Two perspectives upon Facebook

Facebook is a pretty powerful application. What you probably don’t know is that there are more people that play Farmville through Facebook than there are Twitter accounts out there. Because it’s Saturday and my turn to rest, I’m offering below two wholly different perspectives upon the Facebook phenomenon.
The first is a quite tainted ironic cultural response, in the last episode of South Park. You can watch below as Kyle is being literally sucked into the world of Facebook.

The second perspective is that of the video game designer, that tries to analyze Facebook’s wide success with minigames. It’s a long watch, but it’s definitely worth it. If you feel lazy, here are some of the things discussed, in a nutshell:

- games are no longer all about fantasy, but are actually slipping into the real; not literally, as in the case of South Park, but to provide  authenticity to the human experience, that has kind of lost it’s veritable sense when the cut off from nature occurred; we need this autheniticty because we can no longer be self sufficient

- technology convergence is bullshit; with one exception, pocket gadgets like the iPhone which were designed to be modern Swiss Knives

- technology is slowly becoming disposable: one PC might have more technology than was necessary to send the man on the moon, but that will never keep us from throwing it away in favor for a better one

- a rather gloomy view upon a fully monitored future human life: sensors will record all our actions and turn life into a game with achievements to encourage or discourage our sense of awareness to some types of subjects; such games have already emerged, see GeoCaching.

Video games: ludic qualities versus representational dimension

The academic literature has made a bad habit out of defining video games as a form of cultural discourse that replicates the texts of either literature or cinema. But I think that firstly, video games should be at first studied as such, as games. In this respect, though, games still are a fuzzy concept. Nevertheless, as Buckingham (2006) admits, we can argue that games are defined through play, the framework of which is sketched out through rules.  Games, in contrast to other forms of media, “are not self-contained and they involve a different type and level of participation from that of reading a novel or watching a movie”. But, besides this participational aspect of play, it is disputable what other aspects should be encompassed by the term “video game”.

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Seeing video games as an academic field of study

I got up this morning with the crazy idea of recommending a website to you all. www.gamestudies.org will surely change your view upon the video game industry. This periodical academic journal has engaged in analyzing video games form all cultural points of view. Whether you want to find out how multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike generate new language, compare The Sims to other popular titles (Grannies really ARE cooler than trolls, don’t you think?!) or just gain another point of view on one of the most famous games of the 21st century (World of Warcraft), you are surely bound to find out interesting things.

Video games have emerged as a cultural field of study for about nine years, with the launch of the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March 2001. The same academic year saw regular graduate programs in computer game studies being offered for the first time in universities. That is when scholars and academics first took computer games seriously, as a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate.

As Espen Aarseth, in the editorial for the Game Studies journal admits:

We have a billion dollar industry with almost no basic research, we have the most fascinating cultural material to appear in a very long time, and we have the chance of uniting aesthetic, cultural and technical design aspects in a single discipline. This will not be a painless process, and many mistakes will be made along the way. But if we are successful, we can actually contribute both constructively and critically, and make a difference outside the academy. I am not too optimistic about influencing a multibillion industry. But in the long run, who knows?

And I really think games deserve a reality check, before they explode in an uncontrolled, poor quality pseudo-reality.

The Narrative Perspective in “Fannie and Annie” by D.H.Lawrence

This short story is part of D.H. Lawrence’s “England, my England” short story collection. Curious what I am talking about? Read it on Scribd.

D.H. Lawrence is the first writer in English with a truly international reputation to have come from the working class, and this is reflected in his work both in terms of subject matter and some of his attitudes. Many of his short stories, for instance, deal with elemental conflicts between men and women, but are set amongst ordinary working people. “Fanny and Annie” is no exception from the rule, as it presents the potential marriage between Fanny, a lady’s maid and Harry, a foundry worker, all taking place in a very realistic working class community.

As in most of his short-stories, in “Fanny and Annie” too, D.H. Lawrence  changes his manner of writing from one scene to the next, being sometimes plain and direct, sometimes lush and florid, while sometimes he intrudes in his narrative to deliver lectures in a style which is flagrantly rethorical and often incantatory. It is this aspect of Lawrence, the seer, the prophet that could most closely describe the type of narrator which he chooses for his writings. The narrative voice is omnipresent, closely focused on the main character, Fanny, as she progressively gets to the final decision of marrying Harry in spite of all the town gossip. In addition, the voice describes the woman’s thoughts and reveals portions of her past, as if all-knowing. It anticipates future scenes and even the reintegration of Fanny, a personality aspiring for the higher middle-class, into the working class society she once belonged to.

But the first purpose of this voice is to provide a realistic setting of the story. (more…)