I have journeyed across the Pacific to the verdant northwestern reaches (also known as Seattle), and I attended PAX 09, an event that ranks among the best in my experience.

I’m finally feeling like I can get some perspective on the whole phenomenon, having decompressed from the wonderland of geekiness I have just been through. But, I feel like this story is bigger than just one post, so I hope you’ll indulge me as I stretch it out a little.  This will hopefully enable me to focus on the details of some big events, which I think helps me tell a better story.

But where to start?  Perhaps at the beginning…

I arrived in Seattle on a Tuesday night, much later than I had planned due to missing my connecting flight at LAX.  Everyone needs to go to LAX at least once in their lives, if only to experience what a cliche airport nightmare really looks like.  The combination of wholly apathetic staff, architectural facepalms (I have to go outside, up some stairs, back through security twice just to get to the domestic service of the same airline?), and general air of malaise/smog combine to lend the place a unique patina of woe.  It really is a tourist attraction all on its own, but not the good kind like you want, more like a remorseless many-legged creature pulling sailors to their doom.

By contrast, Seattle welcomed me with open arms from the very start.  It was late when I arrived, and after 36 hours travelling I was well on my way to zombiefied face when I practically begged the young bloke behind the rental desk if he could point me at a taxi rank.  Taking pity on me (or seeing another opportunity for a kickback, gotta love you entrepreneurial yanks) he suggested I try a flat-rate car service instead.  Completely incapable of caring at this point, I flailed my arms to signal yes, that would be lovely thankyou, and was eventually picked up by a dude in a Lincoln town car.

I have been to Seattle once before this trip, but it was for New Year’s Eve in 2007 and it was part of an ongoing road trip to Canada.  My experience of the city was limited to the I-5, a motel room, Seattle Center and the Space Needle on New Year’s Day, plus a short ferry ride.  Therefore, the ride in from SeaTac at midnight was a new experience and very enjoyable indeed.  As with most things in the state of Washington, if you don’t build something pine trees spring up everywhere, and so SeaTac is located in some very fine countryside.  At least it looked fine in the dark.  Ok, well it smelled good.  Really good.  Like pine…

I’m going to blame the fatigue at this point while I recall some other things about the ride into the city:  My driver, whose name escapes me, was actually from London, recently arrived a few months beforehand.  Driving the car was his night job.  The car was so plush that it had multiple seat warmer settings.  Multiple!  Like you could say “Gee, my butt is cold but it’s not freezing I’ll just turn it up half way.”  Isn’t it convenient how they put the stadiums so close together like that?  Wow, Seattle looks very pretty at night.

After a little puzzlement over its precise location, we eventually fronted up to my lodgings for the week (I had booked for only six nights, as I presumed I might travel on to other cities after PAX.  How wrong I was).  The American Hotel in Chinatown is actually nothing of the sort.  In actual fact it’s a hostel, one of the many run by Hostelling International, and I highly suggest it if you’re ever in need of a cheap bed in Seattle.  If you do happen to stop in there, say g’day to Stacey and Tess, they kept my favourite pair of jeans safe for me after I left them behind.

Stacey, mistress of towels, and Tess, whose homemade apple pie I never got to taste

But I had no knowledge of that yet.  At this point I was just so very grateful to have finally arrived.  Friendly Stacey told me everything I needed to know about the hostel, and I was so glad of a friendly face and beat to death from travelling that it didn’t even matter my shampoo was broken in my bag and someone else was in my bed.

Great thing about travelling:  shit goes wrong, it doesn’t matter, you just fix it as best you can and move on.  I washed my hair with hand sanitiser from the bathroom, and I fell into an unclaimed bed.  I thought I was exhausted from the epic journey all the way to Seattle.  What I did not suspect was the adventure tomorrow had in store, or how physically and emotionally drained this entire trip would leave me.

Plenty more for me to ramble about yet.  So come back soon!  Thanks for reading

Woot!

So I’m less than a week away from the great pilgrimage.  Geek Mecca.  The Temple Mount of gamers.

Penny Arcade Expo…

I’ve been a huge fan of Penny Arcade since high school.  Many was the night I would be up late reading strip after strip, with attendant news posts, experiencing that weird cumulative effect of so many comics in quick succession.  We only had the one computer in our house at the time (remember this was six or seven years ago now, ADSL was still a novelty) so this activity had to conducted in a clandestine manner under cover of darkness, with the household asleep, trying to contain my laughter into the odd snort or chuckle.

I’d be sniggering along quite happily, then something like the Fruit Fucker would come along, and all bets would be off.  Uncontrollable fits of painful, tear-jerking laughter would ensue, and before I knew it Mum or Dad would be barging into the study and telling me to go to bed.

The story of how two guys from Spokane, WA managed to turn their passion into one of the best jobs in the world is well worth a look.  They struggled for years trying to make the transition from day-jobs, to subsisting on the generosity of their readers, to finally being able earn enough from ad revenue and merchandise sales generated by their huge fanbase (This of course is a massive over-simplification on my part.  Gabe and Tycho nearly lost it all several times, anyway read the story!).

To me it is emblematic of a growing social phenomena where creative folk who may not otherwise have had access to a mainstream audience are using the internet as a platform to turn their passion into a full time job.  Jonathan Coulton is another example, as is Joel Watson of Hijinks Ensue, another fantastic comic which started when Watson was inspired by Coulton’s example.

I’m looking forward to PAX in a big bad way.  Hopefully I’ll be able to update from there via the magic of the intertron.

I recently watched the Larry Charles documentary Religulous starring Bill Maher, and enjoyed it a whole lot.  While Charles’ mockumentary collaborations with Sacha Baron Cohen are much more well known, they are aimed squarely at eliciting laughs through outrageous stunts and gross-out humour, with social satire as an aside.  Religulous is still a very funny film, but the humour does take a backseat to Maher’s odyssey into the American heartland in search of answers to his questions:  Namely, how can so many otherwise reasonable people believe in two thousand year old fairy tales?  And why are those opposed (or at least indifferent) to religion afraid to make themselves heard?

There is a lot to recommend about this film.  Probably my favourite sequences  are the opening and the finale, which sums up the film’s polemical message in a monologue from Maher, intercut with extra interview footage and overlaid with an operatic crescendo (Larry Charles’ agitprop skills would make Eisenstein proud).  Even as plain text it’s still worth reading, and I include it below for your consideration:

From the opening:

‘This is it.  I’m standing on the very spot where many Christians believe the world will come to an end.  It’s called Meggido, and its the place that the book of Revelations says that Jesus Christ will come down to, end the world, and save the people who believe in him.

Now, when Revelations was written, only God had the capacity to end the world.  But now Man does too.  Becuase unfortunately, before Man figured out how to be rational, or peaceful, he figured out nuclear weapons and how to pollute on a catastrophic scale.  And if it’s one thing I hate more than prophecy, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

And the conclusion:

‘It seems peaceful, but this is the very spot where a lot of Christians believe life on earth will end.  The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end…

The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live.  The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people.  By irrationalists.  By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it…

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It’s nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do.  Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says: “I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!”  Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas…

And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not.

The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt.  Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong…

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves.  And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a horrible price…

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest.  To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was.  That we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it.

That’s it.  Grow up or die.’

Amen, Bill.

I have long been of the opinion that religion has very little to offer in the way of real answers about the nature of our world, or of human experience.  For a long time I considered myself superior to religious people because while I am a rationalist, I don’t deny anyone the right to worship whatever they want.  That’s better, right?  If you’re not hurting anyone, you’re OK in my book, do whatever you like.  And they might even be doing some good right?  I mean, comfort in times of hardship, yada yada …

No.  Just no.

What this film points out is the alarming degree to which people will believe in these traditions, to the exclusion of all reason and argument.  To the detriment of anyone who disagrees with them or their values.  The increasing chances are that if we let our culture and our debate, our politics and national policies be decided by people who believe in falsehood and tradition because it is easier than confronting the truth that we are alone in this world, and that human agency is the only viable way forward, the world is heading for a very messy end.

If you think like I do, even if you’re on the fence – hell, even if you’re a churchgoer – watch this film, tell your friends and family to watch this film.

Last and most importantly of all:  make up your own mind.

Expect to see this a lot from now until Transformers 2 comes out

I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I enjoyed this movie a whole lot. If that’s all you’re looking for in a one sentence summation, then there it is.

I want to try and avoid becoming part of the inevitable flamewars that will ensue around this movie.  Forums and comment lists, their most deranged example being the hellish madness of YouTube comment posts, will most likely overflow with bile as fanboys of various stripe exclaim over “respect for the material” or more accurately “Zack SNyder sucKs mah dick LOLZ”.  I love the comic and I enjoy Alan Moore’s body of work, but the links and unavoidable comparisons between the text and the movie should be thought of as an extremely sharp double-edged sword.

My first impressions of the film itself are almost universally positive.  As a cinema experience I was certainly entertained and impressed by Zack Snyder’s execution of the story.  The liberties taken with the plot, the parts substituted, excised or referred to only in passing, seem necessary to me if only because leaving them in would have slowed down the pace of the action, or blown the film’s running time out by at least another hour.  A whole miniseries could probably be made out of the story of the Black Freighter all on its own.  As it is now, the film is still so saturated with references and nods to the original text that I’m looking forward to at least a second viewing just to appreciate them.

As an adaptation, Watchmen is almost unerringly faithful to its source material.  Most of the dialogue or voice-over is a line-for-line transcription of the text, and as he did with 300, Snyder painstakingly recreates the composition of the original panels in major scenes.  I think that for any director, especially a fan of comics who has made a name for himself with accurate adaption work in the past, this would have been inevitable in trying to bring Watchmen to the screen.  The comic itself is a recognised classic, both of the comic medium and storytelling in general, and its this similarity with longer form fiction that makes it difficult to compare Watchmen with other comic book adaptations.  Unlike comic book universes like Batman or Spiderman in which established characters and villains can be re-imagined in numerous storylines time and again, the fact that Watchmen exists as a closed, standalone piece of fiction means that there is a great deal less latitude extended by audiences who are expecting a re-telling of a cherished favourite.  No Jane Austen fan would be happy with a film version of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennett cuts her hair and joins up with the Royal Navy (and we’re sure to see worse than that now that IP has come out of copyright), no matter how well it might test with ‘tween audiences.  Watchmen is so enshrined within an established and vocal fan culture, that tampering with it too much would have brought screams of derision from fans and critics alike.

Whatever your position on how faithful an adaptation of Watchmen should be, translating this text to the screen means that the original is exposed to forms of interpretation that both enhance and detract from the experience.  For me the most enjoyable parts of this movie were what I hadn’t seen already in the comic.  The realisation of fight sequences was handled very well, the action punctuated by Snyder’s penchant for CG-accentuated bloodletting gave every fight scene a sense of the overwhelming destructive potential of superheroes, especially against mortal foes.  The film’s visuals use a much darker palette than the quite colorful original, but this only serves to emphasise those colours that are on display, the yellow that links the Comedian with both Silk Spectres, Rorschach’s ghostly white hood, and of course Dr Manhattan’s swinging blue trouser snake.

The dialogue was perhaps the only area where leaning heavily on the original actually hurt the film.  The dialogue that occurs in the comic does fine for that setting, but as screenplay some of it falls a little flat.  My favourite lines from the comic are almost all from extra-diegetic narration; Rorschach’s journal, Dr Manhattan’s perception of time (or lack thereof).  For the most part I felt the actors did an excellent job with what they had to work with, but it’s notable that some of the best lines delivered as dialogue in the film are lifted from narration in the comic.  Rorschach’s warning to the inmates in prison (“I’m not locked up in here with you.  You’re locked up in here with me!”) is delivered just right by Jackie Earle Haley, who deserves a round of applause for being compelling as a character whose only emotions are disinterested bitterness for most of the film.  A special mention should also go to Patrick Wilson for making an overweight, impotent superhero sympathetic as well as laughable, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian who brings just the right element of menace without being a caricature.

The most glaring change, the ending, will cause a huge amount of controversy all on its own.  For me this change probably best sums up what I perceive as the director’s philosophy behind this adaptation.  Snyder chose to reshape Watchmen in a way that brings it more in line with current cultural anxieties (“Who wants a cowboy for a President?”), and by doing so he managed to avoid what would have been a time-consuming task building in the clues to an eventual reveal of a plotline almost every single moviegoer would have already anticipated.  By avoiding the exact details of the original ending, but maintaining the overall theme, Snyder actually achieves a kind of surprise in what I expected to be a very foregone conclusion.

My only gripe with the experience of this film doesn’t even stem from within the text at all.  Quite simply the crazy amount of hype it received, combined with a storm of blogging and pre-release ‘making-of’ featurettes released on the net (frankly irresistible), meant that I not only knew this story backwards and front, but knew how shots were set up and effects achieved long before I ever set foot in the cinema.  But that is the nature of the hyperculture we inhabit.  Events are in a constant state of about to happen/happening/already happened, documented and refreshed every five seconds, then archived.  The experience of viewing a film is not isolated, and perhaps never was.

Compare studies of the internet to the study of another complex system; the study of life on our planet. Increasingly, it is from the field of biology that cultural theorists today borrow many scientific and theoretical premises for modelling the complexity of contemporary culture: evolution, ecology, selection, reproduction, of ideas instead of creatures, of cultural products and signs instead of animals, plants, or micro-organisms. Using a small sample of such approaches, I will attempt to describe how they can be used to think about the operations of online culture. My primary area of study will be the popular MMOG[1] World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) in which I will be attempting to highlight examples of interactions between the producers/consumers of World of Warcraft, the developers and end-users/fans, both inside and outside of the game’s medial space, with a view to exploring how emergent systems of game play and player culture arise beyond or without the direction of the developer.

Launched in November of 2004 in the United States, World of Warcraft continues to be the most popular and lucrative game of its kind in the world, with over ten million subscribers worldwide as of 2008. This kind of market domination gives WoW a very large cultural footprint, and references to the game abound in other media formats. WoW related stories often make major network newscasts so that even people with only a passing knowledge of video games are familiar with its brand. More recently, advertising campaigns have attempted to harness its market share to cross-promote their products, and a new advertising campaign for the game itself has begun using geek cultural icons such as Mr. T and William Shatner to promote itself.

One of the reasons World of Warcraft, and other MMOGs before it, like EverQuest (1999) are so successful is because they foster a range of gameplay styles, as well as the ability to interact with other players, and the combination of a huge world of options, combined with human variables gives a huge scope of potential for game play and enjoyment. Nicholas Yee has written extensively on the psychological motivations for online play in MMOGs (2006 [1], [2] & [3], 2007), basing his research on statistical analysis of the responses given by MMORPG players to survey questions. Yee identifies three broad components, consisting of more specific sub-components, which explain why players find MMOGs so compelling. Achievement, consisting of a desire for advancement through the game, an understanding of the workings or rules of the game, and desire to compete and dominate other players, forms the first component. The second component, termed the Social, reflects player desires to interact with other players, form relationships and work together collaboratively to make group achievements possible. The third component, Immersion, is centred more on the narrative of in game events, discovering the game world, losing oneself in the virtual experience, or perhaps borne out of a desire to escape the real world (Yee, 2007: p773)). The multiplicity of usage patterns are not mutually exclusive however, as some players scored high on more than one component (Yee: 2007: p774).

So, games like World of Warcraft provide a huge amount of content and play possibilities, which results in players investing huge amounts of time into them, while at the same time drawing in a wide mix of gender and age groups. In a study of MMORPG demographics, in which online survey data was collected from 30,000 players, it was revealed that player ages ranged from 11 to 68 years old, with the average age being 26. The appeal of MMORPGs was also evident in the fact that players spent an average of 22 hours per week logged in to their game worlds (Yee, 2006 [1]: p309).

For MMOG developers, this is the desired state of their art. To cover the continued running costs and maintenance requirements to keep an MMOG up and running, most follow what is now the standard model of requiring players to pay an initial cost to purchase the software client, then also charging a recurring monthly fee for continued access to their games. Hence, these games are designed with the imperative of rewarding the player enough to keep them wanting to play, but never truly having an achievable ‘end’. In World of Warcraft, even getting a character to the maximum level cap is not the end of the play experience, but rather another beginning of what is ironically called the ‘endgame’ content; high-level monsters and loot, requiring groups of powerful players to proceed. The game is explicitly designed with a range of hooks to keep players playing, and therefore paying. This process can often lead to players feeling burned-out or exhausted by the game experience:

“The central irony of MMORPGs is that they are advertised as worlds to escape to after coming home from work, but they too make us work and burn us out. For some players, their game play might be more stressful and demanding than their actual jobs. And the most tragic irony is that MMORPG players pay game companies on a monthly basis to work and get burned out.” – Yee, 2006 (3), p70

In this sense, a player becomes more and more bound to the grinding gameplay experience, and there have been numerous accounts of gaming addiction as a result of MMOGs like World of Warcraft. At the same time however, the WoW machine is constitued by, and also dependent on, its player-base. An MMOG without players has no future, and the developer will likely close a game down if subscription numbers drop low enough. The interesting thing in the case of WoW, is that is has attained a kind of cultural critical-mass, its player base being so huge that not only is it dependent on them, and them upon it, but the growing storm of media and attention has infiltrated public discourse around video games as well. At this point it seems that the WoW juggernaut constitues its own complex system, or machinic assemblage, as Guattari says:

“Curiously, in acquiring more and more life, machines demand in return more and more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred throughout their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they subtract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference.” – (Guattari, 1995: p36)

The system, or phenomenon, that we could largely characterise as the ‘WoW Experience’ does not end when the user disconnects from the game, or even when they turn off their computer. The user is part of the machine, and everything they do, be it discussing the game with a friend, who may or may not be a player too, to following online news about the game and reading ancillary materials like message boards or wikis devoted to the game, all adds to the processual development and re-creation of the machine itself.

It is here that we should discuss some of the problematic uses of the term interactivity. If the interactive elements that games like World of Warcraft are lauded for are actually programmed in anticipation that they will form a drawcard for player subscriptions, this appears to be something more akin to Lev Manovich’s conception of pre-programmed interactivity:

“If a complete work is the sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path accesses only a part of this whole. In other words, the user is activating only a part of the total work that already exists. Just as with the example of Web pages that consist of nothing but links to other pages, here the user does not add new objects to a corpus, but only selects a subset.” 2001: p128

So, the bounty of limitless interactivity is instead a predetermined set of variables that the programmer controls through their manipulation of the game world. The player is interpellated into the game world, and in turn becomes part of the pay-to-play system that supports it. This approach is somewhat limited however in its characterisation of a single user alone within the text. When discussing MMOGs it is fundamental to realise that the game space is open to multiple players, and this changes the dynamic between producer-end user. Gamers are nothing if not adaptable, and the sight of how others play the game inspires greater possibilities in our own play style. All of this operates under the auspice of the game itself however, and the game space cannot exist without parameters, rules governing the size and shape of the playing field, and what the player may enact within that space. Therefore instead of considering MMOGs as interactive works of art or electronic playgrounds or other generalities, it is more useful to see them as constructs of rules and protocols.

This concept of games-as-protocol is a useful approach to consider the power relations of MMOGs. Both the networking protocols such as TCP/IP, which allow the Internet to function, and the game code itself, that forms the basis for all the interactions possible in the game world, can be conceptualised as rules that determine what functions are possible, or as Alexander Galloway puts it, “as a management style for distributed masses of autonomous agents.” (2004: p87). Protocol “installs control into a terrain” (Galloway, 2004: p147), ensuring that the means by which connection and communication are made possible are the same means by which control is enacted. In this way protocols are made irresistible, as “only the participants can connect, and therefore, by definition, there can be no resistance to protocol” (ibid). With all that said, while governing protocols create and enforce the parameters of an online space, there is always room for disturbance. Complex systems involving multiple protocols and user inputs can react in unforeseen ways, and there are many examples of this to be found in World of Warcraft.

The “corrupted blood” plague of 2005 is one example of a viral breakout of emergent game mechanics.

The “corrupted blood” incident highlights the emergence of unanticipated results within a complex system, even when that system is governed by seemingly incontrovertible protocols. The effect that the curse would have on lower level players would have been obvious to the developers, as the instance was specifically designed with end-game level players in mind, and its effects were never intended to leave the instance. However the ability for player pets to become infected, combined with the fact that they retained the infection when dismissed, allowed some enterprising players to bring the curse out with them, and unleash it upon the rest of the virtual world. This is a perfect example of a hack, or exploit, using the logic of protocol against itself. Whether or not the hack was intentional in the first place or not is somewhat academic, but what we can learn from this event is that protocol can be affected by user agency, and is not infallible. Indeed as Galloway and Thacker put it: “Connectivity is a threat. The network is a weapons system.” (2007: p16). The supposed ’safe area’ of a player capital city was invaded by the electronic equivalent of weapons of mass destruction.

Corrupted blood is a useful point of departure to start thinking about the status of virality in networked media, and how it plays upon network structures in order to propogate and survive. Parikka (2005) states that understanding digital phenomena using complexity theories relies on a recognition of the “co-evolution of the organism and its environment”. That is, not only does the network give rise to viruses and other fragments of digital life, but these in turn shape the further development of the network itself. Indeed, in the case just mentioned, the protocols of the game itself had to be modified. The corrupted blood debuff was recoded so that it could not exist outside of the raid encounter, and the problem of mass player death was removed. However, it would be a mistake to imagine yet another binary paradigm in which the opposing forces of “the network” and “the viral” are placed as antagonists. This kind of approach is often gratifying because it gives the illusion that we have arrived at a simple conclusion, but in truth no such dichotomy is possible, because the two concepts, and more, are interrelated and interdependent. A virus cannot exists without a network to traverse, and network is purposeless without information to transmit.

This reciprocal relation between systems is what characterises the media ecology as described by Fuller (2005). When complex systems, the media, internet, telephony, to name a few, operate parallel and also interconnected with one another: “medial dynamics in combination generate behaviours, qualities, and openings that are more than the sum of their constituent, codified parts” (2005: p24). Medial dynamics does not only mean the movement or activity of the systems themselves, however. It also includes the actions of users, people who change and are themselves changed by what they see and interact with. It is Deleuze who cuts to the root of the issue when discussing Spinoza’s philosophy of existence:

“The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and accelereation of particles.” (Deleuze: 1988: p123)

Through this rubric of understanding, it becomes apparent that World of Warcraft is more than just a cultural product. It is a machinic system with autopoietic properties (creation, distribution and re-production of meanings, ongoing and dependent on outside forces for stimulation), a closed system with permeable walls, a cell to take the biological term to its fullest. As a system, it is much more productive to think in terms of dynamism between any and all points at once, rather than a discursive struggle between ‘bottom-up’ user creativity and ‘top-down’ networks of control. It is not whether one or the other of the forces described above are in dominance, but that they act and react upon each other, and this is what creates their continued fluidity and hence, stability. Stability through turmoil, as a static system is either dead or in stasis. A computer, as a digital device, only recognises signals in terms of off or on, present or not, in the same way, perhaps a useful way of decoding digital culture is to think of them in such terms. A processual conception of culture, which sees activity as necessarily always in process, is vital to this approach, because if a process or computation is finished, then a machine is at rest. It has no further purpose than to sit idle, waiting for further input, it would be a game without players.

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Yee, Nicholas. “Motivations of Play in Online Games.” Journal of CyberPsychology and Behaviour, 9, pp772-775, 2007

]]> http://organswithoutbody.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/panic-in-the-virtual-streets-plague-and-media-ecologies-in-online-games/feed/ 0 arnonaut http://organswithoutbody.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/serial-narrativity-in-online-space/ http://organswithoutbody.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/serial-narrativity-in-online-space/#comments Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:33:22 +0000 arnonaut http://organswithoutbody.wordpress.com/?p=8 ]]> Where to begin?

At first, the scope of the task seems too ridiculous for words. However I shall attempt to describe and discuss the varying forms of online seriality and narrativity, via a discussion of the issues raised by Guattari (1995) and Ndalianis (…). As with any discussion of the Internet or its media applications, the temptation is always to try and differentiate between media forms that came “before” (print, broadcast radio and television, etc) and “after” the advent of the Internet. This binary gives rise to the rather nebulous and somewhat unhelpful term “new media”, or digital media, which has been used in Utopian modes by writers like Mark Poster (1995) to describe a new age in which digital communications will open up new avenues of communication between media producers and consumers, leading to the democratisation of media systems. Well, that was thirteen years ago, and people are still paying to see movies like Jumper (Doug Liman, 2008), so what’s actually happening? (Watching that movie was like inviting Doug Liman to my house for dinner, but instead of bringing a nice dessert, or even a salad, he kicked me in the balls, then kicked my dog in the balls, and slapped my mum around for a bit. Thanks Doug!) Here I will try to elaborate on what is happening to the workings of seriality/narrativity in the online space, and try to sketch a groundwork for how we might understand and discuss these phenomena.

One of the often-cited criticisms of new/digital media discourse include Lev Manovich’s discussion of critical terminology (2001), where he argues that a historical perspective on new media reveals it is not quite so new after all, in fact sharing traits with traditional cinematic production, itself over a hundred years old:

“Indeed, any digital representation consists of a limited number of samples. For example, a digital still image is a matrix of pixels – a 2-D sampling of space. However, cinema was from its beginnings based on sampling – the sampling of time. Cinema sampled time twenty-four times a second. So we can say that cinema prepared us for new media. All that remained was to take this already discrete representation and to quantify it. But this is simply a mechanical step; what cinema accomplished was a much more difficult conceptual break – from the continuous to the discrete.” – (Manovich, 2001: p50)

So, when we browse the net looking for funny videos, are we experiencing something truly new, or is this just the next step in the machinic processes of culture? Guattari reminds us that machines/machinic assemblages beget technology, and not necessarily the other way around (1995: p33). The example given above by Manovich illustrates this point, as the machinic assemblage of cinema paved the way for digital photography technology.

The Big Picture

How can we conceive of the Internet, or Internet culture in all its vastness? Moreover, how do we separate out what is ‘of the Internet’ from what is borrowed, taken, or re-presented from other sources? Is the Internet so ubiquitous, its roots and tendrils ensconced in almost every aspect of media, that it qualifies as a huge machine, or perhaps just one facet of an even larger one?

The two pictures above provide divergent ways of conceiving the internet. The first is a topography showing all possible IP addresses and how they are allocated and distributed to various vendors, a technical perspective which reveals the substructure of the internet, and links it with the ‘real’ world of capital and production. The second is an approach to online communities, approximating the size of the community with the size of an imagined landmass. This view seems geared toward the average internet user, who may take the hidden workings of IP addresses, subnets and bits for granted, but understands the virtual communities and systems that operate on the screen.

Both of these images present the internet from different perspectives, but both illustrate a similar point about internet culture:  that the internet is a site where considerable work takes place.  Physical and mental energy, time, expertise, engineering, programming, etc being contributed by millions of people to create and populate those landmasses, manage those IP’s and network systems.  There is a constant production of ideas, programs, relations, connections, which give these networks a life and a purpose.  And not everything produced need necessarily be product, ie: labour, in the capitalist sense, for cultural production on the internet (blogging, chatting, gaming, email, forum discussions, flame wars, etc) probably accounts for far more of the average internet users’ time than work applications.

The constant “chatter” of the internet, the nonstop production and reproduction of cultural symbols and connections, conjures images of Guattari’s machinic assemblage (1995: p35). Not only are the spaces of the internet culture-machine taking on a geography and life of their own, they are also taking our lives into its fold.

“Curiously, in acquiring more and more life, machines demand in return more and more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred throughout their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they subtract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference.” – (Guattari, 1995: p36)

And so, we become enculturated to the Internet, our brains begin to think in ways they didn’t before. When my parents were young, they never had to worry about spam mail, but now they do. Before the advent of YouTube, I didn’t know what a rickroll was, now an increasing number of us do (if you are one that just learned thanks to my link, welcome!). Likewise, online seriality is also penetrating how writers and audiences think about traditional narrative spaces such as television.

Think of the twisting, circling webs of mystery, drama and intrigue on recent tv programs like Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica etc, and how those programs are integrating web based content such as mobisodes/webisodes alongside and in some cases into their ongoing serial narratives. TBC

Bibliography:

Guattari, Felix (1995), ‘Machinic Heterogenesis’, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pejanis. Sydney: Power Publications: pp33-59

Manovich, Lev (2001),

Poster, Mark (1995),

You mean to tell me an 80 year old man built this robot?  No way, this thing assembled itself and made a statement by executing the poor old bugger right outside in the driveway.