I joined the newly-launched Ethnography Studio last Fall, the only member who wasn’t a previous student of Andrea Ballestero, founder and faculty advisor. We all were to choose a project to work on through the year, workshopping our material, getting advice and criticism on our written work and presentations while improving our theoretical and practical grasp of ethnography as a research tool.

Rather than anything related to my dissertation, I chose a side project, my research into Second Life’s prim breast community. I’d done much of my fieldwork, but wasn’t sure how to turn my mass of material into one or more academic journal articles. My year with the Studio taught me how to do just that: the first article drawn from that research will be out the door to a journal on Monday. I’ve also found two more articles in the material, that I’ll write and submit in the Fall, after the first draft of HAPPY SUMMER FUNTIME is done.

Honestly, the most valuable thing I got from the Studio was faith in the project, and in my work more generally. While my dissertation committee and my program chair enthusiastically support my work, the response it’s gotten from my department generally has been… not so much enthusiastic. Given that it’s a technology and society program, I’d imagined that the response in a traditional anthropology program would be much more skeptical.

Quite the contrary: Andrea and my colleagues were absolutely supportive and encouraging, and gave me a confidence in my work I’d never had.

We workshopped my draft paper a couple weeks ago, and the critique I got was stupendous: I’m still shaky on the interplay of theory and ethnographic data in writing: I got the beginning of a grip on how they’re the same thing and can be brought together more seamlessly. I also got a stack of ideas for how to frame and structure future papers using the dataset, which has left me enthusiastic about writing two more papers from my material.

Andrea’s leaving ASU, unfortunately for us, and the future of the Studio is uncertain. I hope we can find a way to keep collaborating: having a small community of people united in methods and wildly diverse in projects has been wonderful (and my colleagues’ projects are awesome: I can’t wait to hear more as they develop).

As for those next papers: one will be an expansion of my “Digital Femaling” post here, and another will be an exploration of a set of themes around the body exotic, drawing on Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. I’m looking forward to that one: it’ll be a chance to stretch into the digital humanities to do something really bold and fun.

After the first draft of HAPPY SUMMER FUNTIME.

As my first mentor and inspiration in the anthropology of technology use, the newly-tenured Jameson Wetmore, has said, the most unusual thing about my work isn’t the location or subject matter, but how eager people in my communities are to talk to me and share deep and wonderful insights into their digital lives and communities. As much help as the members of the Studio have been, I couldn’t have gotten to this point in my work without the constant encouragement, support and wonderful discussions with members of SL’s busty community, especially Maggie Bluxome, Melissa Yeuxdoux and Vickie Shan (NSFW), but including dozens of other truly wonderful people. Thank you!

What I do have, in addition to the 18 linear feet of books I’ve read in grad school, some large number of unorganized article PDFs, a quarter of a million words on this blog and a dozen or two conference presentations, is a plan. I’d been calling the plan “Dissertation Death March,” but a friend suggested that that might not get me in the proper spirit of the thing: “Oh, what a beautiful morning! Let me get back to the Dissertation Death March! Or… I could clean the bathroom again, that sounds more appealing….”

So. the working title of my dissertation is HAPPY SUMMER FUNTIME (in all caps, to show that I really mean it, of course).

I’ve got 15 weeks between May 1 and August 15, excluding two that I’ll be at conferences. If I write 5 kilowords a week, I’ll have a 60 kiloword draft, which seems to be about the sweet spot for academic books in my field. I’m breaking my outline into 15 5-kiloword sub-chapters, so I can take on one a week, a nice discrete project. If I spend the bulk of the week outlining, assembling work to cite, pulling my research together, I can write Friday and Saturday, and take Sunday off. I know I can do two 2-kiloword brunches a week without breaking a sweat, so pushing out a few more words on those days shouldn’t be a challenge.

The schedule’s an organizational guide, not a rigid formula. I need more structure to my time than the “just write 30 seconds a day” approaches, but need small enough chunks that I don’t feel that my next task is overwhelming in scope.

It’s not going to be all HAPPY SUMMER FUNTIME: assuming I get two articles out the door this week, I’ve still got a few pieces that probably aren’t going to make it into the dissertation that need to keep ticking over. I’m presenting or co-presenting three things at Games+Leanring+Society in July. I need to do a play-through of the Mass Effect trilogy and a good chunk of Skyrim – I’ve been thinking about how single-player games reflect some of the things I’m going to be saying about personhood and place in multiplayer.

Oh, and I’ve been getting my old space-exploration work up on The Spacefaring Web, as background for what may be my first big post-PhD research adventure. Drop on by!

But otherwise – things will probably be pretty quiet around here, and Combat Anthropologist, and Internet Spaceships. Though, I suspect Star Trek Online will continue to be my sanity-saver of choice through the summer, generating some photos of the glory of the Federation for my Tumblr.

I’m planning on going silent till the first draft is done, to ensure I meet my deadline and to give me the mental space to organize a complete argument all the way through. After the draft is done, I have to do a public midterm defense in late August: I’ll definitely post my materials for it here, and try to get streaming video, for anyone who wants to see what I’m up to.

After that, I’ll be open for beta reading by anybody who’d like to, and I’ll probably stress-test chunks here on the blog. I hope to be able to workshop it to an all-star panel at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in October, and then do my public defense (definitely livestreamed, and with two-way audio/text participation from the web) just before Thanksgiving.

Let the HAPPY SUMMER FUNTIME begin!

The unifying theme is “kaseido,” which I’ve used as an online tag since the early days of the web, and still unites most of my social media and avatar identities. When Mars Pathfinder landed on July 4, 1997, my childhood interest in space was rekindled – more like area-bombarded with white phosphorous. I started going to the UCLA engineering library on Saturdays and reading everything I could understand, basically putting myself through a masters in space policy over the next couple years, with a focus on Mars exploration.

At the same time, one of my best friends had  – in all seriousness – told me she wouldn’t speak to me again till I’d marathoned the first season of the Highlander TV show. So I did, and fell in love with Japanese swordsmanship. Watched all the samurai classics, anime, everything I could find – and found a traditional kendo dojo within walking distance in West L.A.

Kendo is – and here’s where the games studies angle comes in – basically gamified samurai combat. There’s an incredibly rich literature on the gamification of traditional Japanese warfare, and, oh hell, somebody really needs to do a translation of it into contemporary games-studies discourse.

But before I sketch that out – “kaseido” came from the intersection of my two passions. A friend of mine joked that I wasn’t a martial artist, but a martian artist. “Kaseido” can be translated as “Martian art,” using the same suffix as kendo, sword-art. It also translates as “The Martian Way,” the title of a classic Isaac Asimov story of an emergent human culture of Mars settlers. It also translates as “The Fire Star Way,” the literal translation of the Japanese name for Mars, which is just pretty.

So for some years I did “kaseido,” trying to bring to my space work the discipline and spirit of the martial arts, and even delivered a paper on the topic at The Mars Society’s second conference in 1999. By 2003 I concluded that the promise of real space exploration was dead for at least a generation, killed off by post-9/11 changes in culture and the Federal deficit, and I moved on, discovering virtual worlds and games studies in 2007, and then starting grad school.

Space came back into my life in a big way a little over a month ago, when a colleague challenged my conclusions that space exploration was culturally and conceptually dead. I went back to re-examine my assumptions about how techno-social change happens, and convened an ASU workshop on the subject (more on that in a later post), and concluded that some things are in fact happening.

Almost randomly, in the midst of a conversation with a member of my dissertation committee, Brad Allenby (famously described by a friend as “a cross between Cave Johnson and the Borg”), I got appointed to a graduate fellowship. I’m now Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics Graduate Fellow for Starship Initiatives.

For realz. I’ve got the engagement letter right here.

What all that’s going to entail is barely in early planning, but the core will be developing courses for an interdisciplinary master’s degree fusing engineering, policy and ethics around the trope of designing a generation ship  – both hardware and culture.

Yes, it is the coolest job in the universe.

What it (probably) means is, I’ll be working at the intersection of games studies (yes, games design and games-and-culture theory are going to be at the core), curriculum design and space policy. All I need to do is work in katanas, and I’ll have everything I think is cool in one space.

I’m working this weekend to get a new section of my website launched, built around a new/old blog, The Spacefaring Web.  TSW was a proto-blog that appeared as a weekly column on the space-industry site Space Daily for several years at the turn of the century, and is about to find new life as my site for ongoing commentary on the ethics, culture and policy of space exploration. Stay tuned: I’ll update this post with links once it launches, and do some intro posting.

OK, back to martial arts and gamification. This needs to be a series of posts and an article/conference paper at least, but a core notion is that several cultures, as they globalized and Westernized, sought to keep traditional fighting arts and the culture around them alive and relevant in some way.

In last semester’s Stealth Seminar, we focused on Brazilian capoiera as a shifting response to changes in racial, class and national identity in Brazil as it industrialized and then re-connected with a global African diaspora through the 20th Century.

What happened with capoiera was that a very traditional semi-underground school held on while a rationalized, bureaucratized, and we’d say now “gamified” alternative grew with official support. Later, in the 1990s, as communication and travel links intensified, and Americans of African heritage sought their cultural roots, a synthesis of the two forms developed, keeping much of the rationalized training while reincorporating culturally rooted elements of the traditional style, creating a form both somewhat accessible to cultural outsiders and “authentic,” if in the mediatized, “Colonial Williamsburg,” sense of the term.

Very similar things happened with the Japanese arts, along with a complex interplay around the American postwar occupation of Japan, in which American soldiers and Japanese traditionalists negotiated a new synthesis of craft, ideology and curriculum.

Kendo is, even for the modern Asian fighting arts, an odd hybrid, not unlike an MMO in its synthesis of disparate and conflicting elements, immersive world and competitive endgame. There’s a tournament circuit of sport kendo, which is a beautiful apotheosis of PvP: it’s fast, built around complex skill mastery, and much of it is the mental game, playing not against the opponent’s technique but against his  – well, guts. My sensei’s sensei, about 140 years old and Yoda-sized, could quite literally scare the crap out of 20 year olds three times his size.

It’s also one of the arts closest to its traditional roots, at least in my then-dojo, with very non-”modern” pedagogy, a teaching of cultural forms as inseparable from combat forms, and a very sparing achievements system. As with MMOs, there was a clear distinction between tournament sport players and people for whom the performative immersion was paramount.

Ultimately, I stopped participating because I was working as an entertainment lawyer at the time, and spending three evenings a week screaming and hitting people on the head with a stick was not helping my aggression levels…But who knows? Maybe returning to kasei will lead me back to ken as well….

This year I’ve been part of a small workshop at ASU, the Ethnography Studio, mostly former students of Andrea Ballestero Salaverry‘s who wanted to continue to work with her after their class ended. We’ve been doing a read-and-comment of each other’s works in progress, and tonight I was up, with my analysis of collective identity work in Second Life’s busty community.

To my surprise, we ran almost the full hour and a half. I got brilliant, revolutionary feedback. Presenting games studies/virtual worlds papers to a general social science audience is hard: I’ve never been clear how much background information is needed to make sense of the environment, and people tend to find interesting things I either take for granted or see in a different way.

We focused on one of my problem areas, seamlessly working theory and ethnographic data together, rather than just dumping blocks of each. The answer they presented me wasn’t so much “you do it like this,” as a series of questions about the data, and questions about my analysis, that as I answered them more fully, pulled things together better.

We got hung up a bit on the inworld/offline borderlands: what I got was, no, you don’t need to ask RL statistical-form stuff like age, gender, nationality, etc., but do interrogate values, politics, notions of identity, that flow across the spaces.  I’ve done some of that, but the Studio folks encouraged me to make it richer, to follow up on a few threads I’d dropped.

They liked my mini-rant on writing from within the community, rather than as a lab-coated outsider, but challenged me to bring in more of the voices of the community, even if I focus the paper on one person and one incident: to get other perspectives, to flesh out both how identity-ratifying is a communal project, but how my theorizing about the community has been informed by making my research project known and inviting discussion (short answer? overnight I got a terrific set of comments from one of my interviewees).

My favorite quote of the night came from Andrea, who responded to my building on games-studies notions of agency as a dialectic between user and software with “experimentation and playfulness around political agency,” which could be a nice summary of all the work I’ll be covering in my dissertation. That was a hugely helpful framing moment!

One of my biggest questions was how to use my data on my own experiences as an active participant in the community. Jieyoung had a wonderful observation – that my discussion of my experience was the bridge leading the reader into the work, that covered the gap between the academic reading a paper and the community off in a strange place – that my voyage brought the reader from one point to the other, and made the community comprehensible. That makes a lot of sense, and I’ll be weaving in more of my own experiences to help make that bridge a stronger one.

Earlier today, Kelly Bergstrom, an incredible qualitative researcher of EVE Online, gave a kickass guest lecture to the undergrad class I co-teach, and I was struck by how strongly the same themes emerged from EVE as from this completely different community in SL. Both are struggling with the flow of meaning in and out of the space of play; both strongly reinforce members’ projective identity; both are some of the last bastions of deep pseudonymity; and both play with “real-world” social and political ideas of huge power and significance in a microcosm which keeps all the passion while acting at a much smaller scale.

Looks like I’ve got more work ahead in both communities as I sit down to write my dissertation.

I can’t thank the members of the Ethnography Studio enough for their time and brainpower!

There will be more pieces: I want to do a gender-studies article building off of my “Digital Femaling” post here, and a digital humanities article on carnival, the exotic and grotesque, and bioconservatism. I’ll also be doing a conference presentation at Console-Ing Passions 2012 in July.

This one takes a theory from games studies and one from science and technology studies, and plays off them to create a model of how identity and agency work in virtual environments, from single-player fixed-avatar games like Deus Ex: Revolution to single-player games with avatar creation, both narrative and sandbox (Mass Effect and Skyrim, respectively), through MMOs and sandbox virtual spaces like SL.

One of the biggest problems of ethnographic work online is the insane amount of data it generates. For the prim breast project alone, I’ve got over 1000 photos and 1000 pages of chatlogs. The approach I’ve been using has been to use it all as a stew for cooking up ideas, then pick one tiny bit of it as a metonymy (or is it synecdoche?) for the whole thing.

For my mammoth second year project on the Confederation of Democratic Simulators-Al Andalus merger, I used one thread on the CDS forum to stand for the whole (still, a discourse analysis of 40-odd posts, many of which were over 2500 words, was a lot of material to work with in even a long paper). Here I’ve used Maggie’s wedding to Jennifur Vultee as a snowglobe of the prim-breast community.

So, this is a rough draft that I’ve written for ASU’s Ethnography Studio, where I’m up for workshop feedback on Monday. I’m not expecting a lot of commentary: two of us are on, and I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve written a lot more, and a lot more non-ethnographic material, than my colleague.

I’ll value their feedback as ethnographers. I’ll value as much or more the opinions of the community. I see my role of digital ethnographer not as being someone in a pith helmet or lab coat coming in from outside and poking at the quaint natives, but a member of the community using academic language to communicate out to a scholarly public. That means I’m representing rather than describing (and hopefully, rather than mis-representing!) the community.

If you’re a member of SL’s prim breast community, and you’ve got the time and inclination to wade through 6000 words of academic theorizing, let me know, either in comments here or by email to kaseido dot quandry at gmail dot com, and I’ll send you this draft. I’m looking for a review of my depiction of the community right now, not of the theoretical argument or writing – I may put a more polished draft out for comments later.

Thanks!

The Center’s mission statement has been polished by loving corporate hands till not a stain of meaning remains, and honestly, from what I’ve seen the answer to “what are we going to do?” is “hang on, we’ve got too much startup work to do and too many terrific opportunities to nail that down right now.” With that in mind, I’d like to offer up some thoughts on what the Center might do for “impact.”

This grew out of a conversation at a party last night, and in writing about it I’m not trying to hog credit, but to give plausible deniability: I’m far enough removed from operations to be able to contribute as devil’s advocate and scrutinizing critic.  I see my role as an independent member of a Board of Directors at the moment, rather than an employee, with a duty to kick the tires and count the horse’s teeth.

OK, so what’s “impact?”

What I’ve heard is that impact games cover education, health and “social impact,” to take a phrase from the Games For Change organization (G4C). Which is kind of recursive as definitions go, but G4C clarifies that social impact games “serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts… to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good.”

How many of you cringed at the phrase “social good?”

I do, and I like broccoli. But not cough syrup.

I respectfully suggest to the Center that the power of “games and impact” won’t be found in social impact games – because most social impact games, particularly the best of them, succeed by destroying the value of games as a medium.

Instead, for revolutionary and transformative impact – I mean changing the world – put a scalable suite of game design tools in the hands of every kid on the planet who’s got basic health and welfare needs met first.

I’ve played some brilliant social impact games…. in class. Ayiti, The Cost of Life has solid mechanics and playability, and is an absolutely harrowing simulation of the tradeoffs involved in living in poverty in Haiti. G4C’s Hush….. *shudder.* They’re powerful works of propaganda art.

What they’re not, of course, is fun.

More than that, they’re anti-games. What games do – why they’re powerful engines for learning, why they take our attention away from old passive media consumption, is give us agency. They give us problems we can solve, things we can do, and rewards for achievement. They make us feel better about ourselves by making us better, if only in orc-slaying and strawberry farming. They give us a little sense of mastery over our environments, a sense all too many of us don’t get in the schoolroom, in the workplace.

Impact games are anti-games. They teach us that things suck, that death and horror are inevitable for many in this world, and when we’re done we’re left with the message – that there isn’t a damn thing we can really do about it. Impact games take our agency from us and beat it with rubber hoses.

Good art does that. Good games don’t.

We’ve got a critical shortage of agency in this world. We’re powerless against the institutions that control our days, our welfare, our environment. Games make us believe we’re not hopeless.

If what games do best is give us agency, then, the better the game, the more agency it gives to more people, and the more impact it has.

What’s the best possible game for agency? The game of game design, the game of making.

Gamestar Mechanic is a creation of E-Line Media, founded by Alan Gershenfeld, one of the principals of the Center. It’s a game and community that teaches game design – and that young kids can use to make and share some pretty cool games.

Gamestar Mechanic is changing the world. Through play – actual fun play, not simulated starvation or genocide – it shows kids they can make culture, make art, make fun. That they can produce and not just consume.

That is perhaps the most radical message in the world. Every person who believes they have the power to make art, takes power back from the would-be monopolists of entertainment in Hollywood. Every person who makes something and shares it has taken back the means of production.

Forget Marx and factories – game developers of the world, unite!

When we unchain creativity, we unchain the human spirit. When kids learn that they can do things themselves…. they will. They’ll make games. And music. And useful inventions, new businesses, revolutions. When they take back the media, they take back their voices, and then they say things that matter.

“Impact games” are imperialism with a bleeding heart. They’re the product of the notion that the solution to poverty and genocide lies in making rich folk feel bad.

The solution to poverty and genocide is giving power to the people who have to live with it. Games teach agency. Agency is power. Power gets used for change.

Dethrone the corrupt? Purify the water? Educate the poor? Liberate women?

Teach design.

Everything else is just applications.

Eric Zimmerman, the person most credited (perhaps unfairly) with popularizing the term in games studies, last month called the topic a “straw man,” saying “there is no magic circle jerk” who’s making the claim that “games are formal structures wholly and completely separate from ordinary life.” (note the article is four pages – it’s kind of hard to see the page buttons) He’s right when he goes on to say that the concept was intended for game designers – not social scientists -  as an offhand means of noting that

Time and space, and identity, and social relations acquire new meanings while the game is going on. This is how playing a game is “entering a magic circle” — there are meanings which emerge as cause and effect of the game as it is played.

And that’s fine. He’s doubtless right that within games studies, there are/are no longer hardcore formalists arguing that only formal rules matter and not the emergent player experience, and certainly not that formal game rules trump and negate social rules (but then there’s the Twixt incident, so maybe “not any” should be “hardly any”).

However. When Salen and Zimmerman in Rules of Play released their little “magic circle” organism out of the games lab and into the general ecosystem of memes, something happened: it humped The Matrix and had a couple million kids.

A lot of those kids ended up in Second Life, and a lot in EVE Online.

These kids (and I say “kids” only in stretching this story too far – in SL, many are in their 50s and up) have a genetic code inherited from the console jockeys of Neuromancer, Sherry Turkle, a bunch of 90s movies about computers, and some random hippies and libertarians. Not much of that DNA at all actually comes from Salen and Zimmerman, but there’s enough to score positive on a paternity test – to Zimmerman’s understandable pique.

In short, the elements of the circle jerks’ genetic code are:

• a belief that when you sit down at a computer (game), you’re entering another country
• that country’s denizens have sole jurisdiction over what is or isn’t permissible behavior
• that country’s denizens can perform “extraordinary rendition” on anyone, any time, because their laws and customs are superior

When I started studying online games and sandboxes, I embraced the circle jerks. I was looking for proto-utopias, “the early days of a better nation,” test-beds of new laws and customs that might prototype better social arrangements for the offline world. I found some noble experiments and quite a lot of wonderful people, but mostly found a failed retro-future (reasons tl;dr – see the governance tag and some of the others here, or wait for my dissertation).

Mark Zuckerberg invented DDT for circle jerks, and it killed off most all of the species: Facebook, as the material embodiment of Zuckerberg’s ideology of unity and transparency of identity, triumphed over the sandboxes. World of Warcraft broke pseudonymity with its “RealID” policy; changes to the Second Life viewer privileged the “Real Life” profile tab, and our values changed from protecting ourselves by pseudonymity to doing so by forcing transparency on others – a shift from armor to longbows, as it were.

And the culture turned, and circle jerks died back. There are only a few places to find them in the wild anymore: tenured university faculty, and multiplayer online sandboxes like Second Life and EVE.

That’s why Monday’s incident is so fascinating. Very briefly, the person who is (a) the leader of Goonfleet, the major organization of greifers and gankers in EVE, (b) the newly re-elected chairman of the official, corporate-sanctioned player council, the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), and/or (c) a young former lawyer delivered a presentation at EVE‘s corporate-sponsored Fanfest in which he called on his followers to hound a man to suicide.

The following day, he claimed (credibly) that he was so drunk on stage that he didn’t remember what he had done, and issued an apology personally to the man and to the player community on the official forum (at 191 pages of commentary, that is a “threadnaught,” and way too big a data corpus for analysis), with the issue of his resignation pending discussions with EVE‘s corporate owners and the rest of the CSM. Here’s a full analysis and transcript.

Here’s what’s interesting: EVE blogger Ripard Teg analyzed the event as a conflict among three people: Goon leader “The Mittani,” CSM chair “Mittens” and regular dude Alexander.  Teg’s piece, entitled “Hats,” avoids armchair psychologizing to focus on roles, or personas.

“The Mittani” is, by all accounts a “circle jerk,” or what some in SL used to call a “digital person:” a person(a) native to a magically-encircled space. Whether or not this is the same thing as “roleplay character,” a la Dungeons and Dragons, is largely in the mind of the beholder, but I’d argue they’re different things – but that’s not really material here.

“Mittens” is a person(a) in a job role of player/game advocate with a public-face and private-advocacy role, not unlike the head of any other advocacy group. We suck these days at figuring out where the line between job role  and private life is: that’s what’s underlying both the foofooraw over employers wanting Facebook passwords and the endless politician sex scandals (a digression: I’m reading H.G. Wells’ The War In The Air, and there’s a scene where the inventor of the airship wants to talk about his mistress, and the press is all, sincerely, “no, no, that’s private, don’t tell us that! ew!” Cultures change).

And it’s in that vague borderland of the magic circle where The Mittani/Mittens/Alexander got caught in a minefield.

Within the fairy forcefield of EVEx-as-separate-country, the presentation was in a gray zone of culturally lawful behavior. Read (some of) that threadnaught: there are plenty of defenders of what happened, who argue that there was nothing to apologize for.

As a matter of corporate/game public relations, it was a clusterfuck, and the gaming press jumped on it.

As something done in a functional blackout by a dude who has to look himself in the mirror the next day… only he can answer that one.

But let’s go back to those comments that held that there was nothing to apologize for. They can largely be summed as “the motto of EVE is ‘harden the fuck up.’ The strong defeating the weak is entirely what the space is about, and if you’re weak and don’t want to be defeated, don’t come here.” So, straight-up Social Darwinism.

Look back at that bullet list above. This – and this thread is far from unique; it’s one of the core tenets of the whole griefer/ganker realm – isn’t just circle-jerkery. It’s not just saying, “we suspend real-world law and morality here in favor of our own.” It’s “the laws and customs inside our fairy forcefield trump the law and morality of the ‘outside world.’”  It goes beyond “destroy your game roleplay character or digital persona in a fit of pique” to “you, specific real-world person with suicidal ideation, should act on it.”

The world turns inside out: the circle jerks would see game rules (primarily emergent social norms rather than Monopoly-like rules) trump real world rules*.

Speaking as a trained anthropologist chock-full of postmodernism and cultural relativism, I can say professionally, that’s fucking nuts.

And that’s why my students have a running joke about my magic circle rants, and why there’s a tag on this blog for “die magic circle die.”

__________

*I see Anonymous, WikiLeaks and the various Facebook/Twitter revolutions not as cultural imperialism by circle jerks, but folks with real-world ideologies and agendas using digital tools to advance them – which, IMO, is how the tech should be used – no fairy forcefields to be found.

Watch this in HD, full-screen.

So. For a generation or so, technical virtuosity – that of both the surgeon and the animator – have necessitated a certain aesthetic, both “flawless” and “cartoonish.” People make themselves look like Barbie dolls, as low-rez plastic has been one of the media in which the craft of beauty has been inscribed.

Jessica Rabbit both reflects  and advocates a standard of beauty derived from the celluloid. It’s been observed that the current American standard of female beauty: broad shoulders, narrow waist and hips, large breasts – generally isn’t possible without significant and sustained technological virtuosity.

The plastic surgeon and the plastic fabricator spent a generation in dialog, a discourse written (primarily) on women’s bodies. The introduction of HD began a change in aesthetic consumption, favoring amateur porn: in HD, even the most plastic of human figures looks… lifelike, so why not just return to an aesthetic of the unmodified human?

The resolution of the computer monitor (where much porn has come to be viewed) only slowly carried over to the movie screen and home entertainment center: thus, seven years or so into the HD+broadband age, our mainstream celebrities still tend to be exemplars of an earlier age of technological modifiction.

Now, though, if the highest example of the computer animator’s art is clogged pores and shaving bumps, the flawless becomes old-school, as quaint as an 8-bit game or rotary phone. Will the cartoony physique become the Donkey Kong of celebrity imagery?

Of course, this calls into question the entire enterprise of transhumanism, rooted in a linear Modernist concept of progress away from the realities of unmodified flesh into a realm of pure Form.

Then again, the aesthetic driver has been the (digital, plastic) artist, with the surgeon and gossip magazine following apace. Given a technological reform in cosmetic surgery that offered us skins as painterly and flawless as, say those of Second Life around 2010, the trend could well reverse itself. Crow’s feet and shaving bumps may be a masterwork of computing power, but I suspect many of us would trade for turn of the century levels of rendering.

Or, this could just be a demo video for a new rendering engine, and I should go get some sleep.

From attending a small workshop and a major talk, I got a sack of intellectual time bombs, and they’ve been going off one by one ever since. One blast comes from threads in her talk, and later audience discussion, about binary concepts of privacy and the decline of the “cyberspace” metaphor. I don’t know of anyone having linked them, but I think the connection’s strong.

One of Markham’s core points was that it’s not useful, methodologically or ethically, to think of information as having a binary state of public/private, but rather of privacy as being situational and contingent (I’d add, negotiated).

A questioner challenged that, saying, if you post a blog and don’t lock it, it’s public, and thus the content is fair game for any use because it’s not private anymore. I countered by mentioning my favorite law journal article, Warren & Brandeis‘s “The Right of Privacy,” from 1890, which is the source of American legal notions of privacy in the (first) age of social media. The example I gave was, I wear my face around in public. That doesn’t give you the right to use my face to sell your cars.

This is obvious, and it’s how we think about ownership generally. My phone is private. But if I lend it to (using examples from the audience) Megan to make a call, that doesn’t give Jeff the right to come over and take it from my bag: my lending it out hasn’t flipped the bit of its binary status from “private” to “public.”

Likewise, that license of use implicitly doesn’t extend to all my ownership rights: I can hit it with a baseball bat if I want, or run out the battery or rack up charges to 900-number sex lines – my license to Megan to borrow it (implicitly) doesn’t include those rights.  If I’ve established a course of dealing of lending it to her, I may be implying a license to her to take it from my bag without asking – but that doesn’t mean the same license terms extend to Annette, because I lent it to her once. Specific negotiation and course of dealing over time are what determine the usage right, not some inherent property of the object.

Most school-age kids have developed an innate sense of this, even if they can’t articulate it in legal language

But we think (thought) about digital information differently.

We’ve thought about digital information technologies differently anyway, all along, and it’s William Gibson and Neal Stephenson‘s fault.

There were a number of really interesting cultural/technological issues around the adoption of the telephone, but people never thought of people on the other end of a phone call as somehow not real, or phone numbers as an alternate identity, or of conversations happening in a “phone space” conceptually distinct from, and subject to different rules from, the “real world.”  But we did all those things with respect to the internet, or as it was called till fairly recently, “cyberspace.”  Why? Gibson and Stephenson.

Markham had a series of wonderful slides, of 1990s imaginings, and realities, of internet use: while we pictured avatarized landscapes of digital data in world-like spaces, we were largely interacting with each other via ASCII text on Usenet   The disconnect between our concepts and our practices was immense.

“Cyberspace” is as extinct as the penny-farthing bicycle (and with it, frontier-manners socializing with strangers, social equality and solidarity, and immersive virtual worlds: I actually agree with Ted Castronova this time): researchers of the internet and cultural pundits need to recognize that the internet and its goods are no longer distinct from everyday life.

Stealing my shit, whether it’s my phone or a digital mask, or my savings account, is stealing. You don’t get to take my shit and use it for your own purposes without getting permission, and that permission isn’t generalizable. I’m me, but I don’t share everything with everybody (well, I pretty much do, but still).

The death of digital exceptionalism is, as a key quote in science and technology studies has it, “neither good nor bad, nor neutral.” It benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless sometimes, but not at other times; it may have brought to an end one of the most powerful forces for good and bad in human history (very mostly good in my highly debatable opinion), the European-American escape valve and cultural mainspring of the “frontier.” It does end a godawful lot of silly talk and make laughable a bunch of 1990s sci-fi movies. It’s ended the “public” lives of a number of dear “pseudonymous” friends.

It’s a slap to the back of the head of punditry, scholarship, and particularly institutional ethical and methodological guidelines for studying human interaction involving the internet, some of which has barely started to come to grips with the internet’s existence, let alone with this second phase of its metaphorical conception.

Speaking of which, I’ve got to call out ASU’s anthropology department, the School of Human Evolution and Social Change  (SHESC) that houses it, and the Ethnography Studio I’m a member of, all of which failed to send a single person to Markham’s workshop or talk. Four years ago, a senior administrator associated with SHESC declined an association with me and my work, saying that what I was doing as a first-year researcher was “ten years ahead of our faculty.” Four years later, they’re proving themselves to be still ten years behind the standard of practice. Shame on you all.

And, concomitant kudos to ASU’s English Department, and particularly its Rhetoric and Composition PhD program (and its exceptional students who I count as colleagues and friends), for recognizing that we live in the goddamned future and it matters.

Above all, thanks to Annette Markham for rocking our academic world.

I’m one of the discussion hosts, and along with organizational work, I’ve been asked to kick the thread off with a comment that will accompany the launch. I can’t release the discussion prompt till Tuesday, but as an introduction to the discussion, and an invitation to my friends, colleagues and students to come over and join in (anyone can comment, and the discussion promises to be vigorous and interesting), here’s my starting response:

I come to HASTAC from a different background from most of the Scholars: I’m in a science and technology studies program where I focus on the user, rather than the designer, experience.  I’ve found STS is a wonderful lens for teaching games studies: where some humanities approaches reify “texts,” STS tends to deconstruct “objects” into networks. One advantage to this approach for undergraduate pedagogy is its ability to refute the opinions, even of avid young gamers, that games are trivial.

We can present the game as not just images on a screen or an object in a box, but as a node in a network of social practices – playing Call of Duty with dorm buddies to World of Warcraft in a Chinese internet café; the economics of gold farming; cross-genre writing about games (we started this semester with articles by a literary journalist, a games designer, and an academic); the construction and performance of identity, including race and gender; a range of technologies; and the divergent disciplinary perspectives of the humanities, social sciences, engineering, programming and law.

The STS approach is inherently trans- or post-disciplinary, which can be a great advantage in teaching students from a broad range of departments, experience and interest. We are able to mobilize rhetorics of design, programming, writing and play; to use music, dance and humor in an integrated and authentic way. Offering students more points of contact with their own interests and backgrounds has enabled great engagement and creative thinking among our students.

Breaking down the boundary of the text (and stomping all over the games-studies concept of the “magic circle,” a legacy of class-ridden Edwardian notions of the amateur and the child), enables us to start from an integrated view of social justice and social responsibility while giving students tools to interrogate critically their relations with technologies, beginning with the familiar and intimate ones of the electronic game.