From social media to games…

To segue the class from last week into this week here is something I found pretty interesting. It is a flash video, using the technique of machinima, posted on Vimeo (a website arguably similar to Youtube), that is a critique (the author calls it “reverse propaganda”) of U.S. military practices. Oh, and it just happens to be made by one of the guys that made the McDonalds game that was mentioned in this week’s reading.

So we’ve got a video, made with a video game, on a socially networked video sharing site, talking about a social issue, made by a video game designer.

It’s almost more meta than I can handle. Anyways, here it is:

Welcome to the desert of the real

Quick edit: I forgot to mention a key point: The video game used to make the machinima is America’s Army, which just happens to be the first person shooter that the Department of Defense commissioned in 2002, which was also talked about in the Bogost reading for this week.

All Your Database Are Belong to Us?

In “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation”, by Johndan Johnson-Eilola, I found several things interesting. The main one is that this line of argument seems totally contrary to what Lessig was talking about in his TED talk. Lessig seems to be saying that if the masses of technology users rise up and communicate their thoughts that conceptions of fair use should be expanded, copyright holders (and the legal system) will listen, much like they did when BMI won their battle against ASCAP, with the end result being that information is free.

Video Games as an Enabler of New Literacies?

I’ve been contemplating for a while about what to write in this blog post, because I’ve been faced with a bit of a problem: in the article that I read for this week, James Paul Gee’s “Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance“, Gee doesn’t seem to be talking about literacy at all, and Certainly not literacy as defined by Lankshear and Knobel in their plenary address. Their revised definition in “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” fits a bit better, but literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” seems so nebulous and hedged as to include almost anything within its purview (4). Even working from that definition (which uses Gee’s own research in discourse theory), I have trouble finding anything that remotely relates to what I would normally think of as literacy in Gee’s chapter. The closest he gets is discussing the sporadic text that happens in between all the action in video games. That isn’t literacy, that is just playing around, right?