Bibliophile: Returning Full Circle At University of Waterloo

 “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecher


First: I wrote something this week that got published at First Person Scholar. Funny how often a site where you sit on the editorial board publishes your stuff. Check it out!

Second, have  I got a surprise for you. This week, we'll be looking at the new books from.... my home town university! Yes, after many, many months, my alma mater has updated its new books page. After so many trips to universities so far away, we may finally return home. And now, since we've eased up on the rules, I can even grant it a name: welcome, everyone, for a very special Bibliophile, in which we examine the new books at the University of Waterloo.  After the break.

Bibliophile: Machinima, Simpsons, and Radio Waves at The Memorial University of Newfoundland

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

After a brief hiatus, we've back, with a discussion of the new books available at... what's this week's university? Well, it was going to be St. Thomas University, or New Brunswick University, but both of these libraries don't allow searching from anyone who is not a student or faculty member, which is a rather unfriendly, elitist thing to do. And Moncton University is a French school, and while I have nothing against the language, the nontrivial effort it would require me to translate the page prohibits me from picking it. So that's it for New Brunswick. Next, then: The Memorial University of Newfoundland, after the break.

Friday Quotations: Free Market Experience Points

"The paper grounds its argument in Foucault's lectures on biopolitics and liberalism (Sennelart, 2008) and Beck's work on the contemporary risk society (Beck, 2009) to focus on the mediation of the CRPG narrative. If, as McLuhan argues (McLuhan, 1994, 235), games function as faithful models of culture, then we should be able to examine the CRPG for its modeling of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century forms of rationality." Andrew Baerg, "Risky Business: Neo-liberal Rationality and the Computer RPG," in Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Paying Game. Gerald A, Voorhees, Joshua Cal and Katie Whitlock, eds. P 154.

You know it's a quotation from an academic book when the citation is nearly as long as the quotation.

Later Days.

Work in Progress: Nitsche's Video Game Spaces

I haven't done a Work in Progress post in a while.  Since they're basically copying and pasting notes I already have, they're pretty easy to do. So I figured I'd do one.  This particular one is from chapter 9 of Michael Nitsche's Video Game Spaces, "Effects of Narrative Filters." It's fairly brief, in comparison to a lot of these note summaries. And it mentions Sands of Time, God of War, and American McGee's Alice, if that entices you.

If It Takes Me Four Straight Hours of Research on a Sunday, I'll post it, whatever it is

So I totally meant to be posting a Bibliophile post today.  But, I got sidetracked by another project: I've been putting together a list of books related to game studies that are coming out this year. Since there is no easy way to search for these, I put together a list of all publishers who have published game studies books that I know of, and searched through their upcoming books list.  It's a lot like putting together a Bibliophile post, actually.  It's very time-consuming, you're certain there's a better way to do it, and when you're done, you have a list of things you don't have time to read.  That list, then, follows the break.

Bibliophile: Back in the Game at Vancouver Island U

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

This is Bibliophile.

I've skipped Bibliophile for two weeks now; in my defense, they really, really take a long time to do. And between Demon's Souls and Magical Diary, I've been way too busy going to Prom and fighting leech demons to bother. But familiarity with what's new in the academic world of books isn't going to create itself, so here we are.

For those new to the blog, the idea behind Bibliophile is that I peruse the new books acquired by a Canadian university, and comment on the ones that appeal to me.  It's a tough job, but no one really has to do it.  As always, a bold H marks the books that are also in my local university library system. Join me for a glimpse into Vancouver Island University, after the break.

Now, if only someone would invite me on other blogs to do a guest post. HINT HINT.

I gave a guest lecture for an introductory class on popular culture today.  The subject, as longtime readers may have guessed, was video games.  More specifically, it was game studies; I went through the general history of the field and the important approaches As I See Them.  That meant starting with narratology and ludology, then moving into platform studies, paratextual studies, procedural rhetoric, ethnography, and gender studies. And since I basically know nothing about gender studies, that mostly consisted of me explaining how misogynist a lot of gamers are, and a lot of people in the industry. I started things off with a video of an EVE Online super battle that happened a few days ago, to demonstrate both how involved games can be (the fight cost over thousand players approximately $20 000 worth of damage, and destroyed months of work for many of them) but also to demonstrate how difficult it is to study games in an authoritative way; to get the point where you'd be able to say you're an expert scholar studying EVE Online, you'd have to spend literally hundreds of hours embedding yourself in the community and mastering the system. Other highlights included a compare and contrast between early NES commercials and Wii commercials; a very long, rambling story about It Came From the Desert and the struggles of small town geologists; and more examples than I cared to think about concerning how a lot of videogame players are pretty miserable human beings. 

I've interacted with the introductory pop culture class a few times, with different sets of students, and it's always a bit of a crapshoot.  Sometimes, you get students who are really thrilled to have a chance to talk about the things they watch and play everyday; sometimes, you get students from every discipline except the humanities, and they're there because they assumed it'd be an easy course, and they're not going to talk without a figurative gun to their head.  There's nothing wrong with their critical skills, I hasten to add; some of the best students I've ever had the pleasure of teaching come from other critical disciplines.  I think the problem is that the discussion format that the humanities try to encourage is a very different mindset than the more lecture-based class, and sometimes the adjustment from one to the other doesn't go smoothly. This group didn't talk a lot, but I got a few responses, when I waited long enough.

The other problem as far communication goes, much as I'm loathe to admit it, is the subject area. I'm so immersed in game studies and video game culture that I sometimes forget there are people were really don't care about videogames at all.  For some students, they're not engaging because it's a subject matter that, right off the bat, just doesn't interest them.  Games--or at least certain kinds of games--are niche.  But that's the good thing about doing these lectures; it reminds me that there are more points of view than the ones I'm situated in.  That's one of the big advantages of teaching undergraduate classes that have such a wide range of students--there's a chance, even if it's just a sliver, that you'll learn something too.  ....That's a pretty sappy note to go out on.  Still true, though.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: New Media, Stalkers, Girl Power, and Games at SFU

I've been playing Don't Starve. Still trying to figure out the ideal Pig King gold/red meat exchange ratio.

 This is Bibliophile.

 After the break, we'll checking up on what's new at Simon Fraser University. We've been there before, but that was about half a year ago, so I think it's due a repeat performance.

First Person Scholar Launches

I haven't been posting here much recently; that'll change soon, I promise.  In the meantime, while I can't imagine there's very many who read this regularly and don't follow me through other venues, just in case, I wanted to point out that the grad student periodical First Person Scholar has launched.  As the about page suggests, we see the site as a way to fit some of the gaps left by game scholarship, with more direct engagement with videogames, and a faster rate of publication.  We also a place to work out ideas before developing them into larger pieces for journal publication.  And I say we, because I'm on the editorial board.  (Surprise!)  I won't say which member of the editorial board I am, to preserve some shred of my anonymity, but I'm there, rest assured.  It's kind of amazing to see the thing in existence, after talking about it for so long; this has been in the pipeline for at least half a year now, if not longer.  At the moment, I have to say that best thing about it is probably our smooth design interface, courtesy of our editor-in-chief Steve Wilcox.  And while we've populated the site with our own work for now, we will need the submissions of others to keep things going in the long term.  We don't have a general submission call up yet, because we want to get off the ground first, but if you've got a game studies idea burning a hole in your pocket, stay tuned.

Later Days.

Game Studies: A Pointed Digression from the Lord of the Rings

I'm writing up a review for a games studies anthology on Lord of the Rings Online called Ringbearers. Like most of my game studies-related book reviews these days, I'm keeping the main text to myself, in the vain hope that I'll one day be able to publish it in a venue that's a little more likely to be noticed than my modest blogging efforts.   However, there's a short part of the review that I've decided isn't worth keeping for that purpose, simply because it could never be published anywhere else--not because it's bad writing, but because it's a bit too vitriolic and rambling to be allowed in a place with a certain objective standard. 

So clearly, it's perfect for posting to this blog. 

And while, yes, it's rambling and somewhat accusatory, I think it's still worth posting somewhere, because I think it speaks to an important part of game studies, the part that leads to dozens of studies of Grand Theft Auto while ignoring every other sandbox game, the part that defines MMOs by what you can do in War of Warcraft.  So here it is.

Bibliophile: The Wizard of Oz & Affirmative Action: Where are the Tin Woodswomen?

My feet were cold last night, so I didn't get any sleep.  Something  smoetinhg shmneoitg nonsequitor.

This is Bibliophile.

Bibliophile: Fiction and Games

The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  But the umbrella owners will inherit the earth.

This is Bibliophile.

Bibliophile: Derrida, Hayles, and Fart Jokes

Chairs are stools that got uppity.

This is Bibliophile.

Book Triad: Try to make a game out of your crippling alienation at the bottom of the ocean.

Welcome to the second edition of triple book reviews.  If you missed last time, the rules are simple. I read two nonfiction books and one fiction, write a paragraph long review of each, and then spend a paragraph on general musing. And them we can all go home. That sounds nice, doesn't it? Without further ado, then, this installment's books are:
 Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
Starfish by Peter Watts
 Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as Cultural Practice

Book Review: The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart

“At the center of the whole discussion on the ethics of computer games, beyond developers and publishers and academes, we should find the players—not as inane inout providers, target groups, or research subjects, but as complex moral beings who will think, reason, and argue about the ethical implications and values of their actions within the game world. It is our moral duty to encourage players to behave ethically and to develop their moral strengths while better ethical games are produced, and we should encourage ourselves to dare to play ethically. Because nothing is ‘just a game’ anymore.” --Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games. 

 As promised, here's the review of Sicart's book.  We're going to be talking about moral philosophy, player subjects, and ethical design, after the break.

Bibliophile: Of Ossuaries and Operas

Is there any better way to ring in the New Year than with an examination of the books a university receives on a weekly basis?

Well, yes, actually. I can think of a half dozen or so rather quickly. But this is the way we're doing things here. Waiving the further adieu, here's Bibliophile.

There's a mere 1000 new books this week; it looks like the torrent dwindles to a trickle when most of the university staff are still out on break. A mere 1000. My, we'll be done this in no time.

Sins of old age 14 piano pieces [electronic resource] / composed by Gioachino Antonio Rossini. [S.l.] : ASV, 1998.
We appear to be getting another influx of musical sources. My google scholarship tells me that Rossini was a 19th century Italian composer, probably best known for his opera, the Barber of Seville. And the opera itself is probably best known for its Bugs Bunny parody, which I'll embed here:

I love Elmer Fudd's sense of entitlement on where it's okay to enter with a shotgun. It's like some hunter version of extreme golf; as long as the rabbit's in play, everywhere is fair game.

Cd-induced responses in plasma ionic regulation and oxidative stress in rainbow trout (O. mykiss) or lake whitefish (C. clupeaformis) during chronic waterborne exposure / by Amanda Mancini.
This entry is sandwiched between Preludi Ostinati and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 9. I really don't understand how the entries in these lists that are outside the Library of Congress filing are organized.

Devil's trill, and other violin sonatas [electronic resource]. London : Hyperion, 1991. Tartini, Giuseppe, 1692-1770.
Going back a little further, we have Tartini, an 18th century composer. I thought I'd look into anyone who had a good claim to doing Satan and fiddles before "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" made it cool. And since I'm in an embedding sort of mood, here it is:

At 13 + minutes, it's a little beyond what I'd call easy listening, but it's not bad.

Controversy spaces : a model of scientific and philosophical change / edited by Oscar Nudler. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub. Co., c2011.
Almost half way in, and we hit the listings proper. Nudler's anthology looks at issues of science and philosophy in terms of theoretical model based on the controversy a particular theory can create. Some of the controversies covered include general histories of catastrophes, the history of the mind, irreversibility from Fourier to chaos theory, linguistics, and DNA molecules. That's a staggering range of scope, if nothing else. And at a $150 price tag on Amazon.ca, this is one book that I'd definitely go with the library's copy.

Dial M for mentor : reflections on mentoring in film, television, and literature / Jonathan Gravells and Sue Wallace. Charlotte, NC : Information Age Publishing, c2011.
I'm focusing on this one because I was hoping they'd cover that Seinfeld episode where George attempts mentoring. Judging from Google Books, we're covering Shawshank Redemption, Jeeves and Wooster, Boston Legal, Lear, Buffy, The Matrix, and the Sopranos. So we have another very wide scope, albeit one of a very different nature. I'm not sure how you could approach something so large without it falling apart a bit, but the effort itself is noteworthy.

Cocktail hour under the tree of forgetfulness / Alexandra Fuller. New York : Penguin Press, 2011.
This one caught my eye as it was an unusual title to find outside of the fiction section. It appears to be a biographical examination of Fuller's mother, and her connection to Africa.

Players unleashed! : modding the Sims and the culture of gaming / Tanja Sihvonen. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press c2011.
Videogame books get a mention. Always. To be honest, you'd have to do some talking at this point to convince me that the Sims are still worth talking about, after being covered so thoroughly by game scholarship, but it sounds like Sihvonen is on the right track, focusing on the cultural contexts of Sims mods. And, browsing through her works cited (again, thanks to the power of Google. How did I ever do research before it? Don't answer that), she's mentioning all the right game studies people, from Aarseth to Wolf. Might be worth a look at some point. Mental note.

Next, a string of digital media books. First up:
Access contested : security, identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace information revolution and global politics / edited by Ronald Deibert ... [et al.]. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, c2012.
Essentially, it's a discussion of how the Internet, especially in terms of censorship and piracy, is evolving on the Asian continent. As you'd imagine, China looms large, but there's also discussion of the Malaysian blogosphere, regulation in Thailand, social institutions in the Phillipines, and opposition media in Burma. I can't say I recognize any of the contributors, but I imagine it would be a culturally enlightening read. Or utterly unfathomable. There tends not to be much middle ground in these cultural studies books.

Cultures of participation : media practices, politics and literacy / Hajo Greif ... [et al.] (eds.) Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, c2011.
Apparently, it's a collection of the papers delivered at the COST 298 Conference in Copenhagen, May 2009. It's an international, interdisciplinary conference focusing on how social media and technology change people's lives. Hmmm. Worth knowing that this conference exists, yes? The program for 2009 is here, if you're curious, though none of the panels in particular jump out at me.

Handbook of Internet studies / edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess. Chichester, West Sussex, UK ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
And then there's this. This book probably wouldn't have made it on my radar, to be honest, as these very general anthologies tend to be a dime a dozen (figuratively speaking; practically speaking, they tend to be much, much more than a dime a dozen). But Consalvo, a game studies prof who has shown up here before, makes it worth a look. Glancing purely at the chapter headings, it seems a little perfunctory, ("Internet and religion," "Internet and Games") and the only user review floating around for it seems to be rather damning. All the essays seem to have been written for the book, which makes for an interesting contrast with other anthologies, such as Nayar's New Media and Cybercultures Anthology. Nayar's book, in contrast, is a collection of essays written elsewhere, and gathered because they speak to a particular context. The pitfall of the former method is that it covers everything, but without depth; the pitfall of the second is that the topics are always considered outside of the original intent. I suppose the difference is in the titles; a handbook needs to be a survey of the area, and an anthology is, comparatively, a collection of difference. Personally, I'd use the handbook for a first year course, and the anthology for a second. (And I actually have used Nayar's anthology to teach a second year course. So there you go.)


Empire of death : a cultural history of ossuaries and charnel houses. New York : Thames & Hudson, 2011. Koudounaris, Paul.
Because you can never get enough charnel houses.

Postal pleasures : sex, scandal, and Victorian letters / Kate Thomas. New York : Oxford University Press, c2012. Thomas, Katie-Louise.
And here we are in the literature section. It's still early, but rather short on fiction this time around; it's much more focused on the scholarship about fiction. I mention this book because, to be honest, I find all the 19th century writing I read to be incredibly boring, despite the attempt of numerous colleagues to the contrary. The actual history is incredibly fascinating, from the British Empire to the Industrial Revolution to the rise of science. But the fiction and poetry and so forth? Eh. This may--may--be a good way to challenge my views on that front.

Vigilante women in contemporary American fiction / Alison Graham-Bertolini. 1st ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
I was hoping for a book on Buffy and Sarah Conner and Ripley and the like. What we're getting here is a bit more "traditionalist" with a study of the writings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Faulkner and the like. Still good. I guess.

Portraits of a few of the people I've made cry : stories / Christine Sneed. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, c2010.
There's the fiction! I'd like a list of the people I've made cry. It would probably be a short list. The list of people who have made me cry is... I regret opening this line of discussion.


Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Media Empire

Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois personality required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and just as twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest deceptions), so virtual games are media constitutive of twenty-first-century global hypercapitalism and, perhaps, also of lines of exodus from it.” --Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greg de Peuter, Games of Empire.
Later Days.

Book Review: Cheating by Mia Consalvo

"Playing the game is almost superfluous"--(Consalvo 179)


I have a confession to make. I use the built-in dictionary feature in the Scrabble Facebook app. I use it, and I don't intend to stop.

As far as confessions go, this is hardly earth-shattering. At best, it could muster the energy to stir a bit of mud, but only if that mud was especially viscous. This is because, in large part, for the Scrabble app, the dictionary is built in. You actually can't enter a word that doesn't appear in its built-in dictionary, so using the app to look up a word or two seems less like a crime and more like a time-saving device. Of course, if anyone attempted to go to a word-generating site, that would clearly be wrong. And you could never play a word that you got from that site. It would be immoral. Unconscionable. Unthinkable. Unless it was a really, really good word.

My point here is not that I am a huge cheater (if I was, I'd have a much higher Scrabble rating) but that breaking the rules, cheating, isn't always a black-and-white thing. It is, however, an issue of social convention, and a process of constant negotiation. At least, that's the argument Mia Consalvo presents in her 2007 book Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames.

In the book, Consalvo investigates cheating in video games, taking an ethnographic approach that involves in-depth interviews, a perusal of the archives of the Nintendo Power magazine, and a whopping 500 hours of personal experience in Final Fantasy XI. The book is decidedly not theory-heavy, but there are two concepts in particular that Consalvo borrows heavily for her argument. First, she uses Gerard Gennette's definition of the term "paratext," which loosely refers to everything about a text that influences the reading of that text but isn't actually a part of it. A preview is part of the paratext of a movie, a review is part of the paratext of a book, and the gift shop is paratext for a trip through a museum--although as that last example shows, the line between text and paratext is blurry. The other concept she uses is Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, the way participation in culture defines a particular class or group of people. In particular, she argues that it is by participating in the paratext of videogames that gamers accumulate "gaming" capital, and esteem in that particular group. For example, if Player X joins forum discussions on the preview for a game, writes a lengthy walkthrough on a website, and eventually creates a mod that allows players to instantly kill other players in the game, she has accumulated a great deal to her personal gaming capital regarding that game, even if it's largely in a way that its designers wouldn't approve of. There's also repeated reference to Huizinga's conception of the magic circle (that players of a game agree to dwell within a "magic circle" where the rules of the game apply), but Consalvo is not so much using this idea as challenging it. Finally, there's an occasional reference to Foucault's discussion of the diffusion of power flow, as it regards to the power between game companies and game players.

The book is divided into three parts, and eight chapters. The first part is a more historical view of videogames and cheating, tacitly endorsed or otherwise. Chapter One looks at the history of game cheating in terms of the paratext of the early Nintendo console games--ie.) Nintendo Power. Derided at times for being a propaganda tool for the larger game company, Nintendo Power also played a decisive role in determining what constituted proper game play behavior. For example, it published strategy guide articles and walkthroughs in its main coverage of a game, but relegated codes and secrets to other sections, implying there was a difference between consulting these walkthroughs and using the cheats. At the same time, it implied that the truly savvy gameplayer was aware of all the game's secrets, cheating or otherwise. Nintendo cultivated a generation of game players, and other magazines followed suit.

Chapter Two looks at the strategy guide market, and how it fulfilled its own version of what a "proper" game experience should look like. Its evolution, from cheap paperbacks promising thousands of secrets to glossy productions sold with the game itself, marks how cheating--in the form of consulting a walkthrough--can become part of the official paratext of a game and welcomed into the larger corporate market.

Finally, the third chapter starts to push some boundaries, with a discussion of game enhancers such as Game Genie and Game Shark, and game mod chips that allow the play of pirated or ported games. Clearly, there's a limit as to what third party products a console company is going to allow, or at least challenge. (The original Game Genie manufacturers, for example, were sued by Nintendo for creating "derivative works" and experiences that dampened Nintendo's own profits--and Nintendo not only lost, but were ordered to pay the company $13 million to compensate for suspending sales during the trial.)

The second half of the book looks at player experiences, both Consalvo's own and those of the people she interviewed. Chapter 4 examines player-defined determinations of cheating, as presented by the people Consalvo interviews. Cheating can be conceived of as occurring on a subjective scale: there's the purist, who regards any sort of outside help as cheating--no hints, no walkthroughs. There's those who allow walkthroughs, but refuse codes. And there's those who believe that it's not cheating and can't be cheating, as long as no other person is involved. As to why people cheat, the most common reasons include getting stuck, ludic pleasure in stomping around with godlike power, or the desire to see the game through when time demands don't allow a full play.

Chapter 5 shifts the focus from cheating in single-person games to cheating in multiplayer contexts. She identifies four main types: exploiting glitches, exploiting other players, exploiting codes, and using third party programs. The first is often seen not so much as cheating but manipulating the environment of the game--unless you push the limits and exploit something such as an item duplication system. The second is your basic manipulation or phishing schemes. The third is the use of aimbots or wallhacks, to improve your play artificially. And the last refers to going further than hacks and using fully developed programs to automate your characters.

Chapter 6 looks at the means through which companies contest these cheaters, and how these approaches define different versions of cheating. One company prevents any form of cheating, and thus treats it as an anonymous force. One counters the effects of cheating, and thus sees it as an action, rather than a group of people. And one collects and bans any who cheat, regarding cheating as a permanent identity.

Chapter 7 is on Consalvo's play of FFXI Online, and an investigation into cheating and the grey areas of rules as the come up in that game. Specifically, she looks at power leveling, bot farming, and gil-selling (that is, selling in-game money for real money), and how each creates challenges, both in player discourse and in the way the designers attempt to eliminate the problem. In general, Consalvo argues for a punishment system that incorporates player input. The final chapter and section is a bit of a round-up of what's been discussed, and a quick discussion of things that didn't fit earlier. Namely, she briefly discusses user-generated walkthroughs, such as Alakhazam and GameFAQs and their contributions to game capital. The book ends with a repeat of Consalvo's main argument: that cheating should not be regarded as a form of identity, but as a practice, a behavior that many people indulge in while playing in some form or other, and a practice that allows us to fully examine what it means to play by the rules.

It's a pretty good book, and it manages to say a lot without being overly pedantic or technical. I'll admit that it took me a while to figure out why Consalvo was emphasizing industry in a book on what seemed like a type of player practice, but as I read on, it became increasingly difficult to refute that the game industry does its best to manage the concept of the ideal, capital-laden gamer to their own advantage, up to and including what forms of cheating are permissible or not. It's especially interesting in a case such as mod chips where cheating goes as far as real-world legality. Consalvo never quite goes this far in her discussion, but it seems like you could fairly extend many parts of her discussion on negotiating the meaning of cheating to negotiating the meaning of breaking the law in general, and where grey areas do or do not exist.

If there is a flaw in the book, it's in the history of the early stages of cheating, in that it's entirely console-heavy and ignores the similar histories and movements going on at the same time on the PC side of things. Considering that Consalvo's argument later delves into hacks for online games, I think a discussion of such early hacking mentalities and how they constitute their own form of gaming capital is an essential missing piece in her historic approach. I think she does address this omission at some point, but it still seems like a large missing piece.

But it's still a great book. I was worried that Consalvo would focus on paratext to the exclusivity of the actual games, but the chapter on FFXI alleviated that concern. (And in passing, Consalvo has definitely gotten a lot of mileage out of that game--"http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifLag, Language, and Lingo: Theorizing Noise in Online Game Spaces" in the Video Game Theory Reader 2 also focuses heavily on the game, but utilizes an entirely different set of elements in it) And I tend to distrust ethnographic approaches; after reading a few books on stat-balancing and survey design, I realized how easy it is to skew the results in your favor. But Consalvo supports her findings through other means, and relies on them more for context for her argument than as set-in-stone supporting points.

If anyone finds the issues Consalvo's raised interesting (I know I did), I can recommend some further reading. On the player behavior side of things, this link goes to an account by a user named Nightfreeze, on how he got even with some dirty dealers in Eve Online. And if you want something a little more scholarly, I'd recommend Steven Downing's "Online Gaming and the Social Construction of Virtual Victimization" in Eludamos 4.2. While it's not about cheating per se, it does cover players' responses to various forms of victimization, including responses to being cheated. As for me, I'm going to pursue the corporate business angle that Consalvo raised, first by reading Digital Play by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter. And then I'll follow Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter to Games of Empire. Well, that's going to take the rest of my summer, then.
Later Days.

Welcome toThe Daily---: A Story of Delayed Gratification

Well, that was weird.

I was embarking on my usual daily anaerobic exercises--200 push-ups, 200 sit-ups, and some light weightlifting (yes, I'm trying to brag in an overly affected modest manner, just ignore politely and move on)--and, also as usual, my background noise per choice was an episode of the Daily Show, as streamed through the Comedy Network's website. (Look at that! A legal use of the Internet to watch television. How quaint.) But due to a crossed wire of some sort, the show kept stopping every fifteen seconds or so in order to load. So I'd get a few seconds of some joke, then a weird pause. I endured this process for approximately 20 minutes of work-out time, during which I received about 9 minutes of actual show. (BTW, the original title of this post was "Welcome to the Daily Sh---," which was more faithful to the actual pause in my viewing, but provided a sort of mixed message in terms of signaling today's content.) This stilted method of viewing drew a number of things to mind:
1) It was the first time I finished the my exercises before the interview segment, making it my fastest workout ever. (I know this isn't actually the case, but please, be quiet; I really need a win right now.)
2) I'm reminded of how big a role immediacy plays in the modern media culture. I want what I want, and I want it now. Internet lags, television commercials, video game loading time, waiting for book releases, listening to an entire song (I've got a friend with a record player) --they're all anathema to culture of NOW, dammit. I had to actively resist an urge to turn off the stream, because a large part of me would rather listen to nothing than be forced to wait.
3) The pauses really drew attention to the structure of the show. The Daily Show is very formulaic in this regard; there's the opening run-through of the news, a consultation with one of the reporters/comedy people, and a commercial. Followed by a a more in-depth look at some more news items (or a feature on-location piece by one of the reporters), another commercial, and then a closing interview. The formulaic approach comes in part from the news format the show is satirizing, and in part from the late night talk show format that it actually is. But another big reason for the formula is that, once people are used to it, they ignore it, and that's what the show wants you to do--to focus on the content rather than their format.

The constant breaks drew attention to the format. Not at the broad level I've been describing, but at the micro-level of the individual joke. There's the framing, from Jon Stewart, the set-up (some kind of news clip, usually), the punchline, and the laughter. With the show slowed down to a crawl, I found myself looking for each element more and more. And because the cut-off happened at various places, I got to see how each element blended into and anticipated the next, particularly the set-up and laughter. You could often predict exactly what Stewart was going to do for the punchline, just from the news clip used. And despite what you might think, the joke doesn't end with the punchline, but with the laughter, the reaction to the punchline. I think both of these elements draw attention to how much of comedy and humor is in its communal component; to follow Kenneth Burke a bit, you identify with the group by anticipating Jon's joke and reacting with them. Of course, that's the main function of a studio audience to begin with.
(There's been a lot of noise in the press this year comparing Jon Stewart to Glenn Beck. It would be interesting to see if his show, while not a comedy, follows the same pattern of formula and community creation/enforcement. If only I could figure out a way of doing it without actually watching the show...)

4) It reminded me a lot of my own research habits. Particularly, it mirrored the painstaking efforts I once went through to map out the conversation tree of a scene in the video game Mass Effect (in case aficionados are wondering, it was the scene with Wrex on Virmire. Flowchart of the conversation is available upon request). There would be a few seconds of speech, then I'd push pause, and frantically rush over to my computer to type out what had just been said. It was significantly worse than transcribing an actual video, because there's no rewind button; if I missed something, I had to reload the entire scene and try again.

More generally, it reminded me of my close-reading method, which is basically to read a passage, stop reading, spend a few seconds jotting notes and reflecting, then return to the text. Watching the Daily Show in this broken manner reminded me of the pros and cons of this approach--you get a very good reading on the micro-level, but at the cost of missing the bigger picture. I might have to rethink my approach a little in the future.

To recap: muscle building, entertainment, and scholarly reflection, all in one 20 minute work-out. Truly, I am the modern Renaissance man. Ladies, get in line.

Later Days.