Professionalism and the bare smell of professionalism

I’ve been looking into this paper for a research assignment and I think you guys might like it too.

sure, it’s a mite old, it’s based in the educational field most of you dont give two hoots about really because… well, most of my oldest friends and newest acquaintances are software developers. But the concepts underlying Action Research Methodologies is still valuable for professional development …EditExpand this post »I’ve been looking into this paper for a research assignment and I think you guys might like it too.

sure, it’s a mite old, it’s based in the educational field most of you dont give two hoots about really because most of my oldest friends and newest acquaintances are software developers. But the concepts underlying Action Research Methodologies is still…

1 month ago 

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve in ever newer forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar
– “Gadget Love” in Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

1 year ago 

Autres Modes, peut-etre De-modees… Pt.1

Other fashions, perhaps rendered unfashionable…

In the absence of any bureaucratic progress, I’ve started branching off some readings; Thus far, I’ve sought out explanations of what constitutes a game, as well as some alternate media readings, mainly TV and comics related. The problem is that while these have tended to explain peripheral issues, defining certain aspects with greater clarity, they do not give a clear picture as to why my preferred hobby should be so vilified. How are Mass Hysterias generated, media stampedes whipped up and dodgy decisions made legislation?

I stray from topic though.

I’d like to discuss a book I’ve been slowly tunneling through during loo and lunch breaks, on busses and bedtimes. it’s simply called “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul” by Dr Stuart Brown (2009). 

Before I launch into that though, I should explain how I came to Brown’s work. Generally speaking, his work as a psychologist and doctor would mean his books would be filed under “self help” or something like that… but I came looking for works like this via reading Roger Caillois (specifically his 1958 book “Les Jeux et les Hommes”).

Caillois, like Huizinga before him, found his native language inadequate when it cames to discussing the nuances of games and play. Indeed most languages are ambiguous about the notions of specific forms of play; it’s as vexing a translation / interpretation problem as finding the right nuance to explain… for example, the concept of ‘Smoking’.

We may for example say that one “smokes” a cigarette in English or French, while others may describe the act as “taking” or “doing” a cigarette. Meanwhile an Arab will say he “eats / consumes” one, which as you may imagine causes much consternation at Ramadan as Imams, Mullahs and Islamic scholars scramble to untangle the business of “Eating only when the sun has set” to include or disclude tobacco, something that logically has nothing to do with digestion and was invented a long time after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad.

So too it is with Caillois’ categorisation of games. On page 36 of Jeux et Hommes, he includes a handy table categorising games as either

  • Agon (in the strictest sense, a pure contest)
  • Alea (randomness, games of chance)
  • Mimicry (make believe, etc)
  • Ilinx (e.g., vertigo, horse riding, rollercoasters and other sensory pleasure / overloads)

but he then further divides them along a spectrum between Paidia (kids games, largely unstructured fun) and Ludus (heavily structured situations we’d recognise as games). Paidia seems a strange choice though - it apparently suggests that these harmless mostly unstructured gambols are part of a larger process of acquiring civilising traits, leading to adulthood Arete. The point is though that I sought to get a wider understanding of where the concepts of FUN and PLAY stood in the modern age.

Well, according to Brown’s research over the better part of a decade, we’ve been looking at play all wrong. He begins his chapters with case studies of friends and patients he’s known, giving a potted history of their lives, their highs and lows, using them as examples for some of his conclusions. On page 126 he pretty much sums up both the central point of his book and the great dilemma of the modern westernised age

“Each of these people, Barbara, Jason and Mark is an example of the critical fact that the opposite of play is not work - the opposite of play is depression.” (my emphasis)

Using examples for his time as a clinician as well as research drawn from numerous animal behaviour sources, he outlines some basic theories as to why we need and crave play, even though it apparently offers nothing in the way of short term gain. It rarely fills our bellies, usually isn’t restful, doesn’t fulfil those basic criteria we often look for when trying to explain the evolutionary functions of play… or does it?

Current theories regarding the purpose of fun range from the traditional “its training for excellence in life skills” through to the more modern “like dreaming, play is designed to help cement and encode memories and learnt skills in the brain, pruning older, less efficient connections and generating new patterns” . The tricky part is that the by-products of fun can be described at a molecular and cellular level but they’re no real help when it comes to explaining the WHY or the HOW of fun without turning into a drug maker’s recipe.

The Training argument is most often applied to juvenile animals, usually mammals; strangely enough, this may apply to some animals more than others. Brown notes for example that among dogs, there are levels of playfulness that can be arranged on a spectrum; the twist is that wolves, the common ancestor of all dogs abandons almost all play behaviours once it reaches sexual maturity.

Wolves may play if cued by their cubs, but they appear not to be generally interested in spontaneous play like most domesticated dog breeds. Adult wolves focus most of their intra-species interactions on sorting out who’s above and below them in the dominance hierarchy; they also become more predictable, more fixed in their range of responses to unfamiliar stimuli.

The implication is that human involvement in selective breeding and the incorporation of dogs into our societal structures has meant in a permanently retarded mental development - they’re trapped in a perpetual childhood or teenage state. What’s interesting about this late onset maturity is that it’s literally what enables the proverbial Old Dog To Learn New Tricks.

This phenomenon, this extended state of creative, mental elasticity is known as Neoteny.

The drop off in neoteny with the onset of maturity doesn’t seem to be an iron clad rule for all mammals though - Brown then recounts (pg 24) the tale of an Inuit hunter who in 2006 witnessed a strange encounter between one of his huskies and a starving polar bear.  

He’d been waiting for about a week for the sea ice to solidify enough for him to proceed in his journey when the bear arrived. He was wary of the animal at first - the bear was more than capable (even in its weakened state) of killing and devouring his dogs or mortally wounding him. Previous experience suggested the bear too was waiting for the ice to solidify so it could continue its journey north to hunt seals; clearly, they’d both be stuck for a few days until then.

But then something magical happened. One of his dogs ran right up to the bear, and bowed down in the classic “play with me!” gesture, hopping to and fro, barking in short bursts while wagging its tail madly. At first, he was perplexed, worried that the huge bear would just swat the dog down and eat it; instead, the bear accepted the dog’s invitation. Soon, they were charging about through the snow, sliding down short hills of icy rocks, chasing then one another, then swapping roles. 

Dumbfounded, the hunter decided not to interfere; sure enough, some hours later the bear tired of the game and ambled off across the tundra. The next day though, the bear returned to play, leaving when it felt it had had enough. This continued for several days until the ice thickened, after which the bear simply didn’t show; the hunter packed up and continued his journey. 

What the hell that was all about? What was the impulse that would compel an otherwise highly effective and dangerous predator to play with a creature that by all other measures would be considered a food item? Neoteny.

Brown recounts going to see an old friend, zoologist Bob Fagen and observing Bears at play in an Alaskan stream; when conventional scientific wisdom from a few decades ago would have us believe that bears do not play - there is no purpose for it in an environment when the animals must work hard to store up fat for the winter. Had anyone suggested play, chances are they might have been written off as a hopeless romantic anthropomorphising these creatures.

and yet here they were playing. When asked why they play, Dr Fagen eventually replied that…

“In a world continually presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for an evolving planet” (pg 29)

“I believe that play teaches young animals to make sound judgements. For instance, play fighting may let a bear learn when it can trust another bear, and if things get too violent, when it needs to defend itself or flee. Play allows “pretend” rehearsal for the challenges and ambiguities of life, a rehearsal where life and death are not at stake.” (pg 32)

Essentially, this proposes a new possibility. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that Neoteny is an evolutionary advantage - the ability to see a problem and try out a wild range of divergent approaches to problem solving is at the heart of what has made humankind such a success.

Dr John Byers made a series of interesting observations on animal play correlating to brain size and structure - the larger the frontal cortex, the more capable a creature is of play. The ability to foresee consequences of actions, to simulate and extrapolate future conditions is at the heart of play and dependent on the development of many cognitive processes.

Another part of the brain intimately involved in this process is the cerebellum - the rearmost part of the brain. Once thought to be only useful as a junction box to the rest of the body, we now realise its vital to cognition, sensing musical rhythms, language processing and many others. Byers’ research led him to conclude that play is a mechanism which re-sculpts the brain’s shape and structure! The Cerebellum for example, is refashioned at the neuron level - old or inadequate connections are pruned and new ones are constructed to improve the speed and facility with which we perform every day actions.  

By most animal standards, we have a prolonged childhood - we seem to have sacrificed instinct-based and inbuilt controls like the “post-partum Automated stand up” and “self-feeding” behaviours most newborn animals have in favour of prolonged socially based learning processes. Neoteny has immediate evolutionary drawbacks, but yields bigger dividends in the short to medium term. Despite the extended period of helplessness, we are able to rewire ourselves almost at will - and play provides a safer venue for that sort of ‘self-upgrading’ than rushing into things willy-nilly.

Next time, we’ll talk more about how this neoteny has hilarious unintended consequences - Now that we have all this spare CPU capacity and memory, we can’t seem to turn it off! Next stop, Play and Dreams and how they connect.

1 year ago 

My philosophy… is Cynicism.

Some time ago, Truna (a most excellent friend and my Associate Supervisor) asked me where my underlying philosophical structures lay.

“I’m a big fan of Aristotle’s” she offered. “What philosopher do you feel most aligned to?” It’d make my work easier to read and understand she suggested as it would provide readers with a peg on which they could mentally hang the rest of the text.

I didn’t think very hard before blurting out Diogenes, the most famous of the Cynics, who in turn were the precursors to the more long-lived and better understood Stoics.

Cynicism has in our time become synonymous with aloof hipster-ism, the state of being jaded with all things or frankly becoming so mercenary or sociopathic that you will use any means at your disposal to get ahead in life… But this is NOT what Diogenes or his contemporaries intended with their philosophies, behaviour or way of life. There isn’t a great deal of original Cynical literature we can work from – much of what we know comes from often comical anecdotes. 

Diogenes was a strange character by most civilised standards – irrespective of your personal definition of civilisation, he pretty much lived to give offence to nearly any and every one he met.

It is said he lived in a large overturned barrel near the Agora, and engaged in all manner of behaviour calculated to shock and confuse his fellow Athenians.

He famously wandered about with a lit oil lamp during the day and when asked why he replied “I’m looking for an honest man”.  He would also urinate or spit on people he disliked, masturbate in public places, eat where and when he wanted to. Just about everything we know of the man are in the form of hilarious tales - such as the time he stood outside a brothel, decrying prospective customers’ moral turpitude. Alarmed, the men in question would bribe him with a few coins just to shut up. To everyone’s surprise though, Diogenes strode into the brothel as a customer himself when he had gathered enough money!

He renounced most of his worldly possessions, keeping only a cloak (which it is said he folded in half to double up as his bedding), a knapsack for his food and a staff.  He famously smashed his only bowl the day he observed a child drinking water from his cupped hands. He seemed to be going out of his way to avoid material comforts… but why?

The key lies in the name – our word Cynic is derived from the Greek “kynikos” or Dog Like. It’s not known if Diogenes came up with the term, or if it was a putdown that stuck. In this he is not alone - consider the Impressionists or Fauvists! 

So why do I admire this obscure fellow, whose antics could easily be dismissed as drunk or a wino?

The anecdotes and jokes ascribed to him in many ways he reminds me of Mulla Nasrudin, the Muslim clergyman famed for his wisdom, but remembered primarily for his amusing fables (perhaps I’ll write more about him another time). People would laugh, the ignorant may dismiss his actions as that of a harmless public nuisance… but there was a deep abiding wisdom and a conviction to his actions.

The central point of his outlook was that civilisation was about complicating the natural gifts of the Gods; dogs are for example not so fussy about where they sleep, crap or mate; they’re also utterly, guilelessly honest about who and what they like or hate. When asked if he (as a dog) bite, Diogenes is said to have replied that most dogs bite those they hate but that he would bite the ones he liked if only to warn them of danger or to save them. 

But before I explain further, let us discuss the notion of Arete - the ancient Greek notion of inherent potential excellence. Excellence to us seems to be all about a state of being superlative in a particular area of endeavour. To the Ancients however, this was a more broad, holistic thing; to possess Arete was to be have achieved one’s maximum potential. Arete implies the attainment of all virtues - and it wasn’t just limited to men and women! Animals, buildings, even works of literature could be said to possess Arete - that they had achieved a maximum state of virtue or excellence in all possible ways one might think of.

My point is that Diogenes sought a very particular vision of Arete; he sought ultimate honesty, even when it meant deliberately being misleading or disingenuous to communicate his lesson. It’s a shame then that his philosophy, his central point that civilisation untrammelled by any higher goal yields little more than a series of absurdities; its an even greater shame that he and Machiavelli have been so frequently libelled. Commonly perceived as the initiators of a Do Anything To Get Ahead attitude, something neither of them believed in nor ever espoused.

In our modern age, a lack of guile is seen as weakness - a sign of naiveté and immaturity; now more than at any other time in history, we need more men who are willing to defy conventions and say no to the manifold layers of lies and self-deceptions our quotidian existence demands of us. 

We need to find our inner dog.

1 year ago 

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Postman, N 1984, Amusing Ourselves To Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin London.

There is an implicit question I have lurking my original question.

“What is the optimal method for ratings”

begs the question

“Why HAVEN’T we had a decent ratings system so far?”

Of course, part of this has been the problems inherent to our society not taking games seriously as a medium - they’ve been viewed as an infantile pursuit, society’s general approach to personal morality was more unified, more censorious. But there was an element missing - I couldn’t get my head around why politics seems to be failing, that public discourse seems to have degenerated into a series of empty gestures designed to whip up an observing media crowd into a frenzy rather than about dealing with the facts surrounding an issue.

In fact, it totally drove me to fucking despair. At Truna’s suggestion, I picked up a copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. It seems strange to read a book written in the mid 80’s that so readily resonates with the horrific way our modem political world works. My word there’s a lot of food for thought here!

Postman’s argument can be summarised as “Orwell was old fashioned and Aldous Huxley has won”. Basically, we are trapped in a new cycle of media changes that are eroding and changing our intellectual landscape. Only this time, we aren’t in the grip of a wild tumult of censorship wars destroying knowledge and truth - we’re in a situation where most of our mass media MUST be structured as entertainment with all the good and bad this implies.

“For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication - from painting to hieroglyphics to the alphabet to television. each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” (p10)

He argues that most previous linear media were almost like methods of freezing a sequence of ideas to be read as a coherent argument or explanation, most modern media have through a combination of social, political and economic factors resulted in a new imperative - the need to be entertaining, a demand that imposes certain limits on anything approximating serious debate. Being an image based format, Television in particular demands that there be a series of defining, visually interesting images to go with any story. Lingering on any one issue to go into too much depth would implicitly make for bad TV -it’d be all talking heads, with threads of argument sacrificed to fit within the format of the show, around the needs of the advertisers, the tone of the timeslot.

He then takes a historical and anthropological stance, arguing that when cultures moved from a primarily oral structure to one dependent on the written word - what he calls - 

“… a perceptual revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as the organ of language processing. Indeed, there is a legend that to encourage just such a shift, Plato encouraged his students to study geometry before entering his Academy.” (p12)

He then goes on to quote the literary critic Northrop Frye - 

“the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of a summoned up Hallucination” (p13)

This development of the written word reached its apex in post-revolution America; When almost every sector of the population from farmhand to governor were reading, we could say the nation was ahead of the global intellectual curve. This love of reading seemed to result in a hunger for investigation, invention and self-improvement. Most of the great social and political discourse of the time was rooted naturally rooted in the Word - the literary or typographical word that is.

Men and women of accomplishment and worth expressed themselves in often complex ways that reflected the high esteem in which the printed word was held. It wasn’t merely their speech, it was their entire mode of thought; these people would be shellshocked if they time travelled to our world… and we’d be amazed at the attention-focus demands their speech would make of us!

But then, subtly, their world changed with the inception of the telegraph; even the famous Thoreau seemed underwhelmed by the telegraph as he noted that up until this point, people would read of great tales abroad in book form, but would generally tend to know mostly about goings on in their vicinity - the significant events and goings on in their parish say. But the telegraph was uniquely unsuted to continuing the dominant form of data transmission of the time because

  1. it told of distant events, not necessarily or usually of great import to locals - that which was telegraphed and repackaged as “news of the world” would tend to need to be of national import, novelty value or sensational. 
  2. because of the mechanical necessities of the telegraph, conversation would be limited and the enforced brevity would utterly change the nature and form of any discourse using it.

Of course, you put the two together and you get a torrent of snippets of non-sequitur information. Or as David Thoreau put it…

“… perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” (p65, or p37 ‘Walden’)

Now fast forward through the various iterations and developments of media to TV. Of a necessity, it borrowed from film, from photography and the stage… and as such I agree with Postman and his master McLuhan on this point - they are entertainment media but have masqueraded as bringers of reality into our lives. In one amusing passage, Postman enumerates an ever sillier list of alternate uses for television - as a source of light by which to read a book, as a book shelf, etc… His ultimate point though is pure genius - 

“I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harboured by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall Mcluhan used to call “Rear View Mirror Thinking”, the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile for example is only a faster horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a mistake in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television redefines the meaning of public discourse.” (83-84)

His point may be equally valid when applied to games - that critics and opponents of video games conceive of them (for I doubt many have played them at all) as a vastly more potent Television, made more dangerous by their participatory structuring of adolescent power fantasy fulfillment (Save the maiden! Steal any car! Outwit the law! Cheat Death!). Of course, the medium of games is still an evolving thing: 

“Like a brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology in other words is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” (84)

These primitive wish fulfilments are ultimately a product of the limited technologies available; I still remember a time when early 1st Person Shooters (FPS) games involved silly half measures like shooting control panel buttons because nobody had figured out how to allow players to regularly “use” objects in the game worlds! FPS games are a by product of early 3d graphics technologies and raycasting algorithms. If you can cast many rays to calculate light and colour, why not cast a single ray & couple it with a button press to “fire” an imaginary bullet? 

This is as much of a medium limitation as the use of TV to display a talking head for an hour or more, turning a TV show into a slightly animated radio show. 

I now have to go find out what the data is for the alleged “dangerousness” of TV and film for I doubt there really is any credible evidence to say adults can be corrupted and depraved.

I’ll add more interesting Postman quotes to this segment as I come across them.

1 year ago 

The Byron Review

In 2007, then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown commissioned Dr. Tanya Byron to prepare a report reviewing the current state of data about the dangers facing children when accessing the internet and playing videogames. Overall, her reccomendations suggest that there is WAY too much media hype, and that there’s little basis for the constant sensationalisation these two media have seen almost since their inceptions.

1 year ago 

My good buddy, Socrates

At the suggestion of knowledgable friends, I began to seek out classical readings about older generations’ attitudes towards censorship issues. First stop - Plato.

I had approached Plato’s Republic with some trepidation, but it was a baseless fear. Much of this work is interesting and utterly readable - the Greeks clearly had the best line in after dinner conversation EVER. 

Plato’s work attempts to show his master’s powers of reasoning as he talks through a thought exercise about what it would take to make an ideal state. His plans speak of a nation whose structure is rational; its people, strong, moral, healthy and prepared for war. He would have them ruled by an elite cadre of hand picked citizens, raised from birth to be philosopher warriors. This group would be egalitarian, highly trained, non-sexist, and frankly unthinkable to the average contemporary Greek. 

Thus it was with some interest that I read of Socrates’ attitudes towards the popular art of reciting epic poetry - 

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls’ health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers.

At first glance, this may seem like a magnificent throw-away, an irrelevance.

It’s not entirely so.

Because of the text’s structure, we can see where he’s coming from - what he thought were the important characteristics of poetry. It seems that to the greeks the job of a poet as entertainer was a vexed one. On the one hand, its clear that recitals of epics were accompanied by music; that the verse had a strong religious element to it, telling as it did, the deeds and circumstances between heroes and Gods. 

Much of Book III concerns itself with the position of skilled artisans concentrating on just doing their specialised part for society rather than getting multidisciplinary… but when it comes to poets, Socrates is not entirely pleased with what he sees. 

First, he worries that the content of this popular entertainment is unbecoming of the dignity and divinity of the Gods. Then he turns his attention to the question of musical accompaniment - he feels that certain regional musical styles my prove too sluggish, or induce torpor, or even a wallowing in too much indolent decadence.

Finally, he turns the discussion to the question of mimesis. It seems that he’s all for straight, factual narration and nothing else; for in his republic, he believes anything more than the dispassionate telling a tale, such as the bard doing different voices for different characters, or playing the harp in such a way as to evoke the crash of swords on shields… ANY kind of mimetic devices in storytelling can only lead to degeneracy in the listeners.

Of course, it’s not entirely clear if this was just a statement of principle - is this Socrates explaining what would be required to optimise a Greek city-state to the level of his hypothetical republic? Or was this a stern Socrates, always on guard against the slightest taint of entertainment-as-agent-of-degeneracy? Either way, it’s interesting. 

1 year ago 

Let me tell you about my plans…

Well, this is it - I’m now going for the Masters of Visual Arts it seems; My question is “What is the Optimal Method and System for the Rating of Video Games?”

At this point, my body of work is going to be an installation with a series of polemic games that will hopefully raise questions in the minds of the participants - questions like 

  • Where does all this feigned “moral” outrage against games come from?
  • What is the purpose of ratings, REALLY?
  • In whose interest are most current systems really?
  • How are other countries handling this dilemma?
  • How are we handling this in Australia?
  • What would be an improvement on this?

This bloglet is all about my progress in organising my thoughts and literature on this matter.

1 year ago 

Professionalism and the bare smell of professionalism

I’ve been looking into this paper for a research assignment and I think you guys might like it too.

sure, it’s a mite old, it’s based in the educational field most of you dont give two hoots about really because… well, most of my oldest friends and newest acquaintances are software developers. But the concepts underlying Action Research Methodologies is still valuable for professional development …EditExpand this post »I’ve been looking into this paper for a research assignment and I think you guys might like it too.

sure, it’s a mite old, it’s based in the educational field most of you dont give two hoots about really because most of my oldest friends and newest acquaintances are software developers. But the concepts underlying Action Research Methodologies is still…
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve in ever newer forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar
– “Gadget Love” in Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Autres Modes, peut-etre De-modees… Pt.1

Other fashions, perhaps rendered unfashionable…

In the absence of any bureaucratic progress, I’ve started branching off some readings; Thus far, I’ve sought out explanations of what constitutes a game, as well as some alternate media readings, mainly TV and comics related. The problem is that while these have tended to explain peripheral issues, defining certain aspects with greater clarity, they do not give a clear picture as to why my preferred hobby should be so vilified. How are Mass Hysterias generated, media stampedes whipped up and dodgy decisions made legislation?

I stray from topic though.

I’d like to discuss a book I’ve been slowly tunneling through during loo and lunch breaks, on busses and bedtimes. it’s simply called “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul” by Dr Stuart Brown (2009). 

Before I launch into that though, I should explain how I came to Brown’s work. Generally speaking, his work as a psychologist and doctor would mean his books would be filed under “self help” or something like that… but I came looking for works like this via reading Roger Caillois (specifically his 1958 book “Les Jeux et les Hommes”).

Caillois, like Huizinga before him, found his native language inadequate when it cames to discussing the nuances of games and play. Indeed most languages are ambiguous about the notions of specific forms of play; it’s as vexing a translation / interpretation problem as finding the right nuance to explain… for example, the concept of ‘Smoking’.

We may for example say that one “smokes” a cigarette in English or French, while others may describe the act as “taking” or “doing” a cigarette. Meanwhile an Arab will say he “eats / consumes” one, which as you may imagine causes much consternation at Ramadan as Imams, Mullahs and Islamic scholars scramble to untangle the business of “Eating only when the sun has set” to include or disclude tobacco, something that logically has nothing to do with digestion and was invented a long time after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad.

So too it is with Caillois’ categorisation of games. On page 36 of Jeux et Hommes, he includes a handy table categorising games as either

  • Agon (in the strictest sense, a pure contest)
  • Alea (randomness, games of chance)
  • Mimicry (make believe, etc)
  • Ilinx (e.g., vertigo, horse riding, rollercoasters and other sensory pleasure / overloads)

but he then further divides them along a spectrum between Paidia (kids games, largely unstructured fun) and Ludus (heavily structured situations we’d recognise as games). Paidia seems a strange choice though - it apparently suggests that these harmless mostly unstructured gambols are part of a larger process of acquiring civilising traits, leading to adulthood Arete. The point is though that I sought to get a wider understanding of where the concepts of FUN and PLAY stood in the modern age.

Well, according to Brown’s research over the better part of a decade, we’ve been looking at play all wrong. He begins his chapters with case studies of friends and patients he’s known, giving a potted history of their lives, their highs and lows, using them as examples for some of his conclusions. On page 126 he pretty much sums up both the central point of his book and the great dilemma of the modern westernised age

“Each of these people, Barbara, Jason and Mark is an example of the critical fact that the opposite of play is not work - the opposite of play is depression.” (my emphasis)

Using examples for his time as a clinician as well as research drawn from numerous animal behaviour sources, he outlines some basic theories as to why we need and crave play, even though it apparently offers nothing in the way of short term gain. It rarely fills our bellies, usually isn’t restful, doesn’t fulfil those basic criteria we often look for when trying to explain the evolutionary functions of play… or does it?

Current theories regarding the purpose of fun range from the traditional “its training for excellence in life skills” through to the more modern “like dreaming, play is designed to help cement and encode memories and learnt skills in the brain, pruning older, less efficient connections and generating new patterns” . The tricky part is that the by-products of fun can be described at a molecular and cellular level but they’re no real help when it comes to explaining the WHY or the HOW of fun without turning into a drug maker’s recipe.

The Training argument is most often applied to juvenile animals, usually mammals; strangely enough, this may apply to some animals more than others. Brown notes for example that among dogs, there are levels of playfulness that can be arranged on a spectrum; the twist is that wolves, the common ancestor of all dogs abandons almost all play behaviours once it reaches sexual maturity.

Wolves may play if cued by their cubs, but they appear not to be generally interested in spontaneous play like most domesticated dog breeds. Adult wolves focus most of their intra-species interactions on sorting out who’s above and below them in the dominance hierarchy; they also become more predictable, more fixed in their range of responses to unfamiliar stimuli.

The implication is that human involvement in selective breeding and the incorporation of dogs into our societal structures has meant in a permanently retarded mental development - they’re trapped in a perpetual childhood or teenage state. What’s interesting about this late onset maturity is that it’s literally what enables the proverbial Old Dog To Learn New Tricks.

This phenomenon, this extended state of creative, mental elasticity is known as Neoteny.

The drop off in neoteny with the onset of maturity doesn’t seem to be an iron clad rule for all mammals though - Brown then recounts (pg 24) the tale of an Inuit hunter who in 2006 witnessed a strange encounter between one of his huskies and a starving polar bear.  

He’d been waiting for about a week for the sea ice to solidify enough for him to proceed in his journey when the bear arrived. He was wary of the animal at first - the bear was more than capable (even in its weakened state) of killing and devouring his dogs or mortally wounding him. Previous experience suggested the bear too was waiting for the ice to solidify so it could continue its journey north to hunt seals; clearly, they’d both be stuck for a few days until then.

But then something magical happened. One of his dogs ran right up to the bear, and bowed down in the classic “play with me!” gesture, hopping to and fro, barking in short bursts while wagging its tail madly. At first, he was perplexed, worried that the huge bear would just swat the dog down and eat it; instead, the bear accepted the dog’s invitation. Soon, they were charging about through the snow, sliding down short hills of icy rocks, chasing then one another, then swapping roles. 

Dumbfounded, the hunter decided not to interfere; sure enough, some hours later the bear tired of the game and ambled off across the tundra. The next day though, the bear returned to play, leaving when it felt it had had enough. This continued for several days until the ice thickened, after which the bear simply didn’t show; the hunter packed up and continued his journey. 

What the hell that was all about? What was the impulse that would compel an otherwise highly effective and dangerous predator to play with a creature that by all other measures would be considered a food item? Neoteny.

Brown recounts going to see an old friend, zoologist Bob Fagen and observing Bears at play in an Alaskan stream; when conventional scientific wisdom from a few decades ago would have us believe that bears do not play - there is no purpose for it in an environment when the animals must work hard to store up fat for the winter. Had anyone suggested play, chances are they might have been written off as a hopeless romantic anthropomorphising these creatures.

and yet here they were playing. When asked why they play, Dr Fagen eventually replied that…

“In a world continually presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for an evolving planet” (pg 29)

“I believe that play teaches young animals to make sound judgements. For instance, play fighting may let a bear learn when it can trust another bear, and if things get too violent, when it needs to defend itself or flee. Play allows “pretend” rehearsal for the challenges and ambiguities of life, a rehearsal where life and death are not at stake.” (pg 32)

Essentially, this proposes a new possibility. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that Neoteny is an evolutionary advantage - the ability to see a problem and try out a wild range of divergent approaches to problem solving is at the heart of what has made humankind such a success.

Dr John Byers made a series of interesting observations on animal play correlating to brain size and structure - the larger the frontal cortex, the more capable a creature is of play. The ability to foresee consequences of actions, to simulate and extrapolate future conditions is at the heart of play and dependent on the development of many cognitive processes.

Another part of the brain intimately involved in this process is the cerebellum - the rearmost part of the brain. Once thought to be only useful as a junction box to the rest of the body, we now realise its vital to cognition, sensing musical rhythms, language processing and many others. Byers’ research led him to conclude that play is a mechanism which re-sculpts the brain’s shape and structure! The Cerebellum for example, is refashioned at the neuron level - old or inadequate connections are pruned and new ones are constructed to improve the speed and facility with which we perform every day actions.  

By most animal standards, we have a prolonged childhood - we seem to have sacrificed instinct-based and inbuilt controls like the “post-partum Automated stand up” and “self-feeding” behaviours most newborn animals have in favour of prolonged socially based learning processes. Neoteny has immediate evolutionary drawbacks, but yields bigger dividends in the short to medium term. Despite the extended period of helplessness, we are able to rewire ourselves almost at will - and play provides a safer venue for that sort of ‘self-upgrading’ than rushing into things willy-nilly.

Next time, we’ll talk more about how this neoteny has hilarious unintended consequences - Now that we have all this spare CPU capacity and memory, we can’t seem to turn it off! Next stop, Play and Dreams and how they connect.

My philosophy… is Cynicism.

Some time ago, Truna (a most excellent friend and my Associate Supervisor) asked me where my underlying philosophical structures lay.

“I’m a big fan of Aristotle’s” she offered. “What philosopher do you feel most aligned to?” It’d make my work easier to read and understand she suggested as it would provide readers with a peg on which they could mentally hang the rest of the text.

I didn’t think very hard before blurting out Diogenes, the most famous of the Cynics, who in turn were the precursors to the more long-lived and better understood Stoics.

Cynicism has in our time become synonymous with aloof hipster-ism, the state of being jaded with all things or frankly becoming so mercenary or sociopathic that you will use any means at your disposal to get ahead in life… But this is NOT what Diogenes or his contemporaries intended with their philosophies, behaviour or way of life. There isn’t a great deal of original Cynical literature we can work from – much of what we know comes from often comical anecdotes. 

Diogenes was a strange character by most civilised standards – irrespective of your personal definition of civilisation, he pretty much lived to give offence to nearly any and every one he met.

It is said he lived in a large overturned barrel near the Agora, and engaged in all manner of behaviour calculated to shock and confuse his fellow Athenians.

He famously wandered about with a lit oil lamp during the day and when asked why he replied “I’m looking for an honest man”.  He would also urinate or spit on people he disliked, masturbate in public places, eat where and when he wanted to. Just about everything we know of the man are in the form of hilarious tales - such as the time he stood outside a brothel, decrying prospective customers’ moral turpitude. Alarmed, the men in question would bribe him with a few coins just to shut up. To everyone’s surprise though, Diogenes strode into the brothel as a customer himself when he had gathered enough money!

He renounced most of his worldly possessions, keeping only a cloak (which it is said he folded in half to double up as his bedding), a knapsack for his food and a staff.  He famously smashed his only bowl the day he observed a child drinking water from his cupped hands. He seemed to be going out of his way to avoid material comforts… but why?

The key lies in the name – our word Cynic is derived from the Greek “kynikos” or Dog Like. It’s not known if Diogenes came up with the term, or if it was a putdown that stuck. In this he is not alone - consider the Impressionists or Fauvists! 

So why do I admire this obscure fellow, whose antics could easily be dismissed as drunk or a wino?

The anecdotes and jokes ascribed to him in many ways he reminds me of Mulla Nasrudin, the Muslim clergyman famed for his wisdom, but remembered primarily for his amusing fables (perhaps I’ll write more about him another time). People would laugh, the ignorant may dismiss his actions as that of a harmless public nuisance… but there was a deep abiding wisdom and a conviction to his actions.

The central point of his outlook was that civilisation was about complicating the natural gifts of the Gods; dogs are for example not so fussy about where they sleep, crap or mate; they’re also utterly, guilelessly honest about who and what they like or hate. When asked if he (as a dog) bite, Diogenes is said to have replied that most dogs bite those they hate but that he would bite the ones he liked if only to warn them of danger or to save them. 

But before I explain further, let us discuss the notion of Arete - the ancient Greek notion of inherent potential excellence. Excellence to us seems to be all about a state of being superlative in a particular area of endeavour. To the Ancients however, this was a more broad, holistic thing; to possess Arete was to be have achieved one’s maximum potential. Arete implies the attainment of all virtues - and it wasn’t just limited to men and women! Animals, buildings, even works of literature could be said to possess Arete - that they had achieved a maximum state of virtue or excellence in all possible ways one might think of.

My point is that Diogenes sought a very particular vision of Arete; he sought ultimate honesty, even when it meant deliberately being misleading or disingenuous to communicate his lesson. It’s a shame then that his philosophy, his central point that civilisation untrammelled by any higher goal yields little more than a series of absurdities; its an even greater shame that he and Machiavelli have been so frequently libelled. Commonly perceived as the initiators of a Do Anything To Get Ahead attitude, something neither of them believed in nor ever espoused.

In our modern age, a lack of guile is seen as weakness - a sign of naiveté and immaturity; now more than at any other time in history, we need more men who are willing to defy conventions and say no to the manifold layers of lies and self-deceptions our quotidian existence demands of us. 

We need to find our inner dog.

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Postman, N 1984, Amusing Ourselves To Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin London.

There is an implicit question I have lurking my original question.

“What is the optimal method for ratings”

begs the question

“Why HAVEN’T we had a decent ratings system so far?”

Of course, part of this has been the problems inherent to our society not taking games seriously as a medium - they’ve been viewed as an infantile pursuit, society’s general approach to personal morality was more unified, more censorious. But there was an element missing - I couldn’t get my head around why politics seems to be failing, that public discourse seems to have degenerated into a series of empty gestures designed to whip up an observing media crowd into a frenzy rather than about dealing with the facts surrounding an issue.

In fact, it totally drove me to fucking despair. At Truna’s suggestion, I picked up a copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. It seems strange to read a book written in the mid 80’s that so readily resonates with the horrific way our modem political world works. My word there’s a lot of food for thought here!

Postman’s argument can be summarised as “Orwell was old fashioned and Aldous Huxley has won”. Basically, we are trapped in a new cycle of media changes that are eroding and changing our intellectual landscape. Only this time, we aren’t in the grip of a wild tumult of censorship wars destroying knowledge and truth - we’re in a situation where most of our mass media MUST be structured as entertainment with all the good and bad this implies.

“For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication - from painting to hieroglyphics to the alphabet to television. each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” (p10)

He argues that most previous linear media were almost like methods of freezing a sequence of ideas to be read as a coherent argument or explanation, most modern media have through a combination of social, political and economic factors resulted in a new imperative - the need to be entertaining, a demand that imposes certain limits on anything approximating serious debate. Being an image based format, Television in particular demands that there be a series of defining, visually interesting images to go with any story. Lingering on any one issue to go into too much depth would implicitly make for bad TV -it’d be all talking heads, with threads of argument sacrificed to fit within the format of the show, around the needs of the advertisers, the tone of the timeslot.

He then takes a historical and anthropological stance, arguing that when cultures moved from a primarily oral structure to one dependent on the written word - what he calls - 

“… a perceptual revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as the organ of language processing. Indeed, there is a legend that to encourage just such a shift, Plato encouraged his students to study geometry before entering his Academy.” (p12)

He then goes on to quote the literary critic Northrop Frye - 

“the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of a summoned up Hallucination” (p13)

This development of the written word reached its apex in post-revolution America; When almost every sector of the population from farmhand to governor were reading, we could say the nation was ahead of the global intellectual curve. This love of reading seemed to result in a hunger for investigation, invention and self-improvement. Most of the great social and political discourse of the time was rooted naturally rooted in the Word - the literary or typographical word that is.

Men and women of accomplishment and worth expressed themselves in often complex ways that reflected the high esteem in which the printed word was held. It wasn’t merely their speech, it was their entire mode of thought; these people would be shellshocked if they time travelled to our world… and we’d be amazed at the attention-focus demands their speech would make of us!

But then, subtly, their world changed with the inception of the telegraph; even the famous Thoreau seemed underwhelmed by the telegraph as he noted that up until this point, people would read of great tales abroad in book form, but would generally tend to know mostly about goings on in their vicinity - the significant events and goings on in their parish say. But the telegraph was uniquely unsuted to continuing the dominant form of data transmission of the time because

  1. it told of distant events, not necessarily or usually of great import to locals - that which was telegraphed and repackaged as “news of the world” would tend to need to be of national import, novelty value or sensational. 
  2. because of the mechanical necessities of the telegraph, conversation would be limited and the enforced brevity would utterly change the nature and form of any discourse using it.

Of course, you put the two together and you get a torrent of snippets of non-sequitur information. Or as David Thoreau put it…

“… perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” (p65, or p37 ‘Walden’)

Now fast forward through the various iterations and developments of media to TV. Of a necessity, it borrowed from film, from photography and the stage… and as such I agree with Postman and his master McLuhan on this point - they are entertainment media but have masqueraded as bringers of reality into our lives. In one amusing passage, Postman enumerates an ever sillier list of alternate uses for television - as a source of light by which to read a book, as a book shelf, etc… His ultimate point though is pure genius - 

“I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harboured by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall Mcluhan used to call “Rear View Mirror Thinking”, the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile for example is only a faster horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a mistake in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television redefines the meaning of public discourse.” (83-84)

His point may be equally valid when applied to games - that critics and opponents of video games conceive of them (for I doubt many have played them at all) as a vastly more potent Television, made more dangerous by their participatory structuring of adolescent power fantasy fulfillment (Save the maiden! Steal any car! Outwit the law! Cheat Death!). Of course, the medium of games is still an evolving thing: 

“Like a brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology in other words is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” (84)

These primitive wish fulfilments are ultimately a product of the limited technologies available; I still remember a time when early 1st Person Shooters (FPS) games involved silly half measures like shooting control panel buttons because nobody had figured out how to allow players to regularly “use” objects in the game worlds! FPS games are a by product of early 3d graphics technologies and raycasting algorithms. If you can cast many rays to calculate light and colour, why not cast a single ray & couple it with a button press to “fire” an imaginary bullet? 

This is as much of a medium limitation as the use of TV to display a talking head for an hour or more, turning a TV show into a slightly animated radio show. 

I now have to go find out what the data is for the alleged “dangerousness” of TV and film for I doubt there really is any credible evidence to say adults can be corrupted and depraved.

I’ll add more interesting Postman quotes to this segment as I come across them.

The Byron Review

In 2007, then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown commissioned Dr. Tanya Byron to prepare a report reviewing the current state of data about the dangers facing children when accessing the internet and playing videogames. Overall, her reccomendations suggest that there is WAY too much media hype, and that there’s little basis for the constant sensationalisation these two media have seen almost since their inceptions.

My good buddy, Socrates

At the suggestion of knowledgable friends, I began to seek out classical readings about older generations’ attitudes towards censorship issues. First stop - Plato.

I had approached Plato’s Republic with some trepidation, but it was a baseless fear. Much of this work is interesting and utterly readable - the Greeks clearly had the best line in after dinner conversation EVER. 

Plato’s work attempts to show his master’s powers of reasoning as he talks through a thought exercise about what it would take to make an ideal state. His plans speak of a nation whose structure is rational; its people, strong, moral, healthy and prepared for war. He would have them ruled by an elite cadre of hand picked citizens, raised from birth to be philosopher warriors. This group would be egalitarian, highly trained, non-sexist, and frankly unthinkable to the average contemporary Greek. 

Thus it was with some interest that I read of Socrates’ attitudes towards the popular art of reciting epic poetry - 

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls’ health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers.

At first glance, this may seem like a magnificent throw-away, an irrelevance.

It’s not entirely so.

Because of the text’s structure, we can see where he’s coming from - what he thought were the important characteristics of poetry. It seems that to the greeks the job of a poet as entertainer was a vexed one. On the one hand, its clear that recitals of epics were accompanied by music; that the verse had a strong religious element to it, telling as it did, the deeds and circumstances between heroes and Gods. 

Much of Book III concerns itself with the position of skilled artisans concentrating on just doing their specialised part for society rather than getting multidisciplinary… but when it comes to poets, Socrates is not entirely pleased with what he sees. 

First, he worries that the content of this popular entertainment is unbecoming of the dignity and divinity of the Gods. Then he turns his attention to the question of musical accompaniment - he feels that certain regional musical styles my prove too sluggish, or induce torpor, or even a wallowing in too much indolent decadence.

Finally, he turns the discussion to the question of mimesis. It seems that he’s all for straight, factual narration and nothing else; for in his republic, he believes anything more than the dispassionate telling a tale, such as the bard doing different voices for different characters, or playing the harp in such a way as to evoke the crash of swords on shields… ANY kind of mimetic devices in storytelling can only lead to degeneracy in the listeners.

Of course, it’s not entirely clear if this was just a statement of principle - is this Socrates explaining what would be required to optimise a Greek city-state to the level of his hypothetical republic? Or was this a stern Socrates, always on guard against the slightest taint of entertainment-as-agent-of-degeneracy? Either way, it’s interesting. 

Let me tell you about my plans…

Well, this is it - I’m now going for the Masters of Visual Arts it seems; My question is “What is the Optimal Method and System for the Rating of Video Games?”

At this point, my body of work is going to be an installation with a series of polemic games that will hopefully raise questions in the minds of the participants - questions like 

  • Where does all this feigned “moral” outrage against games come from?
  • What is the purpose of ratings, REALLY?
  • In whose interest are most current systems really?
  • How are other countries handling this dilemma?
  • How are we handling this in Australia?
  • What would be an improvement on this?

This bloglet is all about my progress in organising my thoughts and literature on this matter.

Professionalism and the bare smell of professionalism
"Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve in ever newer forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar"
Autres Modes, peut-etre De-modees… Pt.1
My philosophy… is Cynicism.
Amusing Ourselves To Death
The Byron Review
My good buddy, Socrates
Let me tell you about my plans…

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So, I'm doing an MVA - now, let me show you my discoveries.

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