Pondering the Reading List

I like books. Felt spectacular to sell one, even if it was three or four years ago. That after another couple years of sewing together the Frankenstein monster. Then it was out, ravaging the countryside, harrying the peasantry. These days, I can't stomach to look at parts of Game Addiction. My co-author's sections – child development, brain plasticity, psychological hardiness – I love those. My sections on immersion and games culture? I can but meh.

Reading Stephen King's On Writing was the turning point, though a long time in coming. All through writing Game Addiction, I never cared about nice (or even palatable) language. I cared about gaming, then occasionally riding my word processor like a bucking porcelain pony. I dreamed that finishing it – after my last wipe and flush – I'd be off writing, kick the habit. 
 
Years went by. I taught at DigiPen, a door largely opened by the book I couldn't stand. Even hammered out a novel-length derelict of fiction. The spine of King's book winked at me, once or twice. Still didn't pick it up. And then, for no discernible reason, I needed to be better. For nobody but me. King's autobiography/handbook was right there, and I slopped it up in one sitting. On Writing has been special to me, since then. I associate it with the decision to care. 
 
Outside that, I'm skeptical of books. I'm never quite sure how useful they are, for the mysterious art of putting words in order. As a mad professor, who regularly curses artistically-inclined students with reading on comics, art, design, even reading itself, I may have given this unhealthy levels of thought. Mostly because, just as often, it's action that teaches. Whether they're Artists or Musicians, Designers or Programmers, DigiPen students or Real Live Devs, there's a time to stop reading and just goddamned finish a thing. Or fail spectacularly and repeatedly until you can finish a thing. It's why the old writer's axiom has two parts: 

Read a lot. Write a lot.

Is one the more important for the procedural pudding? And if there's a place for books, movies, even games, in teaching games, then is there canon? Are some worth requiring? 
 
So, good time for partial disclosure. Here's a handful of nonfiction I really like:


Introduction to the art and science of design: Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Paraglyph, $16.15 on Amazon
Textual immersion: J.R.R. Tolkien's On Faerie Stories, Del Ray, $7.99 on Amazon
Relationship of text to image: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, William Morrow, $15.63 paperback on Amazon
User Interface: Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think , New Riders, $22 on Amazon
The brain's processing of text: Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, Viking, $11.56 paperback on Amazon
Writing (big surprise): Stephen King's On Writing, Scribner, $10.88 paperback (or 2 bucks at Goodwill, common book)
Physiology of vision, from the eye to the brain: Anne Marie Barry's Perception Theory, in Handbook of Visual Communication
Relationship between mediums: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, $7.68 paperback on Amazon
Characterization: Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, $16.64 paperback on Amazon
Academic sweep of meaning and process: Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games , MIT Press, $17.86 on Amazon
Games culture: Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life $19.37 paperback on Amazon

But these aren't, generally, the kinds of books the axiom refers to. I've always interpreted Read a lot. Write a lot. as more saying that if you want to write Westerns, then read Westerns. Know your genre. Crime drama? Try Garth Ennis and Elmore Leonard. Horror? Stephen King, or maybe some of Neil Gaiman's youth fiction. In cinema, George Lucas got a lot from Akira Kurosawa, and in Michael Bay we see the clear influence of full frontal lobotomy. This last GDC, we heard CliffyB cite the Legend of Zelda, and John Romero Pac-Man.

But are those the most influential? The most useful? It's a fair question, with dozens of professors and devs hawking textbooks to games colleges. Students have got every right to challenge their texts. I've got a few quippy answers ready for just such an occasion, and suspicions on Useful Knowledge, but the truth is I really don't know if these books help them to do games better. 
 
If required gaming, viewing, and reading are all on the table (along with their fiction and nonfiction variants), is it fair to ask about required living? Philip K. Dick, in his How to Build a Universe that Doesn'tFall Apart Two Days Later, made the claim that writers created rough facsimiles of a truer reality. Base your works on older works, and you're making copies of copies. The original picture degrades, until all substance is derivative. If some of our artistic doings – our writing, filming, and developing – gets based off life, is that more the ideal? 
 
Fuck if I know. But I am curious. 

Get a Horse

About a week ago Sherry Turkle's TED talk went live.


She says that we love twitter, Facebook, and sometimes even that metallic “droid” ring tone, because they deliver on 3 gratifying fantasies:

1. we can put our attention wherever we want it to be
2. we will always be heard
3. we will never have to be alone

PARO both looks and sounds like a baby harp seal.

Turkle was surprised when researchers and nursing home orderlies gushed seeing an elderly woman pour her heart out to PARO the empathy bot. She says,

“I was thinking, that robot can't empathize, it doesn't face death. It doesn't know life. And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing. I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.”

Margaret, my grandma, passed away a couple weeks ago. Four days before that, I read a book on bonsai while she slept, helped her drink water, and helped her to the bathroom when the orderlies were 15 minutes overdue. Recovering from the hospital, a couple months ago, she'd spent a few weeks in a well-staffed assisted living place. Sitting with her, I heard at least three distinct voices shouting from down the hall. They all said the same thing, “Help me.” I never saw visitors for the two elderly women sharing Margaret's room. Spending time with the elderly is not glamorous. It is by nature wrenching, and complicated.

Sounds good.

Maybe it shouldn't be much of a surprise that at an event called the “Tacoma Noise Rodeo,” plenty of hip youngsters, and decidedly un-hip 30-year-olds, had their phones out during the music. Everyone seemed to text, at least once. And once one person saw a phone, it wouldn't be long before they took out theirs. As if they all felt compelled to say, “Look how many other things I could be doing now, how valuable I am. How much is at my disposal, how disposable you are. God I'm fucking cool.”

At that point, says Turkle, people stop being people. Recipients and respondents to electronic pawing become, “spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.” So if we want to be heard, knowing how little we actually want to listen – why not tell 64 followers on twitter, or our 356 facebook friends (at least, the 36 who haven't blocked our feeds)? No risk of intimacy, with all the fruits of friendship. Why on Earth would anyone sit down to listen to some goddamned music? Not possible. We need that escape hatch unlocked – ready at any time, for any reason.

Until we don't. Last week Chris, a classy English gentleman, was visiting Seattle. We arranged the meeting details via email, text message, and phone. Chris, who I'd met over noir movies and 24-hour McDonalds take out, in a Malaysian hostel, was traveling up the West Coast with his fiance (the engagement was very cool, very new news, which they shared in person), and a couple from California. We wandered from the Space Needle to Pike's Place, got some donuts they'd seen on a British travel show (that I, Seattle native, had not heard of), drank, drank some more, ate some Dick's at Gasworks park, saw a troll.

Yes, and they're delicious.

It's nice to think that would have happened in an age of handwritten letters.

I write a lot about this one guy Jared, a.k.a. Sasquatch the Rock Notch. Never would have met him without games, instant messenger, and an ability to build real connection through fiber optic wiring. The guy lives three, maybe four hours away, over a mountain range and through at least two distinct climate zones. I hitched a ride to the tri-cities a couple weeks ago, in order to participate in his 12-team beer pong competition (team names included: two girls, twelve cups; sparkle motion; prestige worldwide). At the party, easily 30 people cycled between a garage outfitted with pong tables and couches, a kitchen, and other parties. Phones came out, but they didn't dominate conversations. A person whipping out their phone was phasing themselves out more than anything. Technology wasn't, basically, that big a deal. Sinking ping pong balls into red plastic cups was.

Turkle mentions people texting during funerals. I can't really speak to Grandma's, since I was in the front row, but I can say that two cellphones rang at inopportune times. After the second, a third one crooned as it was preemptively shut down. One of the offending telephones was understandable – it belonged to my mom, who'd spent the last five years caring for her mom, the last three months spending every day (sometimes whole days) taking care of pills, procedures, paperwork, and the last week with details - she was, frankly, exhausted. The other two phones? I'm not so sure. But the crowd was mostly over 50, or under 15. It was probably less disrespect, and more a matter of skill with technology.

I'm torn – it's tempting to see tech fetishism as a series of simple faux paux, thoughtless little indulgences driven by novelty (“holy shit, cars are new!” vs. “heyyy, new car smell!”) – most of us, presumably, will eventually figure out how to drive. Or how to avoid the careening Ford Model Ts. But I like the note that Turkle ends things on.

Why don't you chill the fuck out?

“An ad campaign,” she says, “promises that online, and with avatars, you can, quote, finally, love your friends, love your body, love your life.” But our real lives? Our own bodies? New technologies are at their best when they empower some form of true growth. And there's a whole world out there. Riding a horse across a green, or just walking, is a fundamentally different experience than whizzing by at 70, or floating over at 10,000 feet. Technology gives us utility, but that's no warranty on happiness. It reminds me of Stephen King, saying that, “Life isn't a support system for Art. It's the other way around.”

Some of us figure that out. Rest well, Margaret Chapman (1916-2012).

Sasquatch the Rock Notch

So, basically, my once-facebook-husband Sasquatch looks eerily like MineCraft creator / Mojang founder Markus 'Notch' Persson. Except with better hats. And corrective lenses.

Picture relevant.



And that's all I've got, for now.

Social Media FTW!

Oh. Right. I have a blog, apparently.

I'm back to teaching Media Ethics at DigiPen. After four years of experimenting with some admittedly questionable methods, it's nice to finally have an idea of what that class ought to look like.

Last night, some DigiPen students and staff set up a few cameras for an after-hours Design Club. It was a lot of boisterous young nerds pointing at Mass Effect multiplayer interfaces, snickering, and then making grand, sweeping statements about the future of game design. Or, at least, the future of Mass Effect multiplayer design. Extra Credits writer James Portnow presided, and made it into a pretty enjoyable scene.

Just in case you lack incriminating photographs of yours truly, here's one that my once-Facebook-husband Jared took last year, at a WalMart in the tri-cities:



I've escaped Facebook, for the time being. Twitter is a nice semi-ironic replacement, though I'm never quite sure whether the role of ethics lecturer should be mutually exclusive to the retweeting of wang jokes.

Yesterday, my grandma celebrated her 96th. Go grandma.

...to saying, what you mean.

Thumbing through The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, I came across a list of lecture topics Frost had drawn up in 1916, and enclosed as part of a letter to Untermeyer. His price of $50 for 60 minutes translates to about $1000 in relative 2011 currency.

That was thirty years prior to those lectures unearthed at Dartmouth. In NPR's coverage they play a recording of one, where Frost says, "As near as you want to come to saying... What you mean. That's what poetry is. As near as you want to come to it." Middlebury has some that you can actually listen to, though not permanently download. The earliest of these is from 1936. Even those wander a bit.

So color me curious. Anyone else want to hear R. Frost on anything?

[Enclosed with Letter sent Mid-1916]

ANYBODY WANT TO HEAR R. FROST

ON ANYTHING?

Partial List of Subjects in Stock:

BOOTY. Derivation of the word from beauty. Two words interchangeable in age of bride-snatching. Poetry, the bride of elemental nature. Richard Le Gallienne. Kale Young Rice. Edith Thomas. Etc.

THE UNATTAINABLE. How much ought a poet get for showing (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2) in public? How much is fifty dollars? Are the English overpaid? Masefield. Yeats. Noyes. Base suggestion that poetry is as often gloating over what you have as hankering after what you haven’t. Strabismus and Idealismus.

POETRY AND SCIENCE. Is the conflict irreconcilable? How long will the war last? Poece of Itrecht and other memorable pieces. Aphasia. Pompadour. Nell Gwyn. Resolved that evolution is like walking on a rolling barrel. The walker isn’t so much interested in where the barrel is going as he is in keeping on top of it. The Labrynthodont. The Sozodont. The Cotoledon. The Dodecahedron. The Plesiosaurus. The Thesaurus (and Rhyming Dictionary). The Megatheorem. The Pterodactyl. The Spondee. And the Concordance.

THE INEVITABLE: AND HOW TO POSTPONE OR AVOID IT. How to keep from attaining what you don’t want. Query: If what Shelley meant by Prometheus wasn’t the philosophizing poet, Shelley himself? The world’s gain could he have stood fate off for one year. Two years. Five years. Ten years. Futility of speculation.

THE HARRISON LAW: Some dull opiate to the drains. Swinburne’s famous adjuration to his sister: “Swallow, my sister; oh, sister, swallow!” Picture: We were the first that ever burst; or the danger of mixing drinks. Jamaica Ginger. A plain talk to druggists. Given in England under the title: A plain talk to chymists.

MOANISM AND SWOUNDING. On larruping an emotion. Men’s tears tragic, women’s a nuisance. Heightening. In this I make it clear-by repeated assertions-that I can use any adjective that anyone else can.

NEW HAMPSHIRE GOLD. Adventure with an examining doctor for an insurance company who, after looking me over and taking samples of me, decided I was just the romantic kind he could unload a small wild farm on because it was blessed with a gold mine that had been worked to the extent of producing three wedding and engagement rings. The moral being that I am not romantic.

TRUE STORY OF MY LIFE. Stealing pigs from the stockyards in San Francisco. Learned to whistle at five. At ten abandoned senatorial ambitions in order to come to New York, but settled in New Hampshire by mistake on account of the high rents in both places. Invention of the cotton gin. Supersedes potato whisky. A bobbin boy in the mills of Lawrence. Nailing shanks. Rose Marie. La Gioconda. Astrolabe. Novum Organum. David Harum. Visit General Electric Company, Synecdoche, N.Y. Advance theory of matter (what’s the matter?) that becomes an obsession. Try to stop thinking by immersing myself in White Wyandottes. “North of Boston.” Address Poetry Society at Great Poetry Meal. Decline. Later works. Don’t seem to die. Attempt to write “Crossing the Bar.” (International copyright.) Time: three hours. Very intimate and baffling.

(NOTE): Some of these lectures are more intelligible if taken in combination with all the rest together the same afternoon or evening.

Dollar a minute or sixty minutes for fifty dollars. I have to ask a little more where I introduce my adjectives immediately after, instead of before, my nouns-as in The House Disorderly.

Lists of nouns and adjectives I am accustomed to use furnished in advance to guard against surprise.

[Robert always insisted on the difference between being a rebel and a radical. He argued that a radical was tied far more unquestionably to a program and a rigid set of principles than a reactionary, whereas a rebel was free-free to denounce any political party, propaganda, creed, or cant. As a rebel, he was willing to be the rejected and rejecting individual, isolated, speculating sorrowfully on man’s eagerness to “belong,” to trade individuality for group “togetherness” and mass conformity.

At this time his letters sounded many variations on the theme of foes and friends. I was, of course, touched by the evidences of a friendship which grew continually closer and warmer, and I was also amused by his mock fulminations against his enemies.

It was in the spirit of mockery – “I sort of fool along” – that he sent me a parody of a lecture prospectus. He had given several “talks” after his return to America – he was the most provocative and most penetrating of talkers – but, although for many years it was a way of supporting his farm and his family, lecturing was a kind of public torture. He could never get himself to prepare the customary “descriptive list” of subjects and even refused to confine himself to a set of titles. A self-adulating circular put out by the elderly poet Edwin Markham set him off – it “made me wonder if I hadn’t a series of lectures in me that I could give.”

Enclosed with the following letter was a broad burlesque of what lecture committees liked and what he could never get himself to do. The combination of plain fact and fancy fooling presents a practically unknown Frost. The reference to his “immersing” himself in White Wyandottes conceals a more or less serious grief of ungratified chicken farming.]

Deet de dee

No, there's no reason for this post. None atall.

So, well, hello Internet travelers! Hope you're feeling fine!

This is shaping up to be a very nice morning

Birds are chirping, laundry is finally bopping around in the machine, I’m drinking coffee from someone else’s cupboard, and this morning there’ll be a parade. Sounds like the start of any good SyFy natural disaster movie.

For awhile now I’ve been looking forward to today, and these next few weeks, where I’ll sit in an old familiar house, with its old familiar dog, and hopefully write some things.

It was a surprise to hear (late in the evening yesterday) that one of my first duties sitting this beautiful house would be to play host to a few dozen paradegogers, most notably the local Library Book Cart Drill Team. This is a real thing. One or two dozen librarians, from many different county libraries, shall make the trip into town. Here they will uniform up, claim their squeaky and authentic library book carts, and then roll, twirl, and swoosh them through the parade with practiced synchronicity.

The drill team leader has a whistle.

This is my very favorite dog. I’d like to claim myself as his very favorite human, but lament that his love can be bought with any small amount of bread and/or popcorn.

And yes, there are Christmas lights on the palmish tree behind me. They have not come down in the past five years.