#Ian Bogost

[rosayenem]

Second part: “The world,” he says, “does not exist.”

[kenyatta]

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context.

Online media gives the everyperson access to channels of communication previously reserved for Big Business. Starting with the world wide web in the 1990s and continuing into user-generated content of the aughts and social media of the 2010s, control over public discourse has moved from media organizations, governments, and corporations to average citizens. Finally, people could publish writing, images, videos, and other material without first getting the endorsement of publishers or broadcasters. Ideas spread freely beyond borders.

And we also received a toxic dump of garbage. The ease with which connections can be made—along with the way that, on social media, close friends look the same as acquaintances or even strangers—means any post can successfully appeal to people’s worst fears, transforming ordinary folks into radicals. That’s what YouTube did to the Christchurch shooter, what conspiracy theorists preceding QAnon did to the Pizzagaters, what Trumpists did to the Capitol rioters. And, closer to the ground, it’s how random Facebook messages scam your mother, how ill-thought tweets ruin lives, how social media has made life in general brittle and unforgiving.

It’s long past time to question a fundamental premise of online life: What if people shouldn’t be able to say so much, and to so many, so often?

[z34l0t]

[gamesatwork]

e437 — Dipping into Dots

flipping dots artwork, vintage / retro tech like flip clock radios, airport departure style signs, GameBoy & Tangara devices, the Trust & Safety Tycoon serious game, UNESCO’s plans for a virtual museum and much more!

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash Published 23 October 2023 Michael, Michael and Andy get back together on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean once more to start off this episode with several cool examples of flipping dots artwork.  Michael M remembered seeing a Vestaboard last weekend in Durham.  Have a look at the links in the show notes for visual examples of each of these. Continuing with…

[writingway-in-writinghell]

I love this op-ed.

It’s hard to imagine the world without social media as it is today, of course — many marginalized creators have found community, support, financial independence even. Though the way Bogost separates Social Networking from Social Media, I wonder if I couldn’t have found out about ADHD and autism via a few dozen, well, networks instead of the constant onslaught of “content” for clicks’ sake. I wonder if the support some found all over the globe — trickling to them from the tiniest faucets — wouldn’t also have been possible via community, on-the-ground work as was done when several US states suddenly turned Blue in the Biden election, and come in a steady stream instead.

I also wonder if I even want to stay on this here site at all in light of my general discontent with how detached we all are from each other. Yes I found people I care about. No I can’t feasibly go have a coffee with them. Not ever.

Maybe we should all just boot up Skype again or send each other our various messenger app contacts instead of just vaguely existing in the same bubble. Maybe we should all just slow down and focus on what matters most to us. To me, that’s thoughtful one-on-one conversation. Can’t have that in a thread that can be reblogged and derailed by just anyone, now can you?

[tmbyykk]

The flip side of that coin also shines. On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.

The Age of Social Media Is Ending By Ian Bogost

[jkottke]

Ian Bogost on the death of the “perfect vehicle”, the minivan. “It is useful because it offers benefits for families, and it is uncool because family life is thought to be imprisoning.” Conversely, SUVs & trucks offer a sense of freedom.

[tetw]

8 Great Essays about Social Media

The I in the Internet by Jia Tolentino - The Internet has gone from being a utopia where everything was possible to a place full of angry people obsessed with their own representation

The New Pornographers by Roxane Gay - It’s a TikTok world, creative and sprawling and strange and anarchic and tedious and gross and you can’t stop scrolling and you can’t stop looking and you just want more. So what’s the problem?

The Machine Always Wins by Richard Seymour - Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?https://

My Instagram by Dayna Tortorici - We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift

The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety by Kyle Chayka - Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want what the machines tell us we want?

The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino - How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look

What Was Twitter, Anyway? by Willy Staley - Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our Brains

The Age of Social Media Is Ending by Ian Bogost - It never should have begun

[vanillabeenflower]

does it make sense to say that I love the concept of philosophy and psychology by themselves and the questions they ask but personally hate philosophers and psychiatrists themselves. genuine question.

Keep in mind, I love stuff like color psychology, negative/positive punishment and reinforcement, and the psychological theory that claims dreams are a way of processing issues that happened while awake. I was one of the most engaged ppl in Psychology class. And I was almost brought to tears over the Egg Theory

but every time I read/play something written/made by experts in either field (Pippin Barr, Ian Bogost, etc.), or GOD FORBID combined with the profession of game critic/developer, I can't stop thinking about if they were in a Warhammer explosion (using a codeword to avoid getting nuked). Like I hate the player but love the game

anyway im gonna go play with my friend :3

here's malade's opinion on this pressing matter

[queenlua]

i’m sort of convinced that the absolutely best essayists produce new work only erratically.  it is very hard to do all the work of observing/engaging with stuff, then Thinking Real Hard, and then writing some actually-worth-reading piece, on anything like a weekly schedule.  sometimes a person spends years of their life thinking about something and only writes one thing about it.  but it doesn’t matter because that one thing was worth it, exactly what needed to be said

however, alas, the demands of (legacy) publishing and (newer) algorithms disproportionately favor Dudes Who Can Churn Shit Out On Schedule

which is why the most Aggressively Mid Writer of the 00′s Game Writing Scene, Ian Bogost, is writing for the fucking Atlantic nowadays, whereas all the actually interesting, provocative, strange, and generally-worth-reading writers from that era are like. their stuff’s languishing on some mothballed archive on their personal site.  or on a defunct blog.  someplace where people slowly forget about it even though their stuff was always way more daring and novel and just plain interesting than the polished bullshit that builds a career

grumble grumble

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, Disoriented edition.

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire." [Jorge Luis Borges]

[Image by Rita Kostrikova, via 64mag]

*

One Thing - A catalogue of authenticity

"I couldn’t stop thinking that this trial was also about something else: the value of a woman, long past middle age, who dared to claim she indeed still had value. Just how radical was it for Ms. Carroll, 80, to demand that she was worth something?" E. Jean Carroll and the Value of a Woman ‘Past Her Prime’ [Jessica Bennett, The New York Times]

"We need fewer things to work on. Starting now." It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity [Cal Newport, The New Yorker]

"Recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. Something is changing about the internet." The Year the Millennials Handed the Internet Over to Zoomers [Max Read, The New York Times]

"The [online] sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless”  and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever." Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore [Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic]

Why Are My Secret Spotify Songs Following Me Around? [Nate Jones, Vulture]

“But just remember that Shakespeare himself never read a single book about Shakespeare.” How to stop yourself [Sophie Heawood]

"I've never really experienced jealousy, because I’ve always thought of myself as the greatest person who ever lived. I’m joking; except I’m not." Jealousy! [Amelia Tait, The New Statesman]

"The corporate gig was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Lee Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job." Is There Is Life After Influencing? [Mattie Kahn, The New York Times]

Wine was my poison. Now it’s my sober passion [Nick Johnstone, Financial Times]

America Doesn’t Know Tofu [George Stiffman, Asterisk]

On going to the mat. Baselines [Wudan Yan]

@the_brain_doctor on Instagram

“Life has taught me that things tend to shake out, if you can be cool for two minutes and try to not freak out. Aging has taught me how to respond, not to react — and sober, intelligent responses can take weeks or even years to formulate. That’s ok. Weirdly, I feel like I have far more time now than I did when I was in my twenties, when everything was insanely urgent.” Elizabeth Gilbert Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

[talenlee]

The Magic Circle (The Magic Is Racism)

New Post has been published on PRESS.exe: The Magic Circle (The Magic Is Racism)

One of the few concepts from Games Studies that has escaped into the general atmosphere of people talking about it normally is the idea of the magic circle. The magic circle is an idea mentioned once in the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, which, much like other off-handed comments made by people focusing elsewhere, wound up becoming something that the games studies world spun off into a great big mess of noise, hi there Wittgenstein thanks for making ‘defining game’ into an academic sporting event.

But the magic circle ostensibly, as developed later by Roger Caillois (somewhat, even if he thought Huizinga was a bit stinky) and kind of elaborated on further by Ian Bogost (kinda?) is the notion that a game exists in a space created apart from the general real world; that the beginning of and experience of playing a game involves engaging in a shared separation of reality that everyone involved recognises and accepts has nothing to do with reality and can be therefore, a place for anything to happen.

I’ve talked in the past about how Caillois is kind of a big weirdo, which is a way to divert the conversation away from the fact the dude was a racist and a misogynist and also kind of an asshole even to white dudes as well. In any given conversation about academics from the 1950s it’s not exactly interesting to point out that they were racists and misogynists, you can usually instead direct attention to the few who were exceptions to this trend and that is interesting in and of itself.

In this case, though, Caillois’ vision of games is not atypical for a particular vision of games studies: He sees the games as being disconnected from reality. He also believed them to be unproductive and uncreative; a game by definition could not have a byproduct that was useful or had value. In Caillois’ mind, a game could not ‘create anything of value.’

I’ve been thinking about Caillois as I read CLR James Beyond A Boundary, a dense book full of historical accounting of the experience of playing cricket and playing being a fan of cricket, during a time in which Colonial England offered very few routes for advancement for black people in the West Indies. One of those routes for a limited number of people was cricket. You could use cricket to advance, to position yourself, but, James writes, there’s always material conditions that hold you back. The best black player couldn’t replace an acceptable white player, and the best black player was the lightest-skinned one.

The book has this phrase, early on: Before I knew of politics, I had learned it all from cricket. It’s a history full of reflections on the way that the empire treated its games as this neutral space where everyone adhered to the same rules so everyone got treated the same even as James accounts incident after incident after incident where that was simply not true – there’s even an instance where Australia, another subservient component of the empire, but also, crucially, one presented as whiter, is shown as being positioned as yes, lesser to England, but still very much the white one in a contest against Trinidad.

Australia set a truly eyewatering target of 600. The response came roaring back as the first two batsmen scored over 200 runs. To say that this was a simple value-neutral exchange between parties and that there was no interface of the system of the empire asserting over people is to pretend that people’s feelings don’t matter when they’re engaged with a game; that drive and agency and alertness and all the elements of human exchange are present in the human to be observed, to play the game, but which also, crucially, do not actually exist, because they would make the interplay of the game objects meaningful outside of the game as well.

I have only read excerpts from Games Black Girls Play, which describes a whole range of ways that there are things that I, a white guy, have been taught are inherent to black people but as it turns out are things that the black community being observed practice, through games, and valorise, through good execution in those games. There is no magic circle for these people, in this situation; the real oppressions of the real world melt in to the edges. When a man was shot for trespassing on a country club without realising it because he was playing Pokemon Go, you’re not going to be shocked to hear that it wasn’t a white guy.

Since I started on Games Studies, one thing I’ve often argued with in Man, Play And Games is the position that ‘games are uncreative,’ that they cannot create any value. To me, the idea of mandela patterns and playful meditation experiences which can leave you with an artistic product struck me as fundamentally against this idea; either they’re not games or they’re not creative, or Caillois’ idea doesn’t work.

The thing I didn’t really consider there though is that my immediate, easy and convenient example of a playful experience that has a creative output was something from a non-white cultural space. And that’s not to say ‘western games are like this, eastern games are like that.’ It’s more that if you approach games from the perspective of the magic circle, and assume that idea works, you have to start shaping things you see in order to make them collaborate with that idea; they are part of the conversation.

And look, the magic circle is not an idea with zero explanatory power. It’s absolutely an idea you can use to describe the way that when you’re in a game, you can tell you care about something and then after the game is over, that thing has no value to you. It’s not like once the game is over you have a reason to care about having a five of clubs. I think that this can be handled by Suits’ idea of a lusury attitude, but the magic circle is a term that can be connected to ideas of theatrics and narrative design.

But it’s kinda hard, when you sit the distinct difference in who gets to be aloof and who has to be involved alongside one another to not see that the Magic Circle is just another way to describe privilege.

Oh and Caillois hated clowns, obligatory mention.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[z34l0t]

[foxingpeculiar]

One of my goals this summer is to get something published. Like, honestly, I should’ve done that by now in my “career,” such as it is. But I’m torn as to what. Because there are two major options.

1) The creative option. A poem or short story or some shit. The pros of this are that it’s an excuse to do some tailored creative work, and it’ll mean more for me presently since I’m in a creative writing program. The major con is that it’s a distraction from my primary creative project (which I also hope to make significant headway on this summer). Like, my attention is fucking scattered enough as it is; do I need to add to that?

2) The academic option. Which, like, okay… if I’m going to end up in academia, which is a fate I’m resisting but is also like, the closest thing I feel to a calling, then I should commit, right? And if I’m going to teach, I’m going to teach theory. And the bit of theory I’m into right now is basically, approaching video games studies from a humanities/narratological perspective. Cos , even now, that remains a lacuna, a nascent field that nobody’s really figured out yet. So I could do the politic part of academia there, like stake out some territory, have a take that might mean something. And it’d be fun. I already know what article I’d write, and it’d basically be coming at a significant name in the field* like right out of the gate. But like… that sounds exhausting. I just wanna tell stories and build worlds and play with language. Leave me in my room with my toys, y’know?

Writing this makes it feel insufferably pretentious when people have real problems, but like… here I am.

(*Ian Bogost wrote something for The Atlantic recently, re: The Last of Us, about the “narrative impoverishment” of video games, and it pissed me off. And I could take him to task for it. Like, I have the training to do that. Shouldn’t I use it?)

[linguisticdiscovery]

A fun, short little book about the history of the word "OK"!

[tmbyykk]

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

The Age of Social Media Is Ending By Ian Bogost