“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Ian Bogost Talk Notes

Herewith my hastily scribbled notes on Ian's talk. Video and audio to follow.

Structuring effect of discourse

McLuhan

Cognitive linguistics: Lakoff
We understand one domain in terms of another

Force of words
Glaukopis Athene
Metric filler, mnemonic

Received forms that we change over time

Invention of linguistic constraint
Oulipo

Lipogram (omitting certain letters)

Perec

Tree of Codes
Cut out of Street of Crododiles

Histories of how we got from clay tablet to codex don't let us think what to do...next...

Book as a book
"I was never making a book--I was putting words down"

We think o photography as representational

"the illusion of a literal description of what the camera saw"
(Winogrand)

Graininess from chemical halide in high shutter speeds

Triumph of tech vs a strange random walk
35 mil camera by a guy who had asthma and didn't want to use view camera!

The way a lens "sees"
Cartier Bresson at small apertures
Or Brassaille in the rain

The confluence of stuff in the image

Light sensitive emulsion or sensitive chip
The ways we want to let the camera see favor certain kinds of vision

Two identical pics of light with same aperture etc. Newer one prevents flare

Frank photo of glowing jukebox
Allowance of flair
Sets of ways of knowledge, not just an accident.

Computers not identical
We tend to want to undermine computers into binary data

Platform studies

Not just delivery--the platform is supported by what it can and can't do

Levels:
Reception/operation
Interface
Form/Function
Code
Platform

We usually stay on top level

Platforms can be windows into other platforms!
You have to know which is doing what and why

Atari: Television Interface Adapter
Playfield
Player Sprites
2 missiles
One ball

Commonalities--what can we make from them

Level playing field etc

Display tech

We think of pics as flat and 2d

But Oscilloscopes

Intense phosphor burn

The electron gun is position then moved

Cathode ray tube tv

Phosphorescence is illuminated by scanning gun that does it 60x per second

Graphic, space then copy to screen

Atari doesn't have a screen buffer

So that interfaces with the electron gun

You have to get everything synched

Not like writing or ploughing

Code for how to get a black screen

20 bits just to make screen
Flipped symmetrically

Adventure Games created way for others to follow

Neutral zone produced by reading out code and running data
You are seeing the code for the data

Layer dip

Flat Ontology

How do we make all the layers visible

You and the metal
Strangely peaceful
How do you make this visible?
A Slow Year
Solitude
Imagism
Haiku
Four games about four seasons
Like poems

Pitfall
Steve Cartwright
Barnstorming

Rain as optical illusion

Trying to get all the levels present in the work

Uniqueness
Living machines that have something to teach us
Everything is like that

Q: form
Making a book
vs writing a book

We complain around it
Stuck in world of ideas

Some analogy between a sonnet and 128k
But one is form and the other is capacity

"chef" programming
Which registers are interesting at any moment

Q: Nostalgia in video game studies


Silicon Valley technical innovation vs Hollywood Style
We throw machines away
Hard to take Atari at face value

Patience or not with earlier forms
Games have largely been killed or thrown away
Nostalgia objects rather than earnest aesthetic containers
What if I took the @ seriously

Activision vs Atari paintings
The paintings create an interesting space
You know it doesn't match the game!

We construe tech as advancement

Imagining obsolescence??

Failure and difficulty--Yar's Revenge

Q: A game that allows mistakes to happen? (Gina)

"I wonder how I can break it?"
"Where is the edge?"

Could you go to the lowest level of Playstation?

You have to understand something about the aesthetics

Commercial games: no one ever frames it

"I wanted to write a game for Playstation that used the smallest number of instructions"

Q: 6 axis controller in Playstation 3

Gimmickry
You would need to take it seriously
That affordance of the device hasn't been plumbed to its depths

Atari had very long commercial life
Like VW Beetle







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