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April 28, 2006
The Obligatory McLuhan Quote
The last two books I read, Game Over by David Sheff and Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson, both begin with a McLuhan quote, as is customary for any book about the media. But the quotes are surprisingly well chosen. Here's the passage from Understanding Media that Sheff uses to introduce his book on Nintendo:
Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture... They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image... The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.
Similarly, Johnson begins his book on the defensive--using McLuhan to remind us how we tend to underestimate new forms of culture: "The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be."
Unlike most authors who use play the McLuhan card, Sheff and Johnson do a good job following up on MM's ideas. One of my favourite passages from Game Over comes from the chapter in which Sheff profiles the humble Russian scientist who invented Tetris, one of the most popular video games in the short history of the medium:
To most of us, puzzles are a diversion, but for Alexey Pajirtnov they are metaphors and mirrors that reflect nature, emotion, and patterns of thought... At their best, games were sublime examples of the intersection of logic and humanity. They worked because of logic and mathematics, but also because of psychology and emotion. The best games held in them a challenge, but also a reward and certain elemental experiences: discovery, recognition, frustration, and completion.
Johnson also addresses the synthesis of art and science, in a wonderfully literal way: "If McLuhan is right and media are extensions of our central nervous system, then we need a theory of the central nervous system as much as we need a theory of media; if the network technology we're creating takes the form of self-organizing systems, then we need the tools of complexity theory to make sense of those networks."
Reading these books has fed my renewed excitement for video games (I haven't been a gamer for over a decade) that first began when I started hearing about all the exciting developments coming out of Nintendo: mini-games, such as the brilliant Wario Ware; the richer forms of interactivity on the Nintendo DS (pen, voice, multiple screens); and brain training games such as Brain Age.
So, I decided to conduct my own pop culture experiment to see if video games will make me smarter. I ran out and bought my own Nintendo DS and I've been playing it constantly. In fact, the only reason why I'm writing instead of gaming right now is because my batteries ran out during a particularly intense session of New Mario Bros (we are the nostalgia generation) and I left my charger at work. Yes, I play Nintendo at work. Although is it still considered play when you're just adding numbers together as in Brain Age's "Calculation Battle"?
More to come on my Nintendo adventures...
Posted by rsexton at 09:18 PM | Comments (1)
April 05, 2006
Happy 1-6!
Forget April fools or daylight savings time, this is an event worth blogging: in the wee hours this morning it was 01:23 04/05/06.
Posted by rsexton at 01:23 AM | Comments (1)