Things as They Are.?

America.

No comment necessary.

Difficulty Level = Expert Impossible

My high score so far is 3 5 9.

And in More Sporting News....

My beloved Buffalo Sabres now sit in second place of the Northeast Division of the National Hockey League. But wait-- there's a strike on, you say? No problem. The good folks at G4 are simulating the entire season on an XBox. And they are also, I might add, showing a bunch of the games on cable.

It'll be very interesting to see what sort of response they get to this. I'd wager that it won't be embraced at all. Sports, I think, can't be reduced to algorithms. Unpredictability makes us watch. But, then again, with the rise of fantasy leagues, who knows.

UPDATE: Turns out I'm pretty late in discovering this one.

Hope

So the Red Sox just won the World Series. Congratulations, Boston.

I didn't really expect to be so moved by their victory. I'm the survivor of many locally-historic Buffalo sports defeats that still litter the text of Western New York highway billboards. I was swayed by neither win or loss.

But yet, oddly, I find myself sitting here in the midst of something I haven't known in a lone time-- a moment when countless thousands of people are all smiling at once and, if only briefly, the future holds a vague possibility.

And for that, Boston, we all thank you. Be good tonight.

Hit Point-Packing Big Mac or Magic-Boosting Whopper?

1up.com has a concise little article about future plans for in-game product placement. That this is happening is nothing new-- Terra Nova pretty much summed things up back in July.

What's interesting to watch for, though (and what one commentator on Terra Nova already mentioned), is the degree to which these product placements influence gameplay. Right now, these ads are being tested for brand awareness but it might only be a matter of time before we see choices presented to gamers (such as BMW vs. Mercedes in Grand Theft Auto, Coke or Pepsi in The Sims) as awareness indicators in themselves. In other words, it won't be long before brands are jockeying for the distinction of, say, replenishing hit points, providing a place to stay or, inevitably, giving the player the most firepower for their buck. Soon, in-game product placements won't be supplemental visuals-- they'll be the fundamentals of the games themselves. The question is whether immersion is impeded or heightened by these ads.

I have a nagging feeling I've encountered games where this already takes place (that I don't know what they are bodes well for our future as consumers, although I am drinking a Diet Pepsi right now...). Does anyone know of any?

No Barenaked Ladies, Then

Via @uspic¡ous Fish¿!, The Albums You Should Have Listened To Before You Die:

Copy this list onto your blog, put the ones you have listened to (completely from beginning to end) in bold and then add three more albums that you think people should have heard before they turn into their parents - remember, it isn't necessarily your favourite albums but the ones you think people should listen to... and when we say listen we mean from track one through to the end... If you put a link to your follow-on post in the comments of the site where you found it, the chain will be trackable. You are also allowed to DELETE up to THREE albums on the existing list, if you feel a) that this is an album which should not reasonably be foisted upon anybody, or b) that one Steve Earle album is quite enough for one lifetime, thank you.

I'm interested to see where this goes here in the good 'ol US of A, where we're not particularly jazzed about The Buzzcocks or The Jam (I like 'em, though) but do seem to have a strange leaning towards Michael Bolton and Celene Dion. Without further ado, here's my list (three new entries denoted by **):

Talk Talk – Spirit Of Eden
The Congos – Heart Of The Congos
The Beta Band – The 3 Eps**
Orbital – In Sides
Michael Jackson – Thriller
Digable Planets – Blowout Comb**
My Bloody Valentine – Loveless
James – Laid**
Miles Davis – In A Silent Way
Brian Eno – Another Green World
Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
The Buzzcocks – Singles Going Steady
Missy Elliott – Miss E… So Addictive
Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left
Genius/GZA – Liquid Swords
Spiritualized – Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
A Guy Called Gerald – Black Secret Technology
Blur – Parklife
Aphew Twin- Selected Ambient Works Volume 2
Kate Bush – The Hounds Of Love

Now remember, this list started on another blog and it'll (hopefully) finish somwhere far from here. Just hit trackback when it's posted or, if you are sans blog, post your additions/deletions to the comments. Let's see how long The Buzzcock's stay on....

Casio Bell Bottoms

Anyone who even remotely listens to rock, pop, hip hop or, hell, even country, has probably picked up on the influence that the 1980's is having on today's music. I'm thinking in particular of the resurrection of the lo-fi keyboards that were Cabbage Patch popular in the early to mid '80's. It seems that musicians nowadays are using this box of circuits not to add a dose of irony into their music (that's been done already by those such as Beck and The Beta Band), but to add warmth and simplicity of texture. Case in point: the Neo-Folk Movement. Now I usually hesitate to apply labels to music (I leave that to Rolling Stone and NME), but this one seems to hold up. Lead (in America, at least) by artists such as Devendra Banhart and Little Wings, neo-folk has taken on the DIY aesthetic of punk rock and applied to, well, the simplicity of acoustic guitars.

But there seems to be an increasing trend toward synthetic simplicity as well and the only irony employed here is what we bring to it. It strikes me that there's something much more honest offered in the blips and beeps of an '80's K-Mart keyboard than there is most studio gimmickery. Reactionary, yes, but effective all the same. I remember being rather amazed by my first Casio keyboard which, along with 3 different guitar tones, had a human voice setting that I thought was incredible. I threw some batteries in it a couple of years ago and realized that it sounded more like a cross between a dying frog and Garrison Keillor (no offense, Garrison). But enough about my issues. This track jumped out at me today. Check it out for yourself:



NOTE: All .mp3s posted are for evaluation purposes only. No song will be archived. All songs posted are owned by the manager of this site. If you own the copyright to this song and wish to have it removed, please contact mruppel{at}umd.edu. Also, please feel free to contact me if you are a band, label or distributor who has something you'd like to share.

Willkommen

A weblog is a lifelong committment. I tend to take my time when making lifelong committments (just ask my wife).

And so it is that, after close to a year of waiting, debating, conflating and procrastinating, I can finally say these words:

Welcome to Things as They Are.?

Or should I say Thank You for welcoming me. It occurred to me during the past 11 months or so while I sat on the code for this site, that I'm not really in any position to welcome anyone at all. Rather, this weblog is more or less a way for me to be welcomed into a larger community of transfer, collaboration, contact. Sure, you can silently visit Things as They Are.?, but it only really lives with your contributions. I offer no justification ala jeblog for my existence. I can only offer my thoughts on media, life and the-in-between in the hope that they can spin themselves into something more when mingled with the hum of electric air.

Things as They Are.? intends, quite pretentiously I think, to be all things at once: a place where jpeg, mpeg, mp3, mpc, Arial, Garamond, WingDings, cuneiform, dual-shock analog, 8-bit digital, paper, pen, pencil, clay and stick all come together to form gleeful concussions of our mediated life. There's still much to be done here, many browsers to be satisfied and many font colors to be retouched (suggestions?). But, for now, let's begin shall we?

And a mental tenner goes to those who know what the title of my blog references (HINT: It's a combination of two different books).

Special thanks goes to Matt K. and Jason Rhody for all of their help and prodding. Eternal trackbacks, gentlemen, eternal trackbacks....

20 Pixel Avatars and Me

I've been working on a couple of projects lately that are taking up a good portion of my time. One deals with movements within digital spaces and the body, and the other deals with Katherine Hayles' idea of cross-sited media, using Neil Young's Greendale as an example of a project with a central narrative (re)mediated across different formats (more on this below).

Pasted below is an early (and I stress early) abstract of my investigation into the impact the Atari 2600 (and early home-console gaming), GUIs and early text gaming had on the rendering of the digital, sexual body:

In 1982, at the height of the early video game boom, a company named Mystique (AMI) released a game called "Custer’s Revenge" for the Atari 2600 home video game system. According to Mystique’s description, the game required players to “rise to the challenge, dodge a tribe of flying arrows and protect your flanks against some downright mean and prickly cactus” in order to accomplish your goal—to reach (and rape) a “ravishing maiden named Revenge” Immediately upon its release, both "Custer’s Revenge" and Mystique were protested vigorously by various groups such as Women Against Pornography, National Organization of Women and the American Indian Community House. Mystique denied any wrongdoing, persisted in its distribution of “adult” games and, eventually, was sued by Atari for “wrongful association”, causing the company to fold (and symbolizing, in many ways, the rapidly hastening dissolution of the video game industry at the time). But what exactly was the significance behind Mystique’s claim that the game presented nothing but “mutually consenting visual images”? And, more importantly, how did Mystique use the hardware of the Atari 2600 and, relatedly, gamers’ conceptions of social and digital space to depict the body’s sexuality?

In this paper, I intend to investigate the ways in which the sexual(ized) body has been digitized and made to perform since the conception of electronic space (as both a temporal and dimensional medium). I plan to look at not only early video gaming (circa 1978-1984), but also early "spoof" text adventures (such as SoftPorn) and the metaphorical GUI (as played out in the Mac's "Virtual Valerie") that followed as media through which the female body is portrayed as an either yielding or enterable corporeality. New technologies of mediation always seem to attach themselves to the exploitation of the female body as a way to “explore” the rendered signals of that space (think stag movies). With electronic media, however, it seems that the body is not only mapped upon the aesthetics of the media itself, but also our (often) subconscious habits and behaviors within that space, be it through texted, joystick-controlled or graphically interfaced virtualities. By exploring these sites, one can not only witness differentiations of “idealized” and controlled sexual bodies (I’ll deal with this definition at length) but also the ways in which these idealizations are endemic of larger cultural justifications for pornographic and coerced sexual intercessions in bodily discourse.

Much has been done with "Custer’s Revenge" already. I plan to look at how the inputs of gamers, whether through typing, pressing the action button or moving a mouse, are separate from the "new media, old problems" paradigm. Just as some have argued that, say, the point of "Super Mario Brothers" is to jump, not to save the Princess, I think it's equally plausible that the end result of many of Mystique's erotic games is not to simply bring pornography to a new medium but also to filter it through already established playing habits.

And so I come to my question:

Does anyone know of any research that examines the body-as-avatar, especially as it relates to sexuality? I found a small amount on the early days of cyber-pornongraphy but not much on the role of the player or user (Mary Flanagan is the exception here-- her work on digital activism and gaming is quite good).

Your thoughts, as always, er, as always from this point on at least, are appreciated.

Hey Mr. Clean! You're Dirty Now, Too!

Neil Young's Greendale tells the story of the Green family living in rural California who, for one reason or another, have to accept the intrusion of media and mediated events into their isolated lives. At its core, Greendale is about negotiating media boundaries, looking for truths that haven't been bent to resemble their carrier(s). Consequently, Young took the narrative thrust of this story (as depicted in words/lyrics) and cast it across several formats ranging from film to live performance to two CDs to booklets to paintings. Interestingly, Young also added small narrative details to these live performances, relying on the web to bring them together.

I see this project as something quite different from, say, the Matrix series where supplemental narratives were accessed through film and gameplay. In Greendale, we encounter a single narrative changed by its contact with different media, requiring the user/viewer/listener/browser/reader to conciliate meaning between sites.

And so I ask again:

Does anyone have any information regarding any other projects like Greendale? I'm not talking about book-to-movie translation but something else, something where media transition in itself becomes a sort of story, with the primary diegesis remaining relatively static. I don't want to be confined to the digital on this-- in fact, I'd ideally like to know of projects that exist with analog referents as well. I've been somewhat purposefully vague here (or as vague as I can purposefully be) in order to solicit a wide range of responses. Thoughts?