Death on a screen whether it be a computer or silver one works often times to represent death as consequence. Essentially, death itself is not the focus of the viewer/player. It is the effects of that death on the current situation which is the point. And so death is seen as a character of causation and not effect.
I came to this notion in thinking on the aesthetics of death as described in Klastrup's article on WOW and in thinking about how death is displayed in the various movies/tv shows that are watched. These thoughts lead me further back to thinking of plays such as "Death of a Salesman" but here I have to stop b/c in thinking on this play imparticular I am forced to look back toward "American Beauty" which deals with death in an all together different fashion. Death in "American Beauty" is the end...the effect...and even though we see briefly its affects on the other characters the emphasis lies not at that point but on all the other points or causes that lead up to it. This is important and perhaps why the movie was such a hit b/c it demonstrates death acting as it does in the "real" world. What is death but the ending point of what is here a summation of all of the causes that we experience that leads up to that point?
So why is it that death in WOW and other videogames acts as a cause? Because perhaps as Klastrup points out there has to be an incentive for a player to play better. If this is so, can we then state that death is part of what makes WOW a world? I ask this last question because death is positioned in these games as counter to its function in the real world
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Permission
So I have some ideas with regards to my digital remix project and my final emonument that entails the use of my fellow class member's identities and their actions. Essentially, I'd like to have your permission to use you in my two projects that have to do with reality TV and reality. Your role in the project would be to represent reality and would be used to enact a stark contrast to those entities that comprise reality on tv. So please respond to this post with a yes or no so that I know what I'm working with. Gracias!
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
World of Deathcraft
The "death penalty" of games: yes, that certainly makes sense. Virtual worlds must punish. Virtual worlds built around the concept of war must punish with death. A few alternatives:
-surrender of land
-occupation
-embargoes
-sanctions
-broken families
-incineration of cities
-torture
-slavery
-inflation
-physical disability
-PTSD
-imprisonment
-exile
-scorched earth
But these are much more messy. Death is easily inflicted and overturned in a virtual world.
Klastrup's "Note on Death and Dying" in WOW calls attention to the construction of mortality and its interface (so to speak) with players. Her most provocative findings/conclusions are: 1) it can teach through incentive; 2) it is an event (she makes this claim indirectly through Van Gennep's idea of a "liminal phase" and her rebuttal of the player who described battleground death as a non-event).
From this I'd like to offer one re-rebuttal and two questions:
Re-rebuttal: Death is an event in WOW but not a death event. I will ignore PVE and PVP and Battlegrounds and get right to the most narrative-worthy material: the Leeroy Jenkins death--dying under the high-stakes conditions of a group run/instance/quest. As Klastrup indicates, this kind of death does not only produce fools. It makes heroes too (although I don't agree that these "valorous" deaths parallel WWI accounts--think of Wilson Owen and trenches, and the comparison falls apart). My point is that this kind of death focuses much more on shifts in social standing than on a bodily event. The group, if wiped, re-spawns and retries. Nothing physical (besides the durability of armor) transforms. Death, on the other hand, is a fleshy event. Without any permanent material rupture, death be not found.
The game should be approached--as should most games--as a combat simulator without killing. "Permadeath" should not describe "death." "Death" should. What happens in WOW is more along the lines of involuntary teleportation--a non-non-death
Question 1): Does this really matter?
Question 2): If it (death or the non-non-death) is a powerful incentive to learn, should we bring it into the classroom?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
A sifting through of society's trash
Ulmer connects his argument in the section on sacrifice (pg 41-42)to Georges Bataille and his thoughts with regards to sacrifice and forms of unrequitted expenditure. His choice of Bataille as reference for this section implies that his idea of car crashes is: "ostentation squander" (<--Bataille word choice in "Gift of Rivalry: Potlach") and hence insightful when discerning the values of the entity (the US) that engages in it. Before moving on to its application to emonuments I want to take a closer look at Bataille's idea and Ulmer's notion of sacrifice. Below is a brief summary of their thoughts explicitly present in the article and informed by Bataille's article "Gift of Rivalry: Potlach" and his short text The Eye
Sacrifice (the continuity of life through the witnessing of death and still being) - as a way of understading society
Sacrifice as performance - ritual - rhythm - which invokes then the sense of pattern
Sacrifice as related to practices of production/consumption and unproductive expenditure
Sacrifice as having no end beyond itself
Sacrifice as ostentatious squander - an act afforded solely through one's ability to do so.
Sacrifice as a symptom related to a larger site of schematics. A symptom that may be reduced to its part of a social cycle that is: give and receive - man to man / man to society / society to man. A power shifting through life and death - a vengeful consumption of individual life at the expense of a society's witnessing - which is needed to acknowldege and reify its own existence. But more so a wasteful consumption of life simply because a society has the goods(individuals) to consume. A behaviour based on a sort of capitalistic circadian rhythmic impulsivity (which implies a lack of uncorrupt conscious reason) which can be directly linked to ownership.
The power to ingest/invest which thereby concludes in ownership, which in turn offers the power to destroy/expel/make abject. ie: i buy a flag..I can burn a flag / I ingest food which will eventually become abject <-- This idea as applied to society. An emonument - bearing witness, calling attention to this. A sifting through of a society's trash as means to discern its values and then laying claim to and projecting such to the mass in lightspeed.
Sacrifice (the continuity of life through the witnessing of death and still being) - as a way of understading society
Sacrifice as performance - ritual - rhythm - which invokes then the sense of pattern
Sacrifice as related to practices of production/consumption and unproductive expenditure
Sacrifice as having no end beyond itself
Sacrifice as ostentatious squander - an act afforded solely through one's ability to do so.
Sacrifice as a symptom related to a larger site of schematics. A symptom that may be reduced to its part of a social cycle that is: give and receive - man to man / man to society / society to man. A power shifting through life and death - a vengeful consumption of individual life at the expense of a society's witnessing - which is needed to acknowldege and reify its own existence. But more so a wasteful consumption of life simply because a society has the goods(individuals) to consume. A behaviour based on a sort of capitalistic circadian rhythmic impulsivity (which implies a lack of uncorrupt conscious reason) which can be directly linked to ownership.
The power to ingest/invest which thereby concludes in ownership, which in turn offers the power to destroy/expel/make abject. ie: i buy a flag..I can burn a flag / I ingest food which will eventually become abject <-- This idea as applied to society. An emonument - bearing witness, calling attention to this. A sifting through of a society's trash as means to discern its values and then laying claim to and projecting such to the mass in lightspeed.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Google Sketchup
Folks...here is the link to Google Sketchup. It's a fun 3-D modeling program, and you can download the basic version for free from this site. Click on the Learn More link to see it in action, and to read about the 3D Warehouse of objects you can import directly into your design.
Well here I go trying to make sense of Nietzsche. During class I thought aloud that his ideas of shirking old traditions and habits, thus making the world anew, at this time in the 21st century, seems almost mundane and old hat, that in my reading i encounter a perfectly acceptable contemporary ethos that is rather taken for granted -- and is not at all revolutionary. In homage to Nietzsche I wish to amend that thought with a new one.
I think the metaphors surrounding his ideas have become firmly embedded in our culture, which is clearly a testament to his influence wide and far. We constantly hear talk of people reinventing themselves, for example. However, the actions of giving up what's handed to you and creating something new is what's actually radical because it's so rarely done in practice. Most talk a good game about trying the untried but as the colloquialism goes, "leopards rarely change their spots, they merely hide their flaws and pull in their claws." So, in this respect, Nietzsche really does challenge us to accomplish the supernatural.
No matter what we learn from science and the humanities, as a species we have a remarkable way of returning to familiar pastures. As a general rule, we continue to develop our most fundamental connections in the "old ways" based on the age-old dicta and resist recognizing communities that define themselves by different structures. It's clear what can be re[con]tained, but I wonder how humanity is to evolve with these prohibitions so firmly in place?
I think the metaphors surrounding his ideas have become firmly embedded in our culture, which is clearly a testament to his influence wide and far. We constantly hear talk of people reinventing themselves, for example. However, the actions of giving up what's handed to you and creating something new is what's actually radical because it's so rarely done in practice. Most talk a good game about trying the untried but as the colloquialism goes, "leopards rarely change their spots, they merely hide their flaws and pull in their claws." So, in this respect, Nietzsche really does challenge us to accomplish the supernatural.
No matter what we learn from science and the humanities, as a species we have a remarkable way of returning to familiar pastures. As a general rule, we continue to develop our most fundamental connections in the "old ways" based on the age-old dicta and resist recognizing communities that define themselves by different structures. It's clear what can be re[con]tained, but I wonder how humanity is to evolve with these prohibitions so firmly in place?
Manifestering
Go manifest. Give yourself some time to manifest. Reflect. Think about something that inspires you. Think about something you're passionate about. Something will manifest.
My voice is annoying me, reminding myself to manifest...after all, this is it: this is the pronouncement that sets into motion the rest of 805's semester.
It's not for the lack of an issue, or lack of passion, or lack of commitment. I think the grand spoiler, the fly that invaded my meat, was Dogme 95. And that is not to say that I didn't or don't enjoy Dogme movies. In fact, The Celebration and Kira's Reason were those rare films that changed my mood for weeks after seeing them. I like Dogme's "Vow of Chastity." I support its mission. But the quality, obviously, is not consistent. And it's all those not-s0-successful Dogme films--there are currently 279--which have left me a little wary about the whole manifesting enterprise.
Dogme's "Rescue Action" is to save film from "superficiality" and "bourgeois romanticism" by "disciplining" the avant-garde and the new democratizing technologies into a counter-conformity cinematic movement. The discipline, though, can sometimes be too tempting. The weakest members of the Dogme society accept too much, agreeing both to the manifesto's rules and (consciously or unconsciously) to the ways in which the more successful members of the group have creatively conformed to those rules. What manifests then in these weaker films is only conformity.
There is a benefit: first-time filmmakers working in this vein tend to avoid mucking up gallatically; their errors are usually limited to making the derriviteness too transparent. I prefer the galatic muck-ups. They bring on an inevitable identity crisis much sooner. They are the stuff revolutions are made of.
We need manifestos. We need revolutions (like the one Dogme championed in the 90s). But perhaps we need to kill our own manifestos too. Maybe we need to stamp them with experation dates--"Best used by summer 2010." "Freshness gauranteed until December 2009." Or maybe the key is to continue to manifest. Manifest against our previous manifesting--turn the revolution topsiturvy.
This seems to be a revolving pillar of the RCID program, one on which the Third Sophistic finds its third position. And that makes the whole affair of manifesting much more exciting.
My voice is annoying me, reminding myself to manifest...after all, this is it: this is the pronouncement that sets into motion the rest of 805's semester.
It's not for the lack of an issue, or lack of passion, or lack of commitment. I think the grand spoiler, the fly that invaded my meat, was Dogme 95. And that is not to say that I didn't or don't enjoy Dogme movies. In fact, The Celebration and Kira's Reason were those rare films that changed my mood for weeks after seeing them. I like Dogme's "Vow of Chastity." I support its mission. But the quality, obviously, is not consistent. And it's all those not-s0-successful Dogme films--there are currently 279--which have left me a little wary about the whole manifesting enterprise.
Dogme's "Rescue Action" is to save film from "superficiality" and "bourgeois romanticism" by "disciplining" the avant-garde and the new democratizing technologies into a counter-conformity cinematic movement. The discipline, though, can sometimes be too tempting. The weakest members of the Dogme society accept too much, agreeing both to the manifesto's rules and (consciously or unconsciously) to the ways in which the more successful members of the group have creatively conformed to those rules. What manifests then in these weaker films is only conformity.
There is a benefit: first-time filmmakers working in this vein tend to avoid mucking up gallatically; their errors are usually limited to making the derriviteness too transparent. I prefer the galatic muck-ups. They bring on an inevitable identity crisis much sooner. They are the stuff revolutions are made of.
We need manifestos. We need revolutions (like the one Dogme championed in the 90s). But perhaps we need to kill our own manifestos too. Maybe we need to stamp them with experation dates--"Best used by summer 2010." "Freshness gauranteed until December 2009." Or maybe the key is to continue to manifest. Manifest against our previous manifesting--turn the revolution topsiturvy.
This seems to be a revolving pillar of the RCID program, one on which the Third Sophistic finds its third position. And that makes the whole affair of manifesting much more exciting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)