It’s been a busy end of the semester and I haven’t been able to post anything for a bit. So, now that I have a bit of time before the semester wraps up, here’s a bunch of stuff that has been happening the last few weeks. My apologies if I’m a bit late on some of these things.
Surveillance, consent, networks, numbers, the hyperarchival condition of the contemporary: Natasha Lennard writes “Of Being Numerous” for The New Inquiry.
“A Game is Being Beaten” by Leigh Alexander at The New Inquiry: “The trend in video game design is to comment on violence by asking players to perform violence. But could there be pleasure in performing consent?”
And sad news in hyperarchival realism. Google is redoing its Street View for many places in Pittsburgh, and thus Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett’s wonderful Street With a View is going away. (Right now it goes from a marching band in the rain to a deserted, sunny street. Uncanny.) Ah, the transitory internet–perhaps it isn’t an archive at all, for really, how do we archive the present in the present. . . .
boundary 2 has made the entirety of Patrick Jagoda‘s recently published essay, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” freely available online. This is an excellent article, and I was actually already planning on providing it to the students of my current Narrative and Technology class. For anyone interested in video games, and the emerging scholarship and conversation about them, this should be mandatory reading.
So I just got back from an excellent meeting of the Society for Literature Science and the Arts (SLSA), in Kitchener, Ontario (a surprisingly good city for a conference), and though I’m vibrating about a host of things, feel completely intellectually and academically reinvigorated, and had a great time w/ my colleagues and c0-panelists Robin Clarke and Sten Carlson, perhaps the thing I most took away from the conference (in terms of this blog) were Patrick Jagoda and N. Katherine Hayles discussing the indie-game, Braid (Jonathan Blow, 2009)–a game I kinda can’t believe I didn’t know about (oops). Sadly, I feel I cannot really spoil why it belongs on this here blog (but maybe I will after I finish playing it), but suffice it to say, it very much deserves some hyperarchivally parallactic attention. Also, it’s available on X-Box Live and is downloadable for like 10 bucks online. It’s totally worth it. So, until I finish playing it and feel like spoiling the ending, here’s a trailer.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 