Gold farmers in Lishui. [source]

Will Eslinger of Entertaining Grime has up a list of his top 5 pieces of game writing:

1. The King of Azeroth by Julian Dibbell

2. Little Big Planet meditation by Michael Abbott

3. The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls by Jason Fagone of Esquire

4. Why We Need More Torture in Games by Clive Thomson

5. The Grammar of Fun by Tom Bissell

The articles on Eslinger’s list are all worth a read — even for people with little to no interest in gaming particularly; like most incisive pieces of writing on popular culture, they’re about their ostensible topic in a way that allows substantial engagement with other issues, which should be of general interest. Julian Dibbell’s list-topping piece looks at some of the fascinating practices around real-money trading (RMT) practices and businesses, which I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

As to my preliminary thoughts on the article and its subject, I’m most drawn to the fascinating conflation of work and play. At one point, Dibbell quotes Liu Haibin in Jinhua, China, a 26-year old who owns and operates a gold farming shop — Liu says that part of the reason he and his employees stick to the industry is that they also love the game. The slippage between work and play is one of the many things about arcade practices int he ’70s and ’80s that fascinates me. Gaming can often resemble certain kinds of (mostly white-collar) work, when we look at the machines and movements involved and the level of discipline required for success. When notions of what might constitute “work” change, as they do with the advent of RMT as an industry, we need to critically assess practices of play as well.

Some questions I’m currently engaging with:

• What does it mean to “play” a game?
• Is it still “play” if it is a job task?
• How might the professionalization of video gaming tasks relate to the professionalization of sports?
• At what point do “virtual” economies become “real” economies, and how should we define “real” in the aftermath of Enron, etc.?

“Video Gaming, Citizenship, and Civic Engagement in the United States,” panel for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 5-8, 2009

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 97 percent of children and 53 percent of adults in the United States play video games. These numbers suggest that gaming is quickly becoming ubiquitous. As video games have become a key part of mainstream popular culture in the United States, they have also become key texts through which notions of national identity are developed and deployed. This panel will look at games as sites of articulation for civic engagement, citizenship, cultural values and identity, asking panelists to consider how “American-ness” and “American values” are articulated through and around video games. All disciplinary approaches are welcome.

Potential topics might include:

• America’s Army and U.S. military recruiting and training as gameplay.
• Guitar Hero as it relates to American popular music
• The Sims’ ambivalent capitalist ethic
• Urban planning and gaming (Sim City, Scalable City, PlastiCity, etc.)
• The transnational nature of online economies and virtual wealth in MUDs and MMORPGs and the complexity of state intervention
• American-made video games in global culture
• Virtual and real-life crime as it relates to gaming

Other topics are encouraged, as these are included only as a non-exclusive jumping off point.

Those interested in participating should contact Carly Kocurek at carlykocurek at symbol mail.utexas.edu with a brief vita and an abstract of 250-500 words by January 10. Queries are also welcome.

He was also a voracious consumer culture and information, which is why he could rattle off commentary on William Blake just as easily as he could crack jokes about Legally Blonde. Apparently, when the English faculty started getting computers, he was denied one by a department chair who said, “Grob, you can’t even type.” And, so, Alan Grob taught himself to type with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. He was better at answering e-mail than most of the faculty, which was saying something. I was sad to hear that Dr. Grob passed away in 2007, although he certainly left a legacy both at the Rice campus and with all the folks that stumbled through his classes.

James Dickey looking more docile than usual. [source]

But, the point of this isn’t really Alan Grob, but a story he told in class once about James Dickey. As aforementioned, Dr. Grob was part of the old guard, and had been at Rice for decades. Because of this, he had been at the university when James Dickey was there. And, apparently, was at an event that James Dickey came to give a talk or reading at, for which Dickey in classic fashion stumbled in drunk barely able to support himself at the podium only to slur out, “I … am a sonofabitch.” I was discussing Dickey with a friend of mine, and I suspect this anecdote might be even better than I’d realized: Dickey also, while at Rice, publicly read “Adultery” for the first time, to an audience that included his wife and son.

As an aside, “Adultery” is one of my ten favorite poems, and is the grounds for the only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered getting.

You can read the poem here, and you can read a story at the New York Times that mentions this reading here.

I particularly like Keith Olbermann’s take on this issue as he goes to lengths to de-personalize his response, which makes his argument that this is a basic human rights issue all the more compelling. (Not that something cannot be both personal and a human rights issue, but, you know, rhetoric and all that.) To say that I have been upset about the passage of Proposition 8 — and of similarly discriminatory laws in Arizona, Arkansas, and Florida passed this election — would be a gross understatement. I spent much of President-Elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and Senator John McCain’s concession speech crying because I had made the mistake of looking up the returns for California just before. While I am not idealistic enough to believe that prejudices against members of the glbtq community have been erased, I had hoped, perhaps naively, that we might at least have a raw majority of people standing against this sort of thing.

I have been for a long time ambivalent about gay marriage — fighting to enter into an institution founded on gender inequity that engenders discrimination against those who are unmarried for whatever reason seems like another example of striving not to eradicate inequality, but instead, to enter into the high end of a system that would remain unequal. I still believe that. However, the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk have driven home to me just how much of a civil rights issue this really is. This is about marriage, sure, but it is, more importantly to me, about blatant, legal discrimination against people, and that I cannot condone in any way shape or form. That is wrong, period. No quibbling, no arguing, it is just flat wrong. Am I pro-gay marriage? Not exactly, but, I’m more anti-discrimination than I am anti-gay marriage. There just shouldn’t be these sorts of discriminating laws on the books.

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, pictured in the New York Times.[source]

Last night I was doing some research on the history of miscegenation laws in the United States for a course I am designing. The couple who took their case to the supreme court rather appropriately had the last name Loving. The Lovings fought for years for the right to move back (legally) to their hometown in Virginia. Mildred Loving outlived her husband by a number of years, and she spent her life saying again and again that she was not a political person. She passed away earlier this year, and perhaps she was not political, but she did make a rare public statement on gay marriage in 2007:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Mildred Loving’s statement is a little hokey, I guess, but it’s earnest. I am glad to hear that someone who was perhaps an unlikely civil rights figure can make the connection to these more contemporary issues. Laws banning black-white interracial marriage were on the books until Loving v. Virginia was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967; that fact seems appalling now, even knowing the fraught history of civil rights in this country. Perhaps that there were laws explicitly banning the marriage of same-sex couples will seem equally appalling in 40 years.

And, as to my general opposition to marriage, here’s an excellent statement from Dean Spade and Craig Willse that addresses the issue: No To State Regulation of Families!

They also include links to a lot of further reading on the topic. In conclusion, I’m ambivalent as I ever was.

For better or worse, I have to say that the media surrounding the current presidential election has been some of the sharpest comedy I’ve seen in a few years. In the above, Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, and Andy Griffith reprise some famous roles to keep your attention for a few minutes. Be warned: Ron Howard is briefly shirtless, which is disturbing. I mean, he’s just not a shirtless kind of guy. He’s a ballcap and jacket kind of guy. Am I right?

I hosted a vampire-themed movie night last night, and the first of the two movies on the bill was Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Now, Near Dark is one of my favorite horror films, vampire or otherwise, and re-watching it always reminds me why. The landscape shots of west Texas and Oklahoma are beautiful, and the score by Tangerine Dream is used perfectly.

However, one thing I noticed on re-watching the movie is Bigelow’s tendency toward gratuitous male nudity. In Near Dark, the audience sees lead Adrian Pasdar shirtless again and again (and don’t even get me started on Point Break). It’s not a problem, it’s just an interesting twist on the conventions of the genres that Near Dark straddles. Near Dark exposes nary a single breast, but the camera lingers like a caress over Pasdar’s well-oiled abdomen.

[Near Dark trailer from YouTube.]

Last week was the Flow Conference, which I did some graphics and organizational work for. I also co-moderated a panel on the role of video game studies in the academy, convened by Judd Ruggill and Ken McAllister, co-directors of the Learning Games Initiative.

In addition to the rousing discussion sparked at that roundtable and at the others I attended, I also had the exciting opportunity to meet Stella Marrs, who I gave a ride to the Thursday night screening and whose artwork I’ve followed for most of the last decade. Marrs was part of the scene in Olympia in the 1980s, and her work remains funny and relevant as ever. Currently, she is at work on an MFA and is collecting Barbie stories at Girl City (feel free to contact her via the site if you’re interested in contributing).

I’ve always loved the way that Marrs flirts with popular culture, making the familiar images available through magazines and advertisements into something that manages to be playful while offering incisive commentary. It was a pleasure to meet Marrs, and I’m interested to see where her new work goes. If you’d like to read more about Marrs and her art projects, there’s an excellent interview available on her site. And, heck, go buy some of her postcards and such — you’ll be supporting a very genuinely nice person whose spent a lot of time fighting the good fight.

[Image from Stella Marrs’s web site, where you can look at lots more.]

Yesterday, I went to the State Fair of Texas with my friend and colleague John Cline. We’d made the same trip last year, and while in line for the Texas Star ferris wheel, he’d started in about wanting an airbrushed t-shirt but not being sure what to put on it. We ran through a few ideas, until I hit on “All that is solid melts into air,” which he decided would be just the thing to go with an airbrushed unicorn. He didn’t get one, but, this year, at the fair, he went for it.

I got sucked in, too, and the image above is the shirt I bought — complete with May of ‘68 graffiti slogan. (I’ll post a picture of John’s when I get a chance). This makes the second piece of clothing I own with a Situationist-inspired slogan blasted across the chest. The other is my go-to black hooded sweatshirt, which reads “We are all undesireables” in French.

Shortly after we’d picked our shirts up, we were having a good laugh about them, and a fair employee asked John what the shirt said. John read it off and mentioned it was a quote from Marx. The man stared very, very politely in the way people do when they’re restraining themselves. I think Shakespeare might have been a safer answer.

“mongrel” america, the annual University of Texas American Studies graduate student conference went off without a hitch, and I’m now back to staring down my dissertation. Our keynote speaker was Dick Hebdige (UC - Riverside), who gave a talk about race, rockabilly, and the west. He played a bunch of music clips, and showed scraps of video, and talked about everything from lynching to June Carter to snake handling as described in Salvation on Sand Mountain, a book I’ve always had a particular affinity for due to its ability to tell a lurid tale without making the people involved seem like cartoons or freaks.

In any case, while the talk itself was interesting, I was particularly interested in the format — the incorporation of videotaped images and slides (real slides, not digital ones), and music clips played from cassettes. As much as I love incorporating multi-media into my own presentations, I rarely invest in that portion of the process as much as I should or would like to. It’s too easy to fall back on PowerPoint slides filled with snappy bullet points, and frequently, I feel that I live down to the relatively low expectations for academic presentations. In part, I’ve avoided cultivating more media-rich presentations because because I just haven’t taken the time, but it’s more because I’m terrified of technological failure. There’s something profoundly embarrassing about failing to master the bells and whistles of a presentation, but fear of embarrassment probably shouldn’t be a guiding force when it comes to scholarship — mine or anyone else’s.

Hebdige’s devil-may-care approach to technological failure was refreshing, though I wonder if some of the willingness to go with it has to do with the particular technologies involved. We all expect VHS tapes and hard copies of slides to fail a bit — they’re obsolete, after all. Increasingly, the fact that anyone can do anything at all with these a/v holdovers is kind of impressive on its own. Newer, more digital technologies are “powerful tools,” though, things to be mastered, things that we’re led to believe will practically do the work for us. In the digital age, I’ve been promised perfection, and when I can’t arrange for it, I feel that I’ve failed the technologies, and not the other way around. That said, I don’t think the audience had any sort of crisis of attention span when the wrong tape got queued up or the audio track on the VHS went dead for a few seconds during the keynote. And, perhaps assuming that audience members are automatically dismissing me when I can’t get everything just right isn’t giving them, or myself, enough credit.

Photo by Russell Lee from the National Archives and Records Administration. Lee worked for the Farm Security Administration as a photographer, later taking public relations photographs for Standard Oil before becoming the first photography instructor at the University of Texas.

This is a cute, happy little ditty. The band is obsessed with Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, and their name is actually a reference to the latter and his film The Squid and the Whale.

Autumn’s breathing down my neck here in Austin, even if the heat hasn’t quite broken yet. The semester’s in full swing, and I’m binging on acoustic-driven music and dreaming of crackle-cool evenings. I bought the Drive-By Truckers’ Gangstabilly over the weekend. Initially released in 1998, the album is, in many ways, the work of a band still trying to find its sea legs. Patterson Hood, who I once interviewed and who seems like a thoroughly decent person, has put notes up on all the Truckers’ albums, and he has this to say about Gangstabilly:

While “Panties in Your Purse” has one of the most evocative song titles I’ve stumbled across, I have to say that “Late For Church” is my personal favorite on the album. It’s one of those songs that sticks in your throat. It manages to take a single moment and extrapolate from that something bordering on a philosophy. I’ve been listening to the track over and over again in my car, and still find it haunting. The harmonies at the end really seal the deal. If you want to give her a whirl, you can listen here at the Hype Machine.

The Republican Party has been using “Barracuda,” by Heart to help pimp out Sarah Palin. Unfortunately, the letter making the rounds is a joke from the Stranger.

That said, Heart and Van Halen have both sent cease-and-desist letters to the McCain campaign, stating explicitly that they would not have granted permission for their songs to be used in such a fashion (and, you can read about the Wilson sisters’ real response to McCain here). John Mellencamp has made a similar request, asking that his songs “Pink Houses” and “Our Country” be cut from the playlist. Mellencamp is a devoted Democrat and was a big supporter of John Edwards, who played both “Our Country” and “In a Small Town” at his rallies.

While Van Halen’s “Right Here, Right Now” is exactly the kind of inspirational pap that seems ready-made for politics, the appropriation of the Heart track is more peculiar, and hearkens back to the Reagan-era use of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a Bruce Springsteen song lamenting the fate of Vietnam War vets that is routinely believed to be a bit of up-with-American jingoism. As my friend Bart Calendar points out in his blog, the Heart song is easily read as a track about rape — which makes sense, as the Wilsons said they wrote it to talk about what a screw job the music industry was, particularly for women. And, speaking to the Mellencamp situation,I can’t quite conceive of why McCain, like Reagan before him, might think “Pink Houses,” with lyrics largely about the general failings of the American dream, would make a good rallying point.

While it’s sleazy to use artists’ music without their permission, which McCain seems to be doing left and right, I’m even more troubled by the persistent ignorance about the content of the songs. It’s one thing to be ignorant of the artists’ political leanings, and it’s one thing to use music without permission — it may or may not be ok, but people of all types do it all the time — but, to pick up a track about the exploitation of women and affix it to a female politician seems just flat ignorant. I cannot imagine that McCain, or anyone in his campaign, would have used the song if they’d had the foggiest idea of what it was about. But, perhaps I’m giving more credit than is due; perhaps they actually thought it was the rest of us who would be too dumb to notice.

I don’t have anything incisive to say about the above video, other than that I love George Carlin. The more I listen to him, the more I think he’s on my side most of the time. I wish I’d been a bit older when his short-lived sitcom was on TV. As it is, all I remember was that I wasn’t supposed to let my brother watch it and that there was a whole bit about crotchless panties.

I realize the “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” bit has become the joke that wouldn’t die, but the particular episode in this ongoing gag has some relevance to a post I just made at one of the other blogs I contribute to, about a New York Times article discussing the way that online word of mouth is becoming key to campaigning among younger voters. I think videos like the above also demonstrate that these sort of word of mouth or “viral” models of distribution also are a key way that people engage with and comment on the political realm. It might not be heady analysis, but it’s commentary nonetheless — perhaps in the vein that fan videos are commentary on tv shows or movies.

Through some twist of lucky faith, I had the immense privilege of serving as column editor for Henry Jenkins way back when I first started working on Flow. One of my favorite pieces was one discussing the problem of Sarah Silverman’s film, Jesus is Magic.

We recently ran a kind of “greatest hits” issue, and Jenkins’s column is there, with a new postscript from the author. Silverman’s humor hasn’t gotten any less intriguing, and as Jenkins rightly points out, that sort of “aww shucks” approach now has several well-known practitioners, including Sasha Baron Cohen of Borat fame.

I think this video works because it plays with the slippage between the homosocial and the homosexual. Also, it’s almost painfully funny.

The video, “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” is a response to the “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” video that Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon did. In the response video, Jimmy Kimmel says the video is a jab not at Silverman, but at Damon, who he blames for “taking something [he] loved.” For this and other reasons, the video becomes further homosocial as the significant exchange is not that between Silverman and Damon or Silverman and Kimmel, but between Damon and Kimmel.

In addition to being an interesting study in homosocial romantic/sexual exchange, it’s a great parody of Live Aid. Check those celebrity appearances. Gold star to Joan Jett.

I think that the promise of open-access publishing is great — particularly as we move more and more toward digital publication. Flow, the journal I’ve been most involved with, is open access to the max, and the model has thus far proven really successful. It’s also involved the volunteer labor of dozens of graduate students and a few faculty, but sometimes that’s what it takes. Most closed-access and print journals involve a lot of unpaid labor, and I know at least some of us over at Flow enjoy the whole mess. I certainly have over the past few years. That said, however, I think the shift is going to be difficult, if it’s possible at all. Many journals that are not open-access are very entrenched — many rightly so, having published often literally decades of significant scholarship. I think the most likely scenario is that there will be an increase in open-access journals, but that this increase will not necessarily unseat the place that traditional subscription-only journals have occupied.

And, finally, if you’re interested in open-access journals, the Directory of Open-Access Journals, which lists over 3,000 journals, is a good resource.

The band seems like a nice pack of people. They’re on the verge of completing their second album, and they’re definitely part of what’s hot and new in Austin music. They sound like a smear of California music history, lots of ’60s dreams — and their song “Without You” made it onto the OC before it got canceled, which doubtless lowered the average age of their fanbase by at least a year or two. In any case, the article should be in the May issue of Soundcheck.

*Note: Will and Lily are the only actual brother and sister pairing.

I’m sorry, but how did someone cast Matthew Lillard, Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta, and Ron Perlman all in one movie? How? Is it even conceivable to watch the trailer for In the Name of the King and not suspect, strongly, that it’s the work of some mash up genius? But, no, it’s real.

I’ve always loved Burt Reynolds. He, Alan Alda, Shipwreck from the animated G.I. Joe cartoon show, Jeff Goldblum and Joan Jett were my childhood celebrity crushes. My adulation of Reynolds was furthered when, in a college production of the the Vagina Monologues, I performed “The Flood,” in which an elderly woman who’s never had sex describes this beautiful surreal recurring dream she has about having dinner with Burt Reynolds. The deal was sealed when I first saw the glorious full-nude Cosmopolitan Magazine centerfold he posed for in 1972. After months of near misses, I finally managed to purchase a copy of that particular cultural artifact on eBay, and I must say, a thing of beauty is a joy forever — especially when it’s naked on a bearskin rug. The image was recycled last year in an advertisement for DirecTV HD, for which they edited out his smokes.

Reynolds seems almost quaintly unrefined now — all that unruly hair and macho swagger. The increasingly fussy aesthetic applied to what makes someone physically attractive has rendered men like Reynolds nearly parodic, a burlesque of manhood. There are echoes here and there. George Clooney’s got a bit of burly chic about him, and Vince Vaughn certainly does. But, in an era when even the Brawny Man has been cleaned up to look like someone’s nice suburban accountant neighbor, those flashes of unrepentant macho seem increasingly rare.

The text from Paul Tolme’s article is lifted nearly verbatim, just spliced up into a conversation between the two characters. I expect this kind of ineptitude from the undergraduates I work with. Google-based plagiarism is typically easy to catch — usually, the culprit has picked a piece of writing that shows up on the first page of search hits. That seems to be what Edwards did as well.

While it’s funny to think of romance novel lovers getting off on discussion of ferrets’ eating habits, the incident points to larger problems. The internet may make writers more vulnerable, but it also exposes how brittle notions of intellectual property really are. I work with a number of international students seeking assistance with their writing. Routinely, I find boosted sentences and paragraphs in their work. These aren’t undergraduates avoiding their homework or trying to pull a fast one; usually, they’re highly intelligent, professionally motivated people who have moved to the U.S. for graduate study. In doing so, they’ve moved into a hot zone of proprietary thinking that is deeply at odds with the culture(s) they’ve grown up in. Explaining the notion of “copying” — of plagiarism — and why exactly it’s considered bad is one of the incidental tasks I dread. The concept is one of those that, frequently, just doesn’t translate.