora of options based on diverse factors? Will we resign ourselves to the inevitability of chance? Will we see our selves as more responsible in the creation of our fate? We will stop pushing for idealized experiences? Or, is our desire to create narratives and story arcs too embedded in our psychology- either our psychology as humans or our psychology as western thinkers inclined to think with these types of stories regardless of media influence?

Are They Serious?

Over the last decade, I've felt an increasing difficulty in categorizing art in terms of any one genre, style, or even medium. There could be many books written about this difficulty, so I won't delve deeply into the problem here. However, along with the complication of categorization has come a seemingly increased difficulty in acertaining the intentions of the writer. Art has become almost purposefully enigmatic in a way that differs from art produced during the heyday of New Criticism. Many new pieces of popular art have no seeming message, yet offer experiences just bizarre enough and just far enough out of the range of expectation that we can't assume that they are merely poor art. From obvious postmodern poster-children such as Pulp Fiction to lesser known (and often maligned) films such as Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise, I often find myself wondering: are they serious?

Are these films what they portray themselves to be? Is there some sort of genre-parodying going on? Or is there a certain heralding of the unexplainable as deconstructionist and postmodern theories of art slowly seep into mainstream consciousness?

This brings me to the song I heard today. I came upon the new Weezer/Lil Wayne collaboration, Can't Stop Partying. The song, penned by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo with a verse by Wayne, sounds at first glance like a cheap rap-rock collaboration, a typical celebration of women, booze, and well...partying, as the title suggests. In the mid-1990's, Cuomo made a (huge) name for his band by releasing bitterly honest and painfully introspective pop-rock tunes that vaulted him to the status of legend in the indie rock community. And yet, since the commercial failure of Weezer's sophomore release, Pinkerton, an album that was composed while Cuomo was studying at Harvard and was written as a retelling of a Puccini opera, Weezer has released seemingly derivative, bland pop-punk. What happened?

I go into depth about Weezer's history as a musical force because it seems that there is some connection between the enigmas described above and Weezer's new glam-rap anthem. Since the release of Pinkerton, it seems that Cuomo has been dedicated to producing generic music that is obviously below his capability as a writer. Moreover, these songs are often laden with subtle nods to the fact that even their author thinks of them as garbage: intentional garbage. This is a man intentionally making music with no clear substance, and yet he still manages to produce albums with hints and flashes of depth. Again, the question arises, is there anything more here than music for the masses?

Like the violence and fart-joke laden works of Eminem that, while they appear shallow in content, are crafted with a great deal of formal skill and intelligence, Weezer's newest song de-stabilizes our expectations for songs. What are we to make of a track with the line, "I gotta have the cars, I gotta have the jewels" that comes from a guy who cited Nietzsche and Stendhal as major influences? If we make the assumption, and I think we can, that Cuomo is not being serious when talks of bottles of Patron and rollin' up to the VIP, we are still left with the enigma of a decade's worth of goofy pop-punk.

But this goes beyond Weezer. Each day there seems to be a new song that can't be made sense of, that fits no traditional genre expectations and has sly lyrical content that seems purposefully impossible to make sense of or even understand whether or not the author is remotely serious. Like Jerry Seinfeld, favorite comedian of the postmodern crowd, might put it, what's the deal with ambiguously ironic songs?



image via HipHopWired

Braid

It's slightly old news by now, but I wanted to post something about Braid for anyone who hasn't been lucky enough to come across it. Braid is the poster child for independent, artistic games; it is a side-scrolling puzzle game with beautifully drawn 2d visuals and a gameplay mechanism which involves the manipulation of time. Braid has been garnering a lot of attention over the past year or so for its boldly artistic...stance(?). Anyone who hasn't seen the game in action, check out the trailer below. It says more than I can by describing it.

Brian Eno on "the death of the uncool"

There is a brief article by Brian Eno in Prospect Magazine on the recent diversification of music tastes. He makes the point that with an ever-increasing number of subcultures and sub-categories of music, that there is no one standard for what makes something "cool." As Eno writes, "The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness." While Eno never uses the word "internet," I would attribute much of the credit for the dissolution of limitations on music taste goes to the accessibility of free music on the internet. With access to millions of songs with little to no cost, it's no wonder that cultural respect has been dissipated across a wider range of music.

At the same time, the music that is mainstream seems to suffer from this leveling of access, at least in terms of quality. Bigger, if not better, media, seems to dominate the attention and pocketbooks of casual customers more and more. Two of the largest media openings in entertainment history have occurred within the past few months, New Moon (film) and Call of Duty 2 (video game).


So, what direction is entertainment media headed in?

the death of uncool

Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a review in The New York Times of Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand. The piece seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up exploring Rand's life and values, with indirect comparisons to our current political landscape. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's placing of businessman and entrepreneurs on pedestals. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees. Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Kirsch, via Heller, emphasizes the the contradicting values expressed to American students. There is a lot of talk about following your dreams and passions, about making a difference in the world. At the same time, an MBA from Wharton is impressive, while having a "career" as an artist is seen as just that- a career in quotation marks, a career that is not really a career at all, as it does not typically result in wealth. Rand's genius, or failing, depending on what angle you are coming from, is to subsume the value of artistic or philosophically inclined thinkers in her descriptions of businessmen. This is a great point to note for those who have conflicting opinions on Rand's philosophy. I always found myself inclined to agree with the gist of her argument in terms of radical individualism and the strive toward human greatness, yet was still strangely unnerved by the way in which she seemed to manifest these concepts.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller- Book Review by Adam Kirsch

Is it Okay to Be Unhappy? Kierkegaard in The NY Times

A few months ago, philosophy professor Gordon Marino wrote an editorial for The New York Times, Kierkegaard on the Couch. Marino looks at how we treat issues of depression and despair in the modern age. While Marino focuses on identifying differences between despair and depression, for me the important question raised by his article was the issue of how we respond to unhappiness in our society. It seems to me as if American society sees most manifestations of unhappiness as a problem to be treated by medicine or therapy. The concept of valuing our melancholy musings is all but lost. The goal of therapy is not to deeper or clarify your thinking on deeper issues, but to "fix" you for having them. Clearly, I am referring to only a specific type of unhappiness/depression and this type is not the only manifestation of unhappiness or depression. For some, therapy and medication may be helpful and/or necessary. However, it seems that psychiatric care is almost always the first option. Serious spirituality has been relegated to new age practitioners and the church. Even here, the aim seems to be to "fix" the problem, to fix you, as if there is something wrong with deep and problematic quandaries. As the respectability and influence of humanities departments in colleges sinks, and our society pushes more and more towards a medical and scientific conception of thinking, I wonder what the place is for serious thought that fails to be uplifting.

Of Little Note: Thoughts On Recording Observations about Texts

A common assignment in high school English classes has students taking notes on a story, poem, or section of a text. Certainly it is valuable for students to have a means to record thoughts and observations, and such assignments give teachers a way to check if students are reading and at least thinking about the text in some way. More recently, however, I have been wondering what the value is in taking notes on works of fiction. How often does anyone take notes on fiction? This is not a rhetorical question, but a real inquiry. Do people take separate notes on works of fiction? I took notes on textbooks throughout college, but with fiction, I relied almost exclusively on highlights, underlines, and other notes written directly on the page. Of course, high school students can't write directly on their books, since the books must be re-used. Still, if students do not take this skill with them beyond their high school texts, then what is the value in note-taking outside of the classroom? It seems like it would be more effective to assign sections of books using photocopies, poems, and copied short stories and have students write directly on the pages. This skill seems more applicable to the study of literature and other texts beyond the English class.

Marginalia presents its own problems when taken outside of the classroom though. It is a somewhat class-biased activity, as only students who can afford to buy their own books are able to practice this skill. Further, on non-written texts, it is an impossibility to work directly on the text. Here, note-taking seems to hold primacy. If we are to teach and require note-taking, it should be done in such a way that students will pick up note taking as a habit for texts outside of class.

It seems that note-taking should be practiced on a variety of texts, from movies to magazines, and sit alongside marginalia, which should be practiced more often n class. In this way, we are equipping students with the means to analyze, question, and relate to texts in written form beyond their high school English classes.

Video Games and Scaffolding

I just ordered James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. This text seems to gain more momentum and have more influence each day that passes. Most notable to me is the recently opened "video game school" in New York City, Quest To Learn. Before I jump into the text, though, I'd like to get down in writing some of my own thoughts on the subject.

In the mid-1980's, Nintendo's video games, notably Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, established a certain progression for video game players. The player would progress through the game, struggling with different levels and enemies, only to reach a point where their avatar would get an "upgrade," a better sword or gun, a higher jump, etc. At this point in the game, the enemies and levels would become more difficult, requiring the player to use the new upgrade. Players would need to learn to use their new sword or new high jump to complete increasingly difficult levels or ward off enemies who could only be defeated by using the new tool. After a few levels, the new enemies don't just demand that the player uses the new tool, they assume that the player has become expert with it. From here, players must learn to wield the newest sword masterfully, or they can not move forward in the game. This cycle repeats with various upgrades throughout the games.

In this sense, the game is scaffolded much as teachers scaffold reading curricula. Students are taught a new skill, let's say, inferences. From this point on in the curriculum, students are given assignments that demand inference making. They must learn to make inferences in order to complete assignments designed to test the skill. After a time, activities no longer help students build on the skill or allow room for trying out the skill. It is assumed that students can make inferences, and inferences become expected and required. From here, teachers build upon inferences by introducing new skills, requiring more complex inferences, and evaluating these new skills simultaneously. Just as players of The Legend of Zelda must learn to use "hookshots" and "master swords," students must learn to make inferences, question texts, notice key words, or whatever literary skills are taught.

Going into Gee's work, I am curious to see if there is any overlap between my own, fairly basic, connections between curriculum design and video games and Gee's own parallels. I expect that if he includes elements of this idea, he will take them deeper and farther. I'm curious to see how this connection might be complicated, questioned, and explored.

Image via Webwombat

Scholes on the Value of the Humanities

I'm currently making my way through The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes. It's quite a fascinating look at how some of the traditionally successful aspects of English as an academic discipline are now being challenged. I think Scholes's analysis goes beyond just English though. In highlighting literature's receding place in our culture, his thoughts have implications beyond academics. He seems to be highlighting not just a crisis of literature, but a crisis of values in our society. He writes,

"What this society wants of those who graduate from its schools and colleges with degrees in the humanities-- as opposed to what those who claim to speak for it say it wants-- are, at worst, docility and grammatical competence, at best, reliability and a high level of textual skills. What this society does not want from our educational institutions is a group of people imbued with critical skills and values that are frankly antagonistic to those that prevail our marketplaces, courts, and legislative bodies." (emphasis in original)

Beyond the obvious implications for English (or philosophy or any of the humanities for that matter), Scholes highlights a real problem for humanities graduates, and for our society. There is no tablet of values for the English or humanities classroom. These classes do, however, preach, explicitly or not, the search for meaning, the search for truth, the thoughtfulness to interrogate texts and values. They teach a humanistic worldview, one that aims students at something resembling Plato's concept of "the good" or Nietzsche's "artist." What place does our society hold for such values?

A Wikipedia article on "quarter life crises" might help to shed more light on the problem. The article describes a quarter life crisis as such:

"After entering adult life and coming to terms with its responsibilities, some individuals find themselves experiencing career stagnation or extreme insecurity. The individual often realizes the real world is tougher, more competitive and less forgiving than they imagined. Furthermore, the qualifications they have spent so much time and money earning are not likely to prepare them for this disillusionment."

If this is the case, could a humanistic education actually be harming our students? While many of the values taught through the humanities are ones that I agree with and believe in, it seems that there needs to be some outlet for them outside of a university setting. I wonder, in our day and age, what outlet is there for critical and transcendent thinking outside of the classroom?