It’s easy to hate Zynga, but neither moral turpitude nor mythic hubris sufficiently explains our present situation. Folklore and modernity alike condition us to desire a lucid answer, a simple take with a clear moral: don’t steal game designs, don’t abuse players, don’t exploit workers. Those are decent principles. But they are also stories, and stories are lies whose deception we forgive in exchange for their grace.

…

If games ever can do good for the world, this is perhaps all they have to offer. To remind us of contingency, to give every move an orthogonal weakness. To impose a doubt for every certainty, while still admitting the need to carry on, out of vanity and shame as much as ambition and hope, to ride higher like Bellerophon on Pegasus to touch Olympus, all the while secretly knowing that we are not gods, that we will be toppled. And to hope that when we do someone will take us in, and that we won’t die alone.

And a great point from one ‘Nicholas Bollerophon’ in the comments:

…when you attempt to make something with a bit of originality to it – even just a little – your effort shows and is in and of itself a political expression. You are asserting that you can step out of the path of collapse; culture has grown instead of just turned over.

I’m reading little bits of Oliver Marchart’s stuff on the difference between ‘Politics’ and ‘The Political’. According to a journal article, “Marchart has elaborated an extended definition of minimal politics, the minimal criteria required for an action to be considered political… To this end, he proposes five criteria of minimal politics.”

The five criteria are 1. “the aim of becoming a majority” (i.e. “…it aims to transform the contemporary social order.“), 2. “Strategy”, (“Strategies contesting traditional ways of doing and saying are also linked to the aim of establishing new institutions and practices.“), 3. Some sense of organisation, 4. “Collectivity” (“As with the aim of becoming a majority, the collective dimension of political action need not be understood as an empirical collection of individuals, but as a symbolic collective; as the symbol of a collective actor.“) and 5 & 6 are “conflictuality and positionality” (“Since politics therefore always includes a dimension of conflict, actors will need to take up a position within this conflict.“).

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that making “something with a bit of originality to it” could be made to squeeze within this set of criteria.

I also really like Ian’s phrase “orthogonal weakness” and emphasis on contingency.

I think it started with TPHD. Theron Jacobs twitter account is a thing that I adore, for reasons I can’t really explain except that he’s always surprising. Right as I started to think I’d had his “schtick” down (tongues, licking, puppies, snakelord – there’s definitely certain themes that he enjoys creating tweets and poems about over others) he goes and surprises everyone with an eBook, “Smell my wild flowers“. (Don’t be fooled, it’s not your high school poetry class waxing lyrical about flora. It’s good for one). Well that’s cool, but then, what’s the last thing you expect after someone puts out a book (pdf) of poetry? BAM it’s a second eBook of poetry – BEAST. Surprise! (Alright, so it doesn’t sound that surprising, but I was slightly shocked. Compressed into a paragraph it loses its impact. Look, you really need to follow TPHD okay).

Come to think of it, I can’t remember if I started following Horse eBooks before or after TPHD. But either way, I did. Also, what they say is true, Horse has changed and he’s gotten too wacky. The aura of magic has dissipated and now it just looks like someone trying to be funny (which is the absolute last thing on the hierarchy of things that are funny).

Actually one of the earliest weird accounts I started following was BARTSIMPSON_REAL which was the typo ridden, delusional output of a strange venn diagram covering only one person – a Bart Simpsons fan and a Slobodan Milosevic apologist. Some of my favourite ever tweets (rivalling even the best of Horse Ebooks) were from this account. It’s current incarnation is Bart_freecialis but that may not last.

There’s also the suitofracoons, though it hasn’t tweeted since December. Baden Pailthorpe’s “Eighty Four Doors” a machine translation of Orwell’s 1984, tweeted at odd intervals. Okershee/OMNIVISION which I have no idea about but which I started following a little while ago just because it’s great. Here’s a great recent tweet from Okershee. And last in this eclectic and incomplete list is BrunoIator (with a capital ‘I’ instead of an L) which just goes to show that Latour would be a great tweeter if he could be arsed.

Twitter has always loved non-sequiters.

I also played some 3v3 last night with two of my good friends who are both quite good at their niche skills, and who both play much more aggressively than I do. Again, I think the TvZ Boxer-build attitude of the mass two-base turtle has kind of infected my other match ups with a conservatism and risk aversion that is really hitting me hard. I don’t think it matters how good my Macro is if my economy is two bases behind.

That’s pretty neat. I love it when bloggers turn their labour of love, sweat and tears into something more financially fulfilling. I still remember when we first found and linked both Patricia and Kate’s work at Critical Distance, maybe around a year ago. If we helped them in any way to get where they are now, I feel we’ve basically justified our existence.

- The videogame blogging community is pretty rad

- The community seems to know stuff (it makes interesting blog posts and discussions)

- Therefore the community as an aggregate entity knows stuff (and for some epistemological reasons that’s interesting)

Easy, right? Except that I’ve grown disenchanted with the idea that the community knows stuff, as well as the idea of the community as an aggregate entity. It’s all kind of boring and banal, with all the things and potentials that excited or surprised me about it now seeming dull and mundane.

Okay fine, so I can’t just withdraw the piece from the anthology because I think my piece is stupid, gotta keep the publishing record up after all. So what’s my option? Go with the pat ‘there were no conclusions reached/further research needed’ option?

A journal article I discovered the other day might have a useful “out”, and I’ll excerpt the intro:

“The 2011 revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and neighbouring countries have brought blogging and other social and citizens’ media to the forefront of the public imagination. Major news corporations have interviewed bloggers and drawn heavily on Twitter and Facebook. Social media have been celebrated as creating or, at the very least, fuelling the revolutionary movements. On the other hand, ‘pre-revolutionary’ scholarship on blogs and other forms of online journalism, citizens’ media and user-generated content argued that they were unsuccessful because they did not appear on the radar of commercial media and/or have not themselves become big media, accessed by a large number of readers/users. For some observers this means that journalism 2.0 has not lived up to its promise (Rebillard and Touboul, 2010).

These two apparently opposing arguments draw on the same logic: media are considered political if, and only if, they have a major impact on political decision-makers and the public sphere. …The danger for media analysis is that we then forget about the political import of mundane, quotidian everyday practices: they no longer fit within the notion of politics.”

They then go on to position the German news-blogosphere (a considerably larger one than the CVG blogosophere) as political via Oliver Marchart’s who “has elaborated an extended definition of minimal politics, the minimal criteria required for an action to be considered political.” So that could be an out: do something with Marchart’s 6 criteria for minimal politics and say the CVG blogosphere meets the criteria (probably like: sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t).

The bits I have that do feel strong are about community formation, and how the CVGBlogosophere emerged and how to talk about community when it’s a techno-human community… but why would a chapter primarily about that end up in a book about videogames (and more to the point: in a section on identity and gameplay?? Unless I want to get all Clifford Geertz up in this piece and treat blogging as a “game” – also a. la Chris Bateman, but I have some problems with that book…)

So I don’t know.  I think I’ve about reached my limit for the day, and it’s time for some relaxing Starcraft instead.

At age 20, is MVP past his prime – or was Tasteless right in thinking that MVP looked physically ill? Gumiho is only 19, after all.

Apparently it’s freezing in Soul. When my parents were there last year (I think?) they both said it was literally the coldest they have ever been – and they’ve trekked through Nepal. The cold is quite conducive to colds.

But what have I been reading? Well, I’ve started reading in pomodoro chunks, and it’s working pretty well. I finally finished the Preface to Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter which looks stunning, and I can’t believe I didn’t finish it earlier. Right up my alley and all that. Second I got out Bernard Stiegler’s “Looking After Youth and The Generations” which blew me away in the first page but which started to get bogged down in Freud and psychoanalysis which is just not really my bag. Perhaps it’s because I don’t understand it/was never taught it, or perhaps my bullshit detector is just right when it tells me much of what passes for psychoanalytic discussion is a bit of a giant wank with little relation to reality. But that’s okay. Wanking never hurt anyone, just don’t expect me to watch and enjoy it.

Apparently Chapter 7 of Steigler’s work is the really good bit, called “What is philosophy?” it (acording to Alex Galloway’s review of the book) plugs into this whole French conversation between Deleuze/Stiegler and someone who Deleuze was kind of riffing off when he wrote his own book “What is philosophy?”.  Anyway I really like Stiegler’s giving-a-fuck-about-youth business, and the first three or four pages of the book which talk about responsibility and how youths are made responsible for their actions (esp. criminal actions) we actually remove responsibility from adults and society responsible for making the youths  into responsible adults. In essence, we say two things: to kids “Be responsible!” and to adults “You don’t have to be responsible!” which is no doubt the source of some serious fucking conflict.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Bennett and Stiegler soon, but this fucking book chapter needs writing (that’s what I was reading these two for. I think it’s probably a bit late to include any more than a cursory mention of either of them though. Stupid chapter is due in two and a half weeks, and I haven’t quite finished my first expanded draft).

Above: Not a lot of hope for our terran adversary.

Heck, he even sends his last SCVs to suicide against my base, so the illusion is complete.

Above: SCVs about to die

But then he doesn’t lose, so I go hunting for a secret expand. I find it, think it’ll be easy… then all of a sudden… this.

Above: 13 Battlecruisers

The dude had been hoarding battlecruisers, and was now pummeling me with 13 of them. Half that was probably enough to wipe me out at that point, my air defense was SO low, and there was no chance I was going to build enough Thors. The game was already 30 minutes in, so I threw up a GG and a WP and quit. But have a look at the minimap. Dude had basically a whole extra secret base-trio that I knew nothing about. Crazy. I felt really, really stupid.