Author: stevenedwardjones

Playgroups

If a class studies film, it has to have screenings of some kind. There’s an old soundproofed theatre with cushy seats and a raked floor in our university library that used to serve that purpose, back before DVDs allowed for individual viewings. Students attended lectures and a screening session in the theatre every week, like the required labs in science classes.

And if you study video games, you have to play. Some time ago I decided that forming playgroups that meet between classes was the best way to accomplish this, especially in the absence of a dedicated game lab (even our Center can’t really serve that purpose, at least not yet). Each group meets weekly for gameplay and preparation, then each reports back to the larger group during the course of the semester, with demos of controls, gameplay and paratextual materials, and accounts of their collective experience. Ideally, every group should have a mix of “kinds” of gamers (self-indentifed): core and casual, experienced and not. The underlying purpose–not unlike that of the playground playgroups from which the name is playfully taken–is social, to promote collaborative learning drawing on diverse strengths in each group. Come to think of it, that may be something that’s lost with the demise of the weekly film-class screening in the little theatre at the back of the library.

MLA session: “Close Playing”

As the year winds down, I’m looking forward to participating next week (1/8/12) in a roundtable discussion at the MLA conference in Seattle on “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies.” The session’s chaired by the inimitable Mark Sample and includes a number of terrific game studies specialists–Edmond Chang, Jason Rhody, Anastasia Salter, Timothy Welsh, and Zach Whalen. My own brief introduction will focus on my coauthored book, Codename Revolution, as an example of a platform studies approach to video games, an approach I see as related to bibliography and book history in its close attention to the material technologies for the production, transmission, and reception of creative works. Here are the slides I plan to show, in a sort of truncated pecha kucha presentation.

Cyberspace is fading

At a European Security meeting this week, Hillary Clinton declared that “We must recognize that rights exercised in cyberspace deserve as much protection as those exercised in real space,” sounding oddly anachronistic with that term for the Internet coined in 1982 by science-fiction author William Gibson (NYT 12/7/11). Increasingly, it’s mainly politicians, the military, the police, and marketers who still use “cyberspace” or “cyber-” (as in cyber-Monday for online shopping). This year more people than ever seemed to notice what Gibson himself has been saying lately: that the word is dying out, losing its currency. On Twitter, @scottdot put it best: “Who the hell says ‘cyber’-anything anymore?”–and then apologized to Gibson. But Gibson re-tweeted and added: “[I have said that myself, many times]” –meaning, yes, he’s also asked himself who says “cyber” any more. As @scottdot said, “Last I checked, it was 2011, not 1997.”

Chicago colloquium

Kasbeer Hall, Loyola University ChicagoNovember 20-21 our Center hosted the 2011 Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the Water Tower Campus downtown. Arrival night coincided with the Festival of Lights parade on Michigan Avenue, so some people had trouble crossing the parade route to get to hotels and restaurants. Otherwise, everything went really well, thanks mostly to the organization and hard work of my colleague George Thiruvathukal and to those who pitched in to help, including some computer science students, and Dr. Nick Hayward and several of his MA students in the Digital Humanities program here.

This year’s program committee also did a brilliant job of vetting and organizing the content for the weekend. Presentations included our colleague in history, Kyle Roberts, who talked about his Virtual Library System, and an opening keynote by Nick Montfort of MIT, whose talk about platform studies ended with some characteristically poetic thoughts about competing definitions of digital humanities. The existence of a strong thread on platform studies, with a special focus on games (I’m thinking in particular of Nathan Altice’s presentation on tool-assisted speed-runs), in the program of an organization like this one–which has historically focused more on data analysis, text markup, etc.–is to my mind evidence of a healthy instability in those still-emerging definitions.