[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 112, Issue 23

Sat Mar 29 04:08:27 EST 2014

I will try to address everyone's points to the best of my ability, and then try and answer Christine's question that I forgot to address in my last post.

RE: Kara Stone. You are absolutely right in that it doesn't necessarily matter whether we are techy or not. I myself am not particularly techy, but am trying to learn more about the codes I use and their history. What is important is that we get meaning from the tools we use and the experiences we get from them.

To clarify my argument a little better--and not to sound too technologically deterministic--Langdon Winner (1986) wrote about the inherent politics of technology in The whale and the reactor where he emphasized that all technologies carry their politics, whether embedded by the designer or from the "nature" of the technology. For example, he discussed how nuclear technology had to be an inherently authortarian technology, because if everyone had access to it we would all be in trouble.

RE: Felan Parker. To tie the paragraph above into your post, it is important that we understand that all platforms have inherent politics in them, and that those politics can shift with time. When YouTube was released over a decade ago everyone discussed how democratic it was and how it enabled a whole range of marginalized film artists to publish their projects. However, we have come to realize in recent years that YouTube censors many projects for "supposed" violations of copyright, intellectual property, hate-speech, ethics, morality-based laws, and the ever ambivalent national security legislation. The point here is that you are right to say that Twine is not in the same league as Unity or GameMaker (its open-source), but it is an organization (open-source community) with its own politics; it just may not be apparent to us yet what those politics are yet, and what potential effects it may have on our freedom of expression.

RE: Christine Kim. I come from an old-fashioned (can I say retro?) artist background printing wood-cuts and lead-type on nineteenth-century printing presses. I have always found printed wood-cut illustrations to be beautiful, and I hope to create my own wood-cuts from scratch and incorporate their art into my games. George A. Walker at OCAD has been making his own wood-cut illustration, non-textual "silent" novels for decades: as in each page of his book is a different wood-cut illustration that he carved in his workshop. So I guess I come to my projects with a specific kind of art in mind, though when I started working with printing presses I didn't have a particular artistic style in mind.

Cheers,

Chris

On Mar 28, 2014, at 11:11 AM, "Felan Parker" <felan.parker at hotmail.com<mailto:felan.parker at hotmail.com>> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> It's important for people to know their tools if their work is not to be
> determined by them. Game development tools are not made by or for a
> different constituency from the rest of the industry. In their
> reification and distribution of solved technical problems they all but
> force recapitulation of the status quo artistically, technically and
> developmentally.

This isn't really true of all game-making programs. While I appreciate that it's potentially useful to critique the underpinnings and assumptions of game design software, programs like Twine, IV Engine, or Scratch are very much made "for a different constituency from the rest of the industry." Indeed, they are not made by or for "the industry" at all - Twine games are almost universally non-commercial, and the program is explicitly designed to encourage the challenging of the gaming status quo (even more so now that it has become popular among women, queers, POC, and other marginalized people). For some analysis of Twine along these lines, check out Jane Friedhoff's platform study: http://lmc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/DiGRA13/papers/paper_67.pdf

We should engage the politics of platforms, but I think it's reductive to suggest that all game-making programs reinforce the same status quo. Twine is a very different beast from Game Maker or Unity.

Felan

> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:41:00 -0700
> From: rob at robmyers.org<mailto:rob at robmyers.org>
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 112, Issue 23
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> On 27/03/14 02:22 PM, Kara Stone wrote:
> >
> > I wonder how important it is that blossoming game-makers actually
> > understand how the programs they are using work.
>
> It's important for people to know their tools if their work is not to be
> determined by them. Game development tools are not made by or for a
> different constituency from the rest of the industry. In their
> reification and distribution of solved technical problems they all but
> force recapitulation of the status quo artistically, technically and
> developmentally.
>
> > There seems to be something in particular about game-making that makes
> > people want to hold on to the code, hierarchizing programming and
> > “techy-ness” above all other aspects of game-making.
>
> I went into games programming a few years after leaving art school and
> was gobsmacked at management's resistance to paying for some decent
> coloured pencils for the artist designing the characters for the game to
> use.
>
> > The emphasis on “knowing the tech” strikes me as a another way to
> > ensure that women, POC, the debilitated, and the very young or old,
> > are not part of the dominant game-world.Not to say that any of us
> > can’t be techy,
>
> If being techy is such a determining signifier and enforcer of hegemony,
> why would any of us want to?
>
> And what would we do instead? Simply recapitulating the status quo
> through using tools determined by it is not a critical stance.
>
> > but to ensure that techyness is something dominated by white, cis,
> > 20-30 year old men.
>
> Not entirely to their benefit:
>
> http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
>
> - Rob.
>
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