Civilization in the Digital Age: Virtual Spaces and Hybrid Reality

Well, the White Whale is slain. My final paper is done. Soon the Rachel will come round to pick up the surviving orphans from the sea, and I'll go back home to warmth and solitude.

In any case, I decided to include a link to the paper in a .doc format, as I know I hate reading papers like this on blogs. I hope you enjoy!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_oHVteZi_KNWHZsMWxIdUhXQ0U/edit?usp=sharing

UPDATED: (TWO of my) Final Product(s)

Like I said in my last post, my final project has kind of broken into many different pieces, but I made good on the promise from my proposal and made a little ebook of my essays on games and literature, which you can find here. It's in epub format, which most e-readers, tablets, and smartphones should support with the right app, or you can read it on the web through Firefox or Chrome with the right add-on/extension. A good Chrome e-reader add-on I found is Readium.

Also, I can't post my paper on the classical unities in videogames online because it's going to be published at First-Person Scholar, but here's a link to a doc of it.

If e-readers aren't your thing, all of the essays are also available (along with some other stuff I've written on games) at my personal gaming blog, Complicate the Narrative.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy!

One Success, Two More Potentials

So my final project has fractured into many different things all at once, but I've submitted three different articles/essays to three different people, and they've now all responded.

First of all, the gaming blog/game blogging aggregator Critical Distance accepted and featured my piece "The Romantic Dead" in their feature "This Week In Videogame Blogging" for this week (week of December 8). That's a big deal because it puts my name right next to a lot of the biggest in the business of videogame writing right now (and it's given a healthy spike to my blog views for the past couple days, too).

Next, Dr. Olvier Turle, founder of the literature blog Interesting Literature and now writer at the Huffington Post, liked my post "Journey and the Epic" and has said he wants to feature it as a guest blog piece in the near future, but it busy right now and will get back to me in a couple weeks.

Finally, the guys over at First Person Scholar liked my "Romantic Dead" piece, but said they don't host things already hosted somewhere else (even my personal blog), so I wrote a new piece entitled "All in One: Open World Games and the Classical Unities" that I've sent to them and they said they'd like to feature it, I just needed some revisions and a few more references. So I'm hard at work on that.

Anyway, so far at least that's 3 for 3, as long as those last two work out. This is amazing results and I'm so excited to see where this goes.

Pinterest Project Proposal

Working Title:
You Are What You Pin: Analyzing People Identities Based on Pinterest Pins

Working Thesis:
As people become involved with Pinterest, they not only showcase their interests but also show their identities through their likes, pins, and repins on Pinterest.

Preliminary Exploration:
For my preliminary exploration, I have been gathering data via Google Alerts--not that much comes up regarding Pinterest and identity, but I have found some good articles on social media in general and identity, which I think have pointed me in the right direction.

My previous blog posts have also looked at Moby Dick and Pinterest and a couple of curation posts here and here. What got me interested in this topic in the first place was reading Girl Wide Web 2.0, especially the chapters that dealt with identity and social media.

Relevance:
I think that this is topic is relevant because as we are spending more time with social media, we are needing to adjust and find ways to best represent ourselves online. There are different ways that people can represent themselves online, such as personally or professionally. From a Pinterest account, not only can people show their likes and interests but they also can show what is going on with their lives at the current time, such as a decorating for a new house or planning a party.

Format:
For the format of this project, I've decided to do a survey (click right here if you would like to take it) about Pinterest and identity to see if I could find a correlation between the two. I will then write a paper describing my background research and my findings and conclusions from the survey.

Outlet:
As stated from my last blog post, I was interested in the CATaC Conference because its theme is the closest to what I want to present. The papers can be in a short (3-5 pages) or long (10-15 pages) format. Since I plan on including the stats of my survey, the paper will be in the longer length. The paper is due on February 14.

Curation:
My curation includes gathering data from the survey and pinning images on Pinterest that correspond with the personality traits I used in the survey. The pinboards are as follows: extroverted, introverted, sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking, prospecting, and judging--the pins are typical of those personality traits, and I tried to get as wide of a variety as possible.

Social Proof:
I've gotten lots of people to respond to my survey so far, and I've had a couple of shares for my survey on Google+ and Facebook. I've also shared the survey to communities on Google+ (the Pinterest and Digital Identities communities to be exact), and I am looking forward to sharing my conclusions with these groups after I finish this project.

Next Steps:
The next steps include to finish gathering data from the survey, compile it all, and see if there really is a strong correlation between personality traits and pins on Pinterest. Since I don't know exactly what they will entail, I want to gather more secondary sources about analyzing identity from personality traits so I can see if the results from my survey might actually mean anything. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

That's it for now. I would appreciate any feedback and will offer up my feedback for your proposals as well.

I Got a Little Eager

So Greg just sent me a link to this great post at Interesting Literature, an academic blog focusing on a wide range of literary topics. I saw that my recent post on my gaming blog, "Journey and the Epic" spoke a lot to that guest post, so I just went for it and submitted that to them as a possible guest post.

Then I figured while I was at it, I should just submit my other post, "The Romantic Dead" to another academic blog I've been looking at, First Person Scholar. So I did.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I put both of those posts into a word document and discovered the were both already in the 8 page range, and I was worried about how I could translate them into regular papers from a blog format (especially "The Romantic Dead," since I depend on pictures a lot in that one) so I decided submitting to academic blogs was a good idea so I could preserve the original format. Also, I figured academic blogs would be a good idea because they generally get back to you faster and publish quicker, and I'm trying to gather as much clout as possible for my graduate school applications that'll be going out early next year. Since I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing in the Fall, I decided against a conference submission, especially since I just did a conference and wanted to try something new.

So that was quick, but quite a rush. We'll see what they say and I'll let you all know how it goes.

Final Project Proposal: Complicate the Narrative/"The Romantic Dead"

1. Working Thesis Statement
My project is twofold: I want to produce a short e-book with several essays connecting videogames and literary traditions and thinking, and I want to submit one of those essays, "The Romantic Dead," for publication somewhere.

For the e-book, the purpose is basically "Videogames are a new medium, but they speak to the artistic traditions of the mediums that preceded them and expand on themes and ideas of the past in new ways native to this new interactive medium, and this book shows several ways in which that is true."

For the essay "The Romantic Dead," the thesis is "TellTale's The Walking Dead and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us are both neo-romantic pieces that update the ideals of romanticism to the post-industrial state."

2. Preliminary exploration
I've done plenty on both these fronts. My personal gaming blog has several posts I've already written that link literature and videogames. I read and reviewed Ian Bogost's book How to Do Things With Videogames. I've also curated a lot of content on the debate over videogames as art here.

3. Relevance
To digital culture: Many lament the rise of digital culture as a kind of death of civilization and great art, but this project seeks to prove otherwise, and instead show how digitally native mediums only enhance art and are just another step forward.

To a specific audience: I'm hoping the e-book will serve as a kind of primer for humanities students and teachers trying to bring this new form of expression into their classrooms and studies. Also, I feel like serious gamers--especially those who have played the game I write about--will be very interested in these essays just as a way to get them deeper into the worlds of the games they play.

4. Format
Like I said before, I'll have two formats here: one will be a more formal research paper (that could easily be a guest blog post as well) and the other will be an e-book that I'll also have available in PDF format (I have to typeset a book for a print publishing class I'm taking, so I might as well just do this, right?).

5. Outlet
There are several outlets I'm looking at for both sides of this project.

I really want to submit one or two of the essays to the BYU English Symposium to get these discussions going in the BYU community, but there are other venues I'm exploring as well.

I've been eyeing the online journal Game Studies for awhile, and think "The Romantic Dead" might be a good fit for it. I also like the website First Person Scholar, and though their call for papers says they focus on graduate students, I still think my work could get accepted there. Finally, the RE: Humanities conference is specifically asking for writing about games, so it could be a venue that is eager to accept my work.

6. Curation
Content for analysis: see the pictures and links in my posts here and here.

Secondary texts:

• Jo Ann Bagerly's doctoral dissertation Henry Treece and the New Apocalypse: a Study of English Neo-Romanticism
• Ian Bogost's How to Do Things With Videogames
• Adam Sessler's review of The Last of Us

Community:

• Greg recently showed me the Google+ community World of Video Game where he shared a video from one of my posts that currently has 94 +1's.
• Subreddits /r/gaming, /r/truegaming, and /r/games are all reddit communities interested in games and game thinking
• Video Games is another Google+ community that's very active and encourages a lot of discussion

7. Social Proof

I've worked a lot with both +Greg Bayles and +Gideon Burton already discussing these ideas, and both have reacted positively and encouraged me to move forward. I received a lot of positive feedback when I presented my paper from last semester on Shakespeare and videogames at RMMLA, which encouraged me to keep writing about the connection between literature and videogames. In an information session with the faculty of the MIT graduate program in Comparative Media Studies Writing, the director of the MIT Game Lab, Philip Tan said my research works in perfectly with their program and what's going on in game studies right now.

To be honest, I still feel like I haven't found the community that I know is out there talking about games like I do, but I've found a lot of good people and continue to search all over for like-minded people.

8. Next steps
I have lots of content already, so next steps for me are to figure out the best way to collect these essays into an e-book and how best to distribute that, as well as study the specific submission guidelines for each venue and adapt my work for each of them. I'll also continue searching for communities and venues, just to make sure I get the widest interested audience possible.

Journey and the Epic

Here's another re-post from my personal gaming blog that I'll probably work into my final project.

Journey, developed by thatgamecompany as part of a partnership with Sony, is one of my favorite games ever made. Despite being short, simple, minimalist, and offering virtually no challenge, it has had the biggest impact on me of any game I've ever played, and I'm hardly the only person to say things like that. Among the many reasons already given for why Journey is so great, I'd like to add a new one: Journey is actually the simplest, most universal epic poem ever written.

Possible Venues for the Final Paper/Project -- Pinterest and Identity

Finally getting around to posting my list of venues for my final paper on Pinterest and digital identity. I really liked Greg's suggestion for the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association for the Women's Studies conference, but since the deadline has passed, I thought I should see if I could find something with future deadline and similar subject matter.

Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space -- Although this venue's mission statement says it wants to provide opportunities for doctoral and master's students, it doesn't put that stipulation on those who wish to submit their work. I feel like this would be a good choice for me and lots of other people in my Digital Culture class. It offers a very broad range of topics (such as crowdsourcing in journalism and social media in journalism, +Kayla Swan) , but the one that I would be interested in is the topic of social media and new practices of identity. Check it out if your topic has anything to do with social media. Proposals are due March 7 and full papers in May.

CATaC 2014 Conference -- Culture, Technology, and Communication (CATaC) holds a biennial publication and conference for subjects regarding culture, technology, and communication. This year's conference is dealing with Design/Production and Practice of the aforementioned topics. The topic that I'm interested in is in the Practice category: the construction of identity using online social media. I think this is the venue that I'm leaning toward submitting to. Because I am focusing on one specific social media platform (Pinterest), I think this will be the best option for me. Papers are due February 14.

I think that's it for my potential venues. While doing this research, I also found some options for a couple of my classmates. For +Brittany Hansen I found A Hands-on Approach: The Do-It-Yourself Culture and Economy in the 20th century. Brittany, I'm not sure what your approach is for your paper, but if you have a good historical background connection, then this might be a good venue for you. Next is for +Lizy Cole: Internet Memes and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of a Journal of Visual Culture. According to the description, they said they were very interested in creative formats for submissions in addition to the traditional essay.

Good luck on your final papers and projects, guys!

The Romantic Dead

The following is a post from my personal gaming blog, Complicate the Narrative. I'm putting it here because it might work into my final project.

I wrote a little bit last week about my experience with TellTale's The Walking Dead and the rise of what I've come to call "film-games." In that post, I also talked about The Last of Us, another of my favorite games of all time. The two games share a surprising amount of similarities (while feeling like entirely different games), but one that particularly catches my attention is that both could are works of Neo-Romanticism.

(*Sigh* I guess I'm morally obligated to tell you, I will be "spoiling" these games, to the extent that the enjoyment of art really depends on the revelations of its plot.)

Preliminary Book Outline for "How to Read a Videogame"

I've been working with Dr. Burton to flesh out an official book proposal for a publisher as my final project for the class. Below is my preliminary outline. The ideal audience I'm going for is people who already think critically about other mediums and want to learn how to apply those techniques to videogames. I'd love any feedback!

Introduction: Reading Games

• Changing state of games
• Games are getting more relevant, complex, and ubiquitous
• Games are the art for us--our time and our world

You don't read games, you play them, but reading means more than gathering information from words, it means gleaning meaning and information through a critical eye. How to Read a Videogame will be an overview of how to "read" games in the latter sense, going beyond playing to pondering and understanding.

Section One: Learning from Literature, Film, and other mediums

• Acting
• Lighting
• Framing
• Dialogue
• Symbolism and Metaphor
• Themes
• Social Commentary

Section Two: Reading Genre

• Intro to game genres
• FPS, RTS, MOBA (ARTS), Action/Adventure, Open-world, Story-driven, Puzzle, etc.
• How genre determines mechanics
• How mechanics make meaning

Section Three: Reading outside genre: "Points of intersection"

Games are about interaction, and meaning comes from when and how different parts of the game interact. Starting from the point of the player, I'll go step by step down the rabbit hole into the game, looking at each layer of interaction and how those interactions create meaning.

• Player to Game System (rules, goals, etc.)
• Player to Player Character(s)
• Effect of Controls
• Player Character to environment
• NPC to Player Character(s)
• Non-player Character (NPC) to NPC
• NPC to environment

Conclusion: Looking Forward to "the Ludic century"

• Games literacy will only be more essential in the future

The cultural contributions the 21st century will be remembered for won't be films or books (those are the last two centuries' mediums), this century will be remembered for its games.