You have an interesting method of citation – on some level it seems more authentic to just place the name with a colon and then the quote – it seems less open to bastardization of the original, but it is also pretty unconventional. In the second chapter I believe, you use a standard form – is there a reason for holding or breaking this convention?

The citations are more like samples. Sometimes i want to name-check an author but i can’t find the quote that fits, and the citation gets more conventional.

first line: its -> it’s (as in “it is blood mischief and … that gamers revel in”)

“No further back than Dungeons and Dragons” suggests that D+D was not in itself a grand orgy of anarchically collected pasts; its popularity hinged on the very idea of reclamation and re-evaluation of these zones and events that were inhabited by real and fictional pasts smashing together like planes to form a cosmology.

I know this is Lunenfeld, but as a introductory statement, this is my first reaction.

Yes, but isn’t that the things L is getting at: its an appropriated past, a past made useful…

Agreed, but some added thoughts:

Lunenfeld:
——————-
“by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons”
——————–
..and in the same sentence, suggesting that there’s a rejection of the tropes the ‘rest of us’ take for granted. His interest is more in the cutting-off of history – I think – the snapping to grid, precisely where he logistically launched the premise of his task-to-history. Your theme in ‘America’ seems to the process of abstraction, which for me comes to a head in your description of Benjamin. Lunenfeld’s approach seems contrary to what follows, perhaps? This chapter gave me a reminder of the forms of recollection and recourse that occur across the topoi.

Lunenfeld:
———————-
” all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use.”
———————-
Abstraction liquifies the past for the purpose of eliciting power through nothing short of absolute pageantry. The shield becomes the shield bar above the health bar, represented by a red cross, and so on it goes.

I have admittedly appropriated PL for my own purposes, as with many of the other quotes. Which is why the notes are going to be listed in the back as ‘cuts’. They are more like samples than citations.

I am suprised the military and the government has not stepped up the gaming promotion yet. Eventually, there is going to be a great need to highly skilled gamers in high level military and government jobs. As robots become more prevalent, such as the new honda bot or microsoft bot, there is going to be a giant increase in demand for someone to control these from behind the scenes.

Brad Henry on 051.
posted on 10/12/06

Yeah, but the background to that level of control will remain essentially mathematical. The idea of a practical robot is already nearly 1000 years gone. Duns Scotus and metal skins…

The Laws of Pyshics are hardly going to be resolved here and Animation/Gaming is really, in terms of Government the same illustrative content as anywhere else.

M

… I mean it isn’t that simple. What use forthright robots when the logic of War is now tnat of how Nations go about losing ‘em.

M

jeez, typo… “Infantry” not Infantly… but hey what’s the difference?

M

… Highly skilled gamers for the Military? “Not that simple”. ie.

-Most of the infantiy weapons produced and deployed in WW1 were never fired.

-After the advent of airborne warfare @ WW2 there were whole fleets of ships designed for the sole purpose of shooting down airplanes which used to have an %11 efficiency.

An engineer would sit in a room with a slide rule and calculate the vectors along the plumb-line of the moving ship ( a little piece of Brass imbedded in the deck) for each incoming aircraft, then assign the calculations to the gunners verbally. Didn’t do much and some ships survived to become Museum pieeces.

-When you say “gamers”; the game is really over when you add munitions. It becomes unlikely, the same rules don’t apply: Robotics and CGI games aren’t even in the same “ball park” to use the American parlance and when the stakes are set so, there’s the %11. So, in game terms- you lose!!!

M

As far as the Lunenfeld quote on 51 goes, he may be in the most part correct but i dont see how that denies a gamer’s need for the past or history, well maybe for the history of the phsyical world. But the game worlds themselves have a history one that would mater to someone who exists primarily within the game world. The high scores and kill counts are just as valid in the game world as our war statistics are for people who exist elsewhere. People within the game will talk about someone who accomplished this many quests in some amount of time, killed this many enemies, played for this many hours or beat/destroyed/decrypted the game algorithm is any manner of way that makes that person spectacular, even heroic, as apposed to the regular old gaming joe. The blood, mischief and role playing are fun and as gamers throw off the ancestral memories they put on a new history, a digital history cataloging the past lives of the heroes and failures that exist within their world. And this is not with a frame a reference limited to pong and D&D because it some way it is structurally and mentally based on how we perceive history in reality and the historical construct within the game is born from the one recording human history for the last 50,000 years, from oral tradition to misguided texts. It seems to me that for someone who exists in this altnernate universe, the history of said universe would be as interesting, if not much more interesting and important to them than the equivalent history within reality and its meaning to the average joe flipping burgers at Dairy Queen. Whats more exciting, learning about Alexander’s conquest of the known world, or some guy in Utah’s conquest of the known universe and knowing you have the ability to do it yourself? It depends who you are and which world you choose to live it, whether that world is “reality” or a digital construct makes no difference. The past is important in both worlds because it can provide a framework for operation or at the very least fuel competition.

Gregory Stefano writes: “The high scores and kill counts are just as valid in the game world as our war statistics are for people who exist elsewhere.” A good point. But the question might be whether history is really adequately captured in an algorithm or a war in a body count. Games give one a certain understanding of how history works, and perhaps in many ways a quite interesting one. But it is not the only way to think historically.

The succession — from the oral to the inscriptive — is too absolute, helping to produce the absolute ‘newness’ of independent, ahistorical game-space. The presence of the ‘new’ here depends, I think, on a false succession.

let us not forget that telesthesia is not solely the domain of the police, but is also increasingly within the purview, (or perhaps is becoming the condition of?) citizenship.
see google-earth

Isn’t that the same thing? Isn’t citizenship merely self-policing?