I’ve noticed that sometimes games may not come with rhetorical baggage, but they tend to attract certain audience.

My experiences here concern mostly RPG’s, but I will lead with one computer game example.

Well, I’m not sure it was an example THEN: Castle Wolfenstein is an early 80’s shoot ’em up where you’re infiltrating a castle filled with Nazis. Your job is to kill all of them.

I remember my gun crazy friends* going crazy for this game because, again, circa 1983, the big games were things like Pac-Man. So this game was fun because it was very different and you could play it at home,

A lot of this audience is conservative. I’m not sure the creators of the game planned on attracting a politically conservative audience, but it did.

Personally, I only got into the fame when someone hacked it and turned it into Castle Smurfenstein because, by that point, the nephew I was helping to raise was a toddler, and he LOVED the Smurfs, so we watched them all the time. Killing Smurfs was cathartic.

Still, though, most of my experience here comes from RPG’s.

Take an RPG from the 80’s called Twilight 2000. The premise here is that you and the people on your crew are stranded in Europe after a limited nuclear exchange.

No, seriously.

This attracted a VERY conservative audience.

I played because the people who set up the game would frequently buy pizza. I was nineteen, and free food was a powerful motivator.

In the 90’s. RPG’s had a different issue. They would set up a universe that the players wouldn’t buy into.

Take Vampire the Masquerade. In this game, you role-played vampire trying to stay alive (unalive?) in the modern world.

This game was supposed to an angst and horror filled game where, your character tried desperately to hold onto your humanity while your surrounded by those who would destroy you.

Interestingly, many of my conservative friends, who had no issue with Twilight 2000 refused to play Vampire because pretending to be a vampire was immoral somehow.
(This is so very 1990’s)
Having said that, no one in my friend group played the game the way the authors intended. I knew someone who wrote scenarios for the game, and he told me that he thought we were playing the game wrong, that we were missing the deep, personal horror of it all.

I said, “I play these games to escape. Why would I play a fame where I’m more miserable thanI am in real life.”

He never understood that.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how these things interact, and I never thought about it in this way before.

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*I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. I knew (and know) lots of gun owners. Heck, deer season is such an important thing where I’m from that the first day of deer season is a say off from school. I mean, gun culture is a thing. For example, I learned how to shoot guns at summer camp whenI was ten. Right after the archery lesson.

Re-reading Wardrip-Fruin on playable media this week, I thought of Wallace Stevens’s great long poem, “The Blue Guitar” (1937). The poem is a long riff on the way “things as they are” are transformed through the refracting energies of poetry (the titular “blue guitar”). I think both Bogost and Wardrip-Fruin, in different ways, want to think about how digital texts can marshal some of this deformative energy and create new ways of thinking about the same old, same old.

Here are some excerpts from the poem for those who are interested from a charming olde website of yore from one of my mentors, Al Filreis.

Keeping a learner active and challenged means constantly expanding one’s skill-set with what learns, and keeping in mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I would like to to approach my final project by designing a course syllabus that integrates many concepts that I have learned over the semester.  I would like to put into practice some of the ideas we have worked on to expand the interaction of a story and its ‘program’ to  make reading communal, to make it multi-modal, to make the user experience more involved.  I would like to use our course projects as a source of ideas to include on a syllabus for  a freshman English class.

A week ago, I dug into Folding Ideas’ latest video Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft. While not his strongest video-graphic essay (instead see his masterfully technocratic critique of cryptocurrencies/NFTs in Line Goes Up), this piece provides a loot box of (video)game cultural criticism that I began mining this past week.

Olson’s video starts with Wolfgang Iser’s dichotomy of instrumental and free play in The Fictive and the Imaginary (recalled the Implied Reader that we read earlier in the semester). Instrumental play for Iser requires a goal-oriented type of play, while free play lacks goals. The example given in Iser’s text concerns children playing tag (instrumental) versus children running around in a field together. Scholar Kristine Ask reformulates instrumental play in the age of videos to as goal oriented approach that values efficiency, expertise, and optimizing strategies as a part of play. A non-casual player does not just reaching the end of the game, but determines the best way to get there.

Using World of Warcraft (WoW) as an example, Olson makes it clear that these categories of play, and the production of meaning in videogames with a online multiplayer element never exist in “pure” forms. Videogames in the 21st century increasing involve a push/pull between game developers with designs, technology and infrastructure, and the players informing the the devs direction through playing in the game in unintended ways (see Steinkueler). Similarly, free play in games like WoW often morph into instrumental play, with an example given from of Warcraft festivals that first involved congregating without an explicit purpose evolved an instrumental facet, where gatherings in WoW can involve raising money specific charity with an explicit dollar goal (see Taylor). There’s a recognition in Olson’s video that early scholars of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) held games apart from the world, a notion that Taylor’s and subsequent work rejects. One aspect of this commentary sheds light on how ubiquitous utopian urges were in the early scholarly work on videogames. The identification of this trend serves as a good reminder to digital humanists that sometimes we conflate broad sentimental history and productions of knowledge with discipline specific movements.

The concept addressed in Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft that interested me the most was the morphogenesis of paratexts from books to videogames. Paratexts in Genette’s original iteration focus on the materials like authorial commentary, editors, printers and publishes that surround the text and inform a text’s reception. Far from being outside of the “main” text, paratexts are “more than a boundary or a sealed border, [but] rather a threshold” (Genette, 1-2). In her work Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogame, Consalvo cleverly extends the paratextual scope to include reader/gamer generated agency in the form of reviews, player forums, fan art etc. Consalvo’s proclamation that “paratexts grow more integral to the digital game industry and player community with every year” was bold in the publication year of her book (2009) it seems obviously true at present.

Although consistent gaming has left my life, I am a slavish fan of From Software’s Soulsborne titles, which had a banner year with the release of Elden Ring. I haven’t finished the game in any meaningful way yet (too many more interesting activities at the moment). I have paid particular attention to the paratexts surrounding it in some detail because of the aggressive (at least, for this gaming studio) patching with an emphasis on game balance both in single player mode (player vs. environment or PVE) and multiplayer mode (co-opt, and player vs. player or PVP). Consalvo’s expansion of paratexts in videogaming contexts serve as an excellent frame for exploring my own knowledge of the Soulsborne community.

Social consensus for the community of gamers playing these titles informs the game play via several concise memes and generally agreed upon though frequently disputed values of these games. “gg” implores new players to “git good,” a mantra offers only slightly in just as advice for people requesting tips for defeating a particular enemy (From games are notoriously difficult). Weapons overly powerful and often used in PVP are referred to as “cancer,” meaning quickly spreading, suddenly pervasive, and frequently destructive to game play. By far the most widespread less instrumental form of play is Fashion Souls, where the effectiveness of armor is minimized in favor of looking fashionable or ridiculous in different helms, robes, boots, etc.

Game lore, often communicated by item description in, gets elaborated in subreddits, forums, and videos. Item locations and questlines and statistical calculations for min-maxing one’s character are house on wikis.

Realizing I’ve got a bit far afield here from the beginning of this post, the paratexts surrounding contemporary videogames looks suspiciously like the popularization of scholarship. In the same way that the novel was finally accepted as appropriate for scholarly attention after decades of treatment as merely a popular form, is this the way that new information media become less disruptive and more accessible to intellectualizing?

I would like to explore producing audio books in a classroom setting.

In an ideal world, I would set it up so that each student would get ta separate chapter that they would have to record.

I do an assignment similar to this in Voice and Diction, but I use long poems, that I divide into sections and assign. Then, each student has to find photos that match what’s going on in the poem, record their part of the poem and turn it into a short video.

Then, I take the individual videos and edit them together and we watch the video in class.

I’d like to do something like that, though not for Voice and Diction… in my mind, this project would be the big end of term project for, like, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts. I’d like yo present the idea and the research to the people at my college who teach that class, but, honestly, when I’ve brought up projects like this before, they haven’t been interested.

This is partially because they fall into the “I’ve been teaching this way since the Pleistocene, I don’t need to anything different” camp of Academics (everyone who works in the Academy knows people like this) and partially because they have all the creativity of a turnip.

I could maybe pitch it to the person who teaches Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers.

Anyway, before I do this with anyone, I’d need to have my ducks in a row, in terms of theory and examples. For an example, I was thinking of using the Manifold project I did for In Our Time and move on from there.

Obviously, I’m still refining this idea, so comments and critiques are welcome.
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After yesterday’s gaming discussion I came across this article in PC Gamer and thought I’d share. In it, former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who worked for Valve as a consultant on their in-game economy discusses the process of developing a functioning and sustainable financial system within the company’s games back in the 2010s.

I found it interesting how nested games can work (how far can you drill down and spin off?), how much of the “real” world can be injected into the virtual (as Murray asked: when do you start to feel the outside creeping in and lose immersion?), and how simulations can jump outside of their boundaries to other platforms (the “real” world). Wonder if the “real enough to use” (Murray) quality of the Valve economy made it more susceptible to platform jumping—people recognized it as something beyond the virtual space.

Former Valve economist calls Facebook’s metaverse ‘a Steam-like digital economy’ with Zuckerberg as its ‘techno-lord’

Majel set up the Miro site. I wasn’t thrilled at this at first… we didn’t have a great deal of time, and I didn’t want to learn a new application in that time frame.

Credit where it’s due, Majel was right. Miro worked for Mrs. Dalloway, especially the way Majel set it up. I think that Majel is a more visual person than I am, and the way she set everything up made the chapters we did flow.

The learning curve for Miro was not that steep, frankly. Looking back at it, I’m not sure why I Was resistant, other than my “sheer cussed stubbornness”. (To borrow a phrase my grandmother used)

Even though I normally teach things like Voice and Diction or Public Speaking, I have had to teach texts to students, so I think in terms of context, historical background, and vocabulary. So, those are the things I focused on. In this regard, the work was not difficult, just a little time consuming. I felt that this historical context was important, because this novel takes place after WWI, but a novel set in the early 1920’s is going to have a very different feel from one set in the the 1930’s, or even one set in 1919.

I sometimes felt like I over-annotated in places, but anytime I looked at a word or phrase and thought to myself, “I’m not sure what this means”, I felt I had to include some kind of note. I mean, if I didn’t understand it, odds are students wouldn’t.

I admit, I thought about this as a way to annotate the work for a class. Because of the classes I Teach, I considered including performance tips. Let me explain. As a student, I have had assignments when I was given a long text — a short story or chapter of a novel– and told to edit the text down and recite what I Edited.

The two times I did this, I was given time limits, like your recitation could only last 5-7 minutes. You’ll see this kind of assignment in some advanced foreign language classes (I did it in French and Spanish) and in courses like Voice and Diction, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts, and maybe some acting courses.

Som at first, I considered adding performance notes keeping assignments like this in mind. I decided against it because I thought notes like that would be going a little too far for what we’re doing here.

As we continued, I was going to be our spokesperson when we presented, but then I got sick and ended up in the hospital, so the team had to deal with that, which I apologize for.

Our team chose to work on Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos for our second group project.  The team included Miaoling, Raquel, Patricia and myself.  As soon as the assignment was given, we all proceeded to acquire a copy of the novel and started reading, each with some general ideas on how we would annotate the novel.  One week later we met an hour before class to discuss what we have discovered so far and to brainstorm for our next step. We all had many realizations to share with the group.  From my point, I realized how incredibly episodic and jumpy the novel is and mentioned that as I was reading, I was making notations of which scene lends itself to an annotation due to graphic descriptions as we had discussed in class (and from our readings.)  The other members thought it was a good, time-saving idea to do so. I also mentioned that I had acquired sound effects, musical numbers, and photographs that seemed appropriate for a specific scene I read.  For example, while diners were eating, I found busy restaurant ambient sounds, music from the era for when a scene was in a lounge, etc. During our discussion, Miaoling mentioned that she would like to take the annotations much further than what we mentioned and wanted to see how creative we could be.  Several ideas were brought up but when she mentioned that it would be interesting to see how AI generated images would work with the idea of the annotations we were discussing would play out, we all had the same reaction- what a great idea.  That caused a big spurt of energy and discussion. Then, Patricia mentioned that it would be very interesting to go along that route and add avant-garde paintings from that era to the annotations.  The group thought that our direction was coalescing.  We then divvied tasks for each member.  Miaoling would look into AI generated work; Patricia would look into art from that era; Raquel would take on the task of site engineer; and I would read the novel, note scenes ripe for annotations and continue acquiring images and sounds.

We communicated via email to update each member’s progress, and then we met again an hour before the next class to discuss our project.  At this meeting, we realized that we would only annotate the first chapter/section of the book as the novel became more character focused and less descriptive.  Miaoling looked into AI generated images and was excited by what she generated.  She also generated a visual map of the characters and their connections to each other.  Patricia discussed the different types of art she discovered to be included, the covers of the first edition of the novel she retrieved, and discovered that Dos Passos was also a painter himself and would like to include his work in the annotations.  Raquel was putting the site together using WordPress and adding elements to it, overcoming limitations and giving advice as to what is possible to be included. For my task, I finished reading the entire novel and summarized each chapter into 5-6 sentences and passed that long to the group. I stopped looking for sounds and images as that didn’t seem as exciting anymore.

Looking at the finished project, we were all excited for how it came out.  Although there were a few hindrances, such as not being able to play background sound while reading, we were very happy with the end product.  I believe our goal was achieved; the novel was expanded by several new reader-generated dimensions, and the story’s ‘program’ was heightened in unexpected ways. It was a very engaging project, and I leave it with new skills in hand and a memorable group project.

So, I emailed Jeff (hi Jeff!) rather than making a post because I thought my idea wasn’t fleshed out enough or good enough somehow. Now with some post-COVID clarity I realize I was wrong and my ideas are cool as hell. So here this is.

I’m planning on doing an analysis of authors and themes etc that “dark academia” Tumblr accounts often make posts about—they are often repetitive quotes and I find it interesting the grip certain authors, like Donna Tartt or Oscar Wilde or Richard Siken etc, have on this community.

That said, this is very niche so there’s not previous writing on this aside from user observation. “But Teddy, how are you going to cite anything?! How is this more than just original conjecture?!” I hear you cry. Well friend, people have been analyzing the behavior of Whovians, Trekkies, and weaboos for decades before this. The psychological part of this research is taken care of via other subculture research–it doesn’t have to be perfectly the same. Literally just searching Google scholar for “internet subcultures” or “Trekkies” or “Sherlockians” gives hundreds of results spanning even back to the 1970s with field observations and demographic and behavioral research about these sorts of people. It’s all really exciting! (This article is one of my favorites I found- observations of Trekkies at Comic Con, 1975.)

I have a list of several Tumblr accounts that specifically post “dark academia” quotes and other blogs that explore these themes. I also have an ongoing list of authors that are considered “dark academia”. My plan is to analyze the quotes in Voyant to make a word cloud to see if there are similar themes in line with the values and aesthetic of the community (which were essentially outlined in The Secret History by Donna Tartt). I also plan on analyzing some of the works written by these Tumblr users themselves against the authors they’re inspired by in a program called the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP) to see if these Tumblr authors actually have any similarity to their influences.

Essentially I will be exploring the psychology of a niche subculture by looking at the texts they interact with most. I do have some minor concern about hitting page counts with this topic since it’s so niche, however being that this project will be based in Linguistics I’m sure many pages will be spent elaborating on what exactly my methodology is and term explanation, though obviously I don’t want that to be most of what I’m doing and will try to write in multi-field-inclusive terms as much as possible. I also think the explanation of where this subculture comes from will be an easily large chunk of this paper.

I’m really looking forward into doing the psychology and philosophy research necessary for this paper. Speaking of philosophy, that is another topic I will inevitably have to explore as “dark academia” folks really like philosophers like Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. I’ve also toyed with the idea of exploring film scripts (“dark academic” folks have a long listen of movies that fit the aesthetic as well, like Dead Poets Society) as text in this case, but I think if I do that I’ll have to do two separate analyses with books and without books since I think the inclusion of film scripts due to their difference in format and text might skew results a bit.

Please give me extra ideas or criticism if you have it ’cause I feel like I need help!!!

There is this famous saying that lives on as a meme in the Continental Europe and in America in discussions when Soviet legacy and history is analyzed. The saying goes “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” ( I am sure people have heard of it) nobody knows exactly who said but it is a collective saying that can succinctly describe the lives of Soviet citizens in their relationship with the State.

HBO series Chernobyl perfectly describes this relationship and in digging deeper I want to explore the topic of “lies” and their effect on society. In the Western traditional culture we have one word that describes lying, lying is a form of dishonesty (which is forbidden as a sin in the scripture) and in ex-Soviet space which includes Eastern Europe and Central Asia (which for some reason is always overlooked in the media) lying had two forms. In many Slavic languages there is “lozh” which is translated as lying as in our Western understanding of the above word and then there is “vranye” which is also lying but has a more nuanced and deeper meaning that both parties of that activity understand and they partake in it willingly. Again I would direct my audience to see Chernobyl by HBO to understand that phenomena and they did do their research on that subject.

“Vranye” (system lie; I do not even know how to describe it) permeates the societies of ex-Soviet states and to a lesser degree satellite states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and even as far as Vietnam. “Vranye” is the type of a lie in which individual understands that it this is a lie and yet collectively partake in it. Hard to go against the grain, and it is the glue that binds many collectivist nations even today. Modern Russia still to this day has this vestige which expands and contracts with time (it is now expanding), and it seeps through the whole society. One has to look no further than the Ukrainian conflict and the Russian society and this “vranye” on how it affects the whole populace. Modern Russia is still a collectivist system, nobody trusts nobody, and even absurd claims are believable by vast majority of people.

So why this theme and concept? It is important to me and maybe to many others. It is in the air, in the news, and thus it is important to understand different societies. I can feel the demand for it in the web and in discussions. I can look some texts and novels that deal with it or have it in them. One that comes to mind is a famous Day Without Lying by Viktoria Tokareva which is a novel that deals about contemporary life in the 1960’s Moscow. I am not sure what it is going to be, I am inclined to do a Diagram software to design and show different webs of lies and how they affected protagonist and what other choices they may have had. You can create diagrams and even games regarding lies and truth since it is a binary but I want to look into more complex situations which deals exactly with “Vranye”. I am not sure about traditional paper since it is a DH course and I want to explore tools that I have not used. Miro is a good choice or diagrams.net also a good choice as both are free and open access.