The essential paradigm of cyberspace

In 1993 Chip Morningstar penned "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, My Postmodern Adventure".  This essay recounted his and Randy Farmer's 1991 adventure at the Second International Conference of Cyberspace.   Surprised by an academic humanities audience, they hurriedly reworked their presentation at the last moment - nonsensically knitting together bits of phraseology they heard the day before...

Thus, with these words Chip opened their presentation:

The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

Apparently there was humor enough to capture their audience.

To some this story may suggest a schism between a pragmatic view (the "vulgar engineer" in Chip's words) with the abstractions of a rarified species in the Galapagos (the academic, Chip's analogy).  Another take is to view this in terms of the different kinds of disciplines and languages that are in play in parsing a phenomenon as complicated as a virtual world.  Each language describes a different aspect of the proverbial elephant.

A first thought lies with Greg's excellent question (fr: Academic Instincts and Virtual World Studies): "when the longed-for discipline of Virtual World Studies is created on the ground we are mapping out, who among us will be qualified to reside there and to join in the conversation?"

A second thought starts innocuously enough.  It begins escoterically with Peter Van Roy's paper  "Convergence in Language Design: A Case of Lightening Striking Four Times in the Same Place."  It is a paper that audaciously infers what the definitive programming language might look like from case studies.  Peter started by looking at four different programming languages that focused on four strategic and different computing problems.    From these he attempted to identify the common forms between them, implicating a definitive design.  I should point out to our technical readers, there is a strong rebuttle.  Yet the exercise seems useful.

This thought plays out with this virtual world twist.  Pick four examples that cover four different virtual world problems well.    Suggest their commonality and hypothesize a definitive form.  Err, that sounds hard, how about just the features then...

However, it seems to me that the larger issue with this approach were it applied to virtual worlds is the Galapagos problem mentioned earlier.  The examples are too similar because they are all in the same niche having co-evolved together.  Perhaps it would be better to conduct more comparisons from further afield: WoW versus Eve-Online versus Second Life is interesting but perhaps much less illuminating than WoW versus MySpace versus ?

In any case, as a final minor detail, I'll point out that Peter does cite another paper of Chip's [1].  Indeed, everything must be related!

--------------------------

[1.] Mark Miller, Chip Morningstar, and  Bill Frantz.  "Capability-based financial instruments.  In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Financial Cryptography, volume 1962 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 349-378.  Springer-Verlag, 2000.

/Ed 11/01  From comments below, for another related view on the 1991 event see  The Second International Conference on Cyberspace: Literary Criticism Collides With Software Engineering.  by F. Randall Farmer

Comments

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Are you sure the audience noticed the humour...?

*sighs*

[Richard Bartle]

Nate>In 1993 Chip Morningstar penned "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, My Postmodern Adventure".

This is one of my all-time favourite papers. I've read many, many fitting-virtual-worlds-to-some-pet-theory writings in which I understand every word individually but together they make no sense whatsoever, and Chip's attack on them still holds as strongly today as it did then. This is because, sadly, such ivory tower thinking is still as prevalent now as it ever was.

It was in response to a similar wash of up-its-own-backside rhetoric that I wrote A Post-Modernist Essay. To save you the madness of reading it, it consists of sentences and phrases extracted from the proceedings of the 2003 SELFWARE conference, sewn together at random so as to make syntactic and grammatical sense while being devoid of any actual content (which is pretty well how the originals read, too). Every time you read the essay, it generates a new version of itself. This is itself post-modern, and reflects my understanding of where post-modernism must ultimately go; thus, what began as a poke at post-modernism's pomposity ironically became a genuine critique of it. The first line, "This is serious", is actually true.

I'll stop now, in the knowledge that most of the previous paragraph is just garbled nonsense...

Richard

[Dan S]

"Are you sure the audience noticed the humour...?"

What?! Are you suggesting the Emperor is wearing no clothes?

As a recent escapee from that sort of blather, I am sure that most of the audience did NOT notice any humor.

[Andy Havens]

@Richard:

On a blog where we frequently deconstruct the living shite out of various esoteric gaming concepts, it's odd to be bashing another academic discipline, let alone one that has proven -- in many cases -- incredibly useful for the understanding of everything from politics to marketing to economics to fashion.

Yes, postmodernism and deconstructionism can be taken too far. In those extremes, examples range from the oblique to the hysterical to the terrifying. But so too can almost any "-ism" be taken too far if not leavened with many grains of salt.

Chip himself says in his essay:

"Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity."

Well, that's one layman's decent boil-down of deconstruction, sure. But then to go on to claim that the entire field of post-modern literary, social, psychological and historical criticism...

"...would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers."

... is like someone coming into your back yard and saying, "Well, geez, Richard. Why do we need more than one fantasy MMORPG? It's all just a bunch of elves, dwarves, and dudes in tights, ain't it? What's the diff between Everquest and WoW anyway? And how come we're still arguing at all about avatars vs. text? Text is just dumb, right? We're so over that. And it's all just a bunch of games anyway, isn't it?"

Before postmodernism and deconstruction, even the *idea* of a discussion about the importance of gaming or popular culture or entertainment within society would have been laughed off by academia. Without postmodernism, what you do doesn't count, Richard. Neither do I, as I'm in marketing. Without deconstruction, the idea of the importance of the content of our VW/MMO worlds and the contributions of the art of such things as animation, comic books, anime, advertising, manga, machinima, popular music... even whole genres like sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, rock-and-roll, blues, musical theater... even whole media like film, radio and TV... they would still be written off as unworthy of study.

Yes, there is bulldookey in the weeds, of course. You get that in any field. Not just in academia, but in the commercial world (we call it PR), and politics (spin) and religion (dogma). But, as movements go, deconstructionism is pretty important to how we all view the current universe of content, art and participation.

I've heard it said again and again, here and in other gaming arenas, for example, that the "particulars" of an MMO/VW aren't, for example, the most important thing when it comes to their participatory nature. The idea that working together, guilding, grouping, etc. builds new skill sets is what is truly important. We've had posts here about dating in MMOs. About how skills acquired online can transfer to real world managerial activities. About political issues transferring into games. These are all "postmodern" discussions; deconstructions of the game-space as more than just "when an orc meets an elf, going through the rye."

You can't have it both ways. Either postmodernism is very important -- in which case, VWs and MMOs get to be more than "just games where people pretend to be goofy fantasy critters banging on each other (WoW) or bugger each other senseless in a visual chat room (SL)" -- or it's not, in which case we revert back to the previous methods of literary and social criticism, which say, basically, "A thing is what it is. Period."

Is the Horde evil? Do people "fall in love" online? Are 2/3 of the questions posed here worth discussing at all? If so, face facts... you're a postmodern deconstructionist in your own field. So stop throwing stones.

@Nate: I'm not sure what you're asking.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Andy: The idea that working together, guilding, grouping, etc. builds new skill sets is what is truly important.

Hardly a breakthrough for human kind... It is more interesting that so many that spend so much time in them end up feeling dissatisfied. Let's face it, they would have been better off collaborating on Wikipedia and open source software.

That said, virtual worlds are a gift to the postmodernists...

@ Andy

Well done! I can't believe though that you actually have to explain these things to people on this blog.

[Bill Ashbless]

'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

'Nuff said.

[Andy Havens]

@Bill:

Yes, yes. We've already admitted that, at its extremes, postmodernism and deconstructionism and lots of other -isms can be laughably troublesome.

Does that mean that pure science is always right? Always best? Always and only what we need to get by?

The way of thinking you are, I guess, "'nuff saying" would completely eliminate, oh... let's imagine... metaphor. Right? Because a metaphor compares two things that aren't logically related. We would also get rid of cultural context and any level of moral relativity, too. Because "a thing is only the one thing what it is."

A banana is only and ever just a banana, Anna, eh?

The first time I read "The Red Badge of Courage," I was in the ninth grade. I knew nothing about it besides I had to read it. OK. No big deal. I read it, took the "comprehension test" to make sure I'd read it, and that was that. Years later, I had to teach it. So I went back and read it again, this time with the help of several study guides and a "teacher's guide" at hand.

What a difference, eh? Crane buries all kinds of interesting metaphor and reference and allusions in that book -- he uses color descriptions, for instance, to mirror the main character's mood. It is also very interesting to understand the historical context of the time in which he wrote the book; the fact that most war stories of the time were distinctly "glory focused," and the idea of a novel that featured an anti-hero was decades ahead of its time. Although I couldn't bring in "Apocalypse Now" to watch in the public school where I taught, I compared the book to that film; a very gritty, realistic depiction of war that much of the public was not ready for.

What I just did there was "postmodern deconstruction." A mild form, to be sure, but the form just the same. What's the big deal? Without deconstruction, you only get to say, "It's a war story about a guy that ran away in a battle, and then didn't."

Why isn't it OK to look at a piece of art or poetry or a film or even (gasp) a game from the point of view of another academic discipline? Say... women's studies? Or sexual roles? I think we've done that here before, haven't we? We've talked a bunch of times about cross-gender avatars and why we choose that or not. Ding! Deconstruction.

Yeah, you can put one over on a crew of self-involved, highly specialized folks who have their own inbred, linguistic foibles...

Here's a scary question for y'all, though... Anybody here want to bet that a good scammer from the other side of the fence couldn't get a fake article published in a game magazine by cutting and pasting a bunch of high falootin' phrases in the same way Sokal did?

[Richard Bartle]

Andy Havens>Before postmodernism and deconstruction, even the *idea* of a discussion about the importance of gaming or popular culture or entertainment within society would have been laughed off by academia.

It still is laughed off by academia. I speak as someone whose planned Online Games degree was recently canned, with one of the excuses offered being "we don't want people to be put off coming to study telecommunications when they see we have a degree in online games".

>Without postmodernism, what you do doesn't count, Richard.

What I do counts regardless of whether someone wants to deconstruct it to oblivion or not. It doesn't need the approval of a deconstructionist point of view to count, any more than I need such approval to think.

>Without deconstruction, the idea of the importance of the content of our VW/MMO worlds ... would still be written off as unworthy of study.

With deconstruction, they still are.

Richard

[Michael Chui]

HTML fix.Check.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Ah, Michael reconstructed the deconstructing HTML! Way to go!

Richard> It still is laughed off by academia.

Well, if not laughed off... they do get a very empty face expression and change the subject. And I don't blame them.

[greglas]

I'm currently reading a pretty good book: David Lodge, Small World, published back in 1984, that nicely skewers structuralism and academic conferences in an amusing way. The Sokal Affair is probably the most well-known clash between the sciences and humanities jargonizing.

That said, personally, I find this whole "Mr. Smith goes to the Ecole Normale Superior" pretty tiresome. As Garber says in Academic Instincts, sometimes jargon is obfuscatory, yes, but sometimes it's just a shorthand to streamlined communicative form that ought to be streamlined. Done well, academic jargon is analogous to Perl.

[?]

@ Andy
here is an interesting view on the Sokal affair that may be interesting to you, given that you seem to seek a balanced approach:
http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html

@ Richard
So whose fault is it that game studies have such a weak reputation? Maybe the people who laugh at Foucault & Derrida in ignorance are the same as the ones laughing at you?

[Prokofy Neva]

Glad you stepped in there, Andy. I'll bet nobody reads "The Red Badge of Courage" anymore, let alone "Lord Jim".

Small wonder tekkies don't appreciate the humanities and ridicule them, never read novels or philosophical essays, scorn the great books or ideas, and only have brief "serious brushes" with them. What passes for "the humanities" these days in universities is a post-modernist word-salad, self-referential and impoverished. You'd have to reconstruct the humanities and re-present them to tekkies to get them to re-engage.

Oh, wait, somebody did that -- in all those elaborate legends and quest narratives in online games.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

greglas: Done well, academic jargon is analogous to Perl.

I guess that explains why Perl is reknown for its poor syntax...

Richard Dawkins has his say on this too of course, in his review published in Nature...

[greglas]

Yes, and it's probably no coincidence that I find Richard Dawkins pretty tiresome too.

[Andy Havens]

It's funny... Because it boils down to "What's good is good, and what's crap is crap," doesn't it?

It's just that some people really, really like crap. Really good crap, anyway. ; )

Richard: I hope you know I meant no offense; I don't think anybody needs any permission, overview, oversite, etc. to do good work -- and your certainly qualifies in my book.

But I didn't mean that a postmodern review or deconstructed reading of games and their play is necessary in order for them to be taken seriously by any modern scholar in any particular. I meant that without the historical precedent of the movement itself, it is likely that we would not have anything approaching fields where popular culture could be studied in the ways it is today. And that includes any kind of support (limited though it may be) for game theory. I think it's a damn shame that there isn't more support for game studies in academia.

But throwing stones at postmodernism is probably not going to get grant money for an endowed MMO/VW chair... since the idea of formally studying the social, economic, art, literary, psychological and sexual integration of games in our society is going to have (if successful) LOTS of fans in the postmodernist movement.

Saying that you want to study these things in games, but don't want to do so with the postmodernists (for whatever reasons) would be like somebody from another (let's say literary) field coming to you and saying, "I want to study everything about MMOs... but leave out all the silly Tolkein-esque fantasy crap and all the sci-fi garbage and giant robots. Because all of that is based on childish, genre fiction that isn't taken seriously by any real, mature authors. So... besides those MMOs... what've we got to talk about?"

It's a real force in the academic world. And the amount of overlap between a things like "The Hero's Journey" that we're all fond of talking about in games is also incredibly prevalent in deconstructionist talk. In fact, arguments about the role of THJ in games are a type of deconstruction; an anthropological form.

It's not all bull-dookey. Taken to an extreme? Sure. But then again, playing WoW for 80 hours a month is pretty kookoo-bananas. We get really tired of reading the mainstream media reports of that one guy who played so long that he died of dehydration, and the "Everquest Widows" and the kids who reenact D&D scenarios and hit each other with flails... they are the abberations. The low-end of the Bell Curve. Right?

I hope.

Same for postmodernism. I spent four years as a lit student "deconstructing" poetry and fiction and essays at a pretty good college. Never ONCE in that time did I come accross a prof who fed me something so deep in the hoopla that I went, "Geez. That's just bug nuts." Some stuff I disagreed with, sure. But that's part of the fun of scholarly discourse, right?

We do that here, too, eh?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Andy:It's funny... Because it boils down to "What's good is good, and what's crap is crap," doesn't it?

No, I don't think so. To quote Wikipedia:The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy."

Now, there are at least three reasons for being obscure:

1. The author is struggeling with a concept that feels important, but is hard to crack open. Such as Heidegger's topic "being".

2. The author is exploring the border of a field, but somehow forgets that he is actually using metaphors as a device, creating an analytical mess for the reader.

3. The author wants to get published and has to work in the right references, even if they are completely superflous. Unfortunately this osbcures what the interesting points he actually has, but that's the way of life.

Type (1) obscurity is a necessity, but (2) and (3) are not. What is unfortunate is that type (1) rhetorics pave the way for the acceptance of type (2)/(3) obscurity.

Some above pointed to an essay which stated that physicists themselves pointed out analogies between QM and society. Sorry, but that is to be expected. If you look hard enough you are going to find "evidence" for anything. That professionals think about the world in terms of their own work, which they master, is typical. That is insufficient to undermine Sokal's critique.

I also reject the idea that technolgists per se are mysteriously incapable of appriciating postmodern ideas. Proof: Nate Combs is without doubt Terranova's most abusive postmodernist. He keeps on wrecking havoc to Computer Science in every other post... (I assume he is a technologist, as I doubt he would be able to wreck it so thoroughly if he wasn't.)

Of course, postmodern ideas are important for society. A pure modernist comprehension of the world would for instance define homosexuality as a fault, flaw... The role of a programmer requires a modernists mindset, but programmers can be artists too...

Ola: No, I don't think so. To quote Wikipedia:The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy."

Making itself intelligible may well be suicide for wikipedia. Speed the day!

Of course it's bogus. Everything to do with liesure is bogus and that includes art, literature, games, TV, and pleasant walks beneath an azure sky. The thing is, though, bogosity in these cases doesn't imply worthlessness even to the strictly modernist outlook since all of them are productive in that they become commodities and generate wealth (hah, literature is a form of economics, people!).

As an engineer, it's only by accepting that bogus concepts can have value in and of themselves that i can ever live my with my lit-crit-loving wife.

[Richard Bartle]

?>So whose fault is it that game studies have such a weak reputation?

It has to be someone's fault?

There are a number of reasons that game studies have such a weak reputation, one of which being the simple fact that we haven't studied them for long enough to build up a corpus of knowledge that says anything of consequence to any discipline beyond our own. However, there are many other reasons, two of which especially hurt:
1) Scientists (physical and social alike) see games as tools for helping them advance areas of knowledge within their own field, but don't see games as anything intrinsically worthy of study. A sociologist might get a PhD and a dozen books out of studying game players, but whether what they say would help a game designer make a better game is not a concern to them.
2) Researchers in comparative studies see games as being just another aspect of their own field, whether that be narrative literature, performance, oral storytelling or whatever. Games aren't of interest to them per se because they see them as a mere special case. Again, this may help them validate their theories but it doesn't directly make for better games. I'd fit post-modernism in here: yes, it can be used to explain virtual worlds, but can it do so in a way that makes any contribution to our getting better games?

For me, as a game designer, I want better games. I'm prepared to listen to arguments about what "better" means, and what "games" means, but ultimately it's the games I'm interested in. Can I write a better novel having studied narrative structure? Almost certainly. Can I write a better novel having studied post-modernism? Only marginally so (unless the novel is about post-modernism). It's the same with games: I want to see better games, not better explanations of how games fit into a one-size-fits-all theory.

I suspect, however, that the reason games studies has a weak reputation is nothing to do with games studies and everything to do with how people view games. Games are "for fun" and "trivial". The very fact we have a Serious Games Initiative suggests that other uses of games are not serious. If they're not serious, why would any self-respecting academic wish to be associated with them? That's our problem.

>Maybe the people who laugh at Foucault & Derrida in ignorance are the same as the ones laughing at you?

Maybe they are, maybe they're not. What difference does it make?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

Andy Havens>Richard: I hope you know I meant no offense; I don't think anybody needs any permission, overview, oversite, etc. to do good work

No offence was taken.

>I meant that without the historical precedent of the movement itself, it is likely that we would not have anything approaching fields where popular culture could be studied in the ways it is today.

I agree. That's not to say we couldn't have studied popular culture in some other way. For example, had people developed theories of game a couple of centuries ago, we could be looking at all popular culture now in terms of games and games-within-games. That may or may not have been a useful way to go about it, and the same can be said of post-modernism.

>I think it's a damn shame that there isn't more support for game studies in academia.

I'm ambivalent. I want to see games studied, but I'd prefer it to be by people who understand games, not people who understand some other subject. Too many times have I seen flocks of academics descend on games, prognosticate on them, then fly away as if the whole field were now solved.

What I want are better games. The more people study games, the greater the chance we'll get better games, however if some bandwagon starts rolling that takes us off in some wild and less-than-useful direction then what I mean by "games studies" could bear little resemblance to what "games studies" has become.

>But throwing stones at postmodernism is probably not going to get grant money for an endowed MMO/VW chair...

Nothing is going to get such money, therefore I can throw stones as much as I like. It's like saying I shouldn't say rude things about Sarah Michelle Geller because then she won't have my babies: it's not going to happen either way.

To be honest, what annoys me about post-modernism isn't so much the theory itself as the sheer smugness of many of its proponents (present company excepted). It's as if someone has come up with the concept of colour and whenever you make a pot or a shed or a hang glider they point out that oh look, it has colour. Yes, I KNOW it has colour, but how does that help me make it? I KNOW I can deconstruct games - I knew that before I'd heard of post-modernism - but how does that help me make games? It's not the fact that I CAN deconstruct them that's important, it's how I DO deconstruct them. It's not the fact that a pot has colour which is important, it's what the colour IS.

>In fact, arguments about the role of THJ in games are a type of deconstruction; an anthropological form.

Yes they are, but so what? I can call you a collection of atoms and be absolutely correct, but that doesn't mean I know what you feel about toothpaste.

>I spent four years as a lit student "deconstructing" poetry and fiction and essays at a pretty good college.

You spent four years analysing it, looking for symbols and levels of meaning and a great deal more. You could have done that without someone slapping the "deconstruction" label on it, just as people did before post-modernism came into vogue. Or are people now able to say things about poetry that they couldn't say about it before post-modernism's arrival? And, particularly, are people writing better poetry as a result of their acquaintance with the theory?

Richard

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Making itself intelligible may well be suicide for wikipedia. Speed the day!

:-) Actually, some of the sections are unbelievably good and up-to-date for an open collaborative effort. Correctness? You shouldn't trust what you read, no matter what the source is.

all of them are productive in that they become commodities and generate wealth (hah, literature is a form of economics, people!).

You ARE american.

[greglas]

Richard> And, particularly, are people writing better poetry as a result of their acquaintance with the theory?

My answer to that is a tentative "yes" -- see Ken Koch. But was Koch postmodern? Depends who you ask.

"Postmodernism" is a big word, in fact so big that it is well nigh useless except as a catch-all for many interesting theories that post-dated modernism and tried to get past its universal theories and towering figures. And I think the current meaning of "deconstruction" is more closely associated with "cultural relativism" than it is with its original origins as a matter of hermeneutics and semiotics.

But that said, when I think of the broad range of visual artists and authors who might fit under the "postmodern" heading (and again, that category is much too broad to be useful), I do see a lot of "better" stuff there, Richard. And actually, I think we can pretty easily trace the influences of those folks into the domain of games, in terms of some basic anti-modernist markers (e.g. pastiche, eclectic visual symbols, disjointed narrative structure, anti-foundationalist tendencies.) In fact, my personal reading is that artists like Duchamp and Warhol -- heck, even "modern" authors like Melville and Conrad -- had sensed out the structure of postmodern theory before the critics got there.

The best critique of Derrida & Foucault that I've heard is that they overstated the newness of their theories and arguments. I actually think that's a fair critique as applied to some discussions of virtual worlds.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

greglas I think we can pretty easily trace the influences of those folks into the domain of games, in terms of some basic anti-modernist markers (e.g. pastiche, eclectic visual symbols, disjointed narrative structure, anti-foundationalist tendencies.)

Then I think you should do the tracing if it is so easy... Which classical games would not have existed if their authors hadn't been inspired by postmodern readings? Walking in the park is a disjointed narrative structure too, does that make it postmodern?

In fact, my personal reading is that artists like Duchamp and Warhol -- heck, even "modern" authors like Melville and Conrad -- had sensed out the structure of postmodern theory before the critics got there.

Hey, if you include Duchamp, you may as well include all of dadaism and surrealism, and by virtue of pictorial resemblance, Hieronymus Bosch. Before you know it postmodernism predated Aristotele.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

And while we are at it, why not include Jesus Christ and George Berkeley in the fold of early postmodern thinkers?

[greglas]

Ignoring your sarcasm, that's my point. Postmodernism is not well defined (see the link above that lists Koch among the postmodernists). So attacking postmodernism is simply attacking a catchall phrase for various responses to modernism, many of which incorporated important insights from both modernism and pre-modern figures.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

But it isn't difficult to define Postmodernism for a particular context. Sherry Turkle did IMO a good job in relation to computer software in "Life on the screen". Her take on it made sense and was useful, even for designers!

The trouble starts when Postmodernism is used to distinguish between us-and-the-others as an eclectic academic symbol. You obviously end up with something messy then... I am sure many artists are inspired by postmodern ideas, but when I look at work from those artists I see more modernism than not: minimalism, cubism, colourist... This is where things go wrong classification wise: creative-influences does not imply membership for the output.

I might be inspired by Mozart when I create pop music, but that doesn't make my output classical music.

[Andy Havens]

Ola: "I might be inspired by Mozart when I create pop music, but that doesn't make my output classical music."

Yes, but if that's true for you, then to say, "Classical music is crap," would be disingenuous, wouldn't it? Or to say, "All those people who spend all their musical lives listening to, studying and playing classical music are idiots. Only pop music is truly worthy!"

I've got absolutely no problem -- zero, niente, nada -- with the statement(s), "Postmodernism and deconstruction can be taken too far, can be made to be ridiculous, can be faked, can be absurd and are, at the extreme, goofy." Not a problem in the world. Go for it. You can not only argue those statements, you can probably prove them.

But I'm also going to argue the statement, "Postmodern and deconstructive ideas have provided more interesting and artistic fodder for creative growth in the last century than many other cultural and social theories."

Ezra Pound, one of my favorite poets and editors, wrote some absoltely gorgrous "clasically modern" poetry. Beautiful, accessible stuff (if you spend some time with it, especially). He also got up on tables at poetry readings and ate dried flowers as performance art.

The latter was meant to be a self-deconstructing act. It was, in its time, incredibly important. He was a well-known, well-respected writer. The shock value of doing something "ridiculous" and "meaningless" in a forum that had been reserved for a medium in which he was a recognized expert was a statement that, he believed, said something about the nature of a world that hand changed radically, largely due to the First World War. That's a gross oversimplification... but there you go.

If I got up in Starbucks and ate dried flowers? Not so much. And today, the idea that a "poetry reading" is reserved for quiet, contemplative, tea-drinking aristocrats is not a socially imprinted ideal.

That's part of the point of deconstructionism; that the context is at least as important as the content. McLuhan said is another way; "the medium is the message." He wasn't talking about specific communicaitons, but about societal movements as a whole.

Could many of these ideas, as Richard says, have taken place without the Postmodernist Movement per se? Of course. And many elements of it were taking place for thousands of years before people said, "Hey, let's call this crap deconstruction."

It is not, in many ways, ridiculous, to call Christ a deconstructionist in relation to His review of the Old Testament laws. He read them in new ways, applied them in a changed context -- with Himself as the center of their fulfilment and nexus of their new interpretation -- and gave His followers a New Testament; a new reading of them all. That's a pretty close metaphor for deconstruction; breaking apart old texts that have ossified and reassembling them based on more appropriate, meaningful constructs.

"So what?" I can almost hear Richard saying. If remixing meaning based on new ideas is what's at the heart of deconstruction, why even call it a movement or a field of study? Isn't that just another way of defining history? Because isn't history a series of steps where that happens again and again? What's so important that justifies an endowed chair? ; )

What's important is that in almost every phase in history, the idea of "this is what is right, what is normal" ends up being enshrined; that is the heart of most movements -- the old definition of "IS" passes away, and the new definition becomes king. Postmodernism does not enshrine any one definition, but the ideas of transition, context, flow, perspective, etc.

So when I say something as simple as, "Andy really enjoys playing computer games as his main entertainment," someone might reasonably go on to ask questions like, "How old is Andy?" or "What kind of games?" or "In what year is this statement made?" or "Is Andy male of female?" Before making the judgment call, "Therefore, Andy is a giant geekoid."

I'm not, by the way, a fanaticaly, giant fan of postmodernism as a "movement." I just like some of the tools in the set. It's like, for me, psychoanalysis. There's some good stuff to learn there, but I don't want to set up house. The tagline for my blog is, in fact, a paean to an era of pre-postmodernism: "Creative flux for our heap of broken images." The idea that it might be important to know how to put s**t BACK together, not just pull it apart. The "tinker" in "TinkerX," the name of my blog is in reference to the old craft of the tinker... someone who fixes broken things and makes useful "stuff" from broken, useless-seeming bits.

So... while I am a fan of deconstruction as a way of observing the universe... I'm not always a fan of the results. But it is also not... useful... to deny that it has had, and still has, a major influence on our world.

[Chip Morningstar]

I was going to just jump on in here, but I see that Richard has (as is so often the case) already done a lot of the heavy lifting.

I'll just add that the core of my beef with the academic humanities is not that they necessarily produce a higher proportion of foolishness than any other activity (they may, but that's beside the point). It's that they've been far too successful at establishing institutional arrangements to insulate themselves from the darwinian workings of reality. Consequently what value they produce is buried much deeper in crap than it is in my world. This hurts us all.

[F. Randall Farmer]

Chip's paper about 2Cyberconf is signficantly superior to my archived thread on the topic of "Litcrit vs. Engineering" as I saw it then, but it is definately fodder for this group.

The paper/thread is archived on ibiblio as:

The Second International Conference on Cyberspace:
Literary Criticism Collides With Software Engineering
by F. Randall Farmer

I'm a bit older now, and more politic - but the issues were enough for me to withdraw from the xCyberconf community of conferences and look for more folks that would be helpful as things were actually being built.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

*nods at Andy* Well, to be honest I find Mozart's music rather boring... but it doesn't really matter. You are right about the tool-approach, because really, even if Freud is 100% wrong, one might walk down new avenues and see new perspective by trying to do a Freudian analysis. It doesn't really matter how you got there, the fact that you got there and found new perspectives is what counts. It's when Postmodernism is posed as the One-True-Way and a Revelation it becomes tedious... The Church of Postmodernism, so to speak.

I've been trying to think of Postmodernism in classic games, but ended up looking for surreal aspects... and I don't think these gamecreators were inspired by Postmodern ideals?

Case 1: My favourite MUD entrance is that of MUD2 (and partially MUD1). You arrive in an English Tearoom and I think you then entered the world by.. ehm... Sipping Tea! It didn't work that way, when I tested it yesterday, so either my memory is wrong or perhaps it has been changed.

Case 2: Jeff Minter's shoot'em'up Attack of The Mutant Camels which is silly in a rather british manner.

Not the best examples... I hope someone can point out the Real Postmodern games for me?

(I did pick Jesus and Berkely because they opposed zealous "objectivists" in their own time, but as you point out that is just the pendulum of history doing the swinging. Hard objectivism is easily transformed into anti-human ideals, creating openings for heroes ready to oppose that.)

[Andy Havens]

@Chip: By day, I'm a marketing guy. I've done it in retail, B2B, advertising, direct markeint, merchandising... a bunch of areas. It's as "darwinian [a] working of reality" as you can get. Survival not just of the fittest, but the fastest, meanest, orneriest SOB's in the market. Bare-knuckle capitalist art at its best/worst. There is no talking yourself out of a shoddy sales-cycle. There is no BSing a bad campaign. You can't talk your way out of your numbers. The only definition of *good* in marketing that I accept is "did it work?" If it worked, it's good.

But...

By night, I'm a poet. Where metaphor is king. Where the sound of words matters, as well as their meaning. Where meter and rhythm are important and where the choice of your next work depends on the last and the next for many, many reasons.

And, guess what? Those worlds actually have a lot in common. Because the *path* to useful, good marketing that works often runs straight through the garden of metaphor and poetry. Understanding one is incredibly helpful at knowing the other.

The reason some of the "less darwinian" humanities studies are a bit more protected within the confines of academia in many cultures is because they are *not* supported much (or at all) in other environments -- such as the economy. But there is an understanding that an overall support of blended knowledge and art is good for the complete health of the culture.

Nobody will ever pay me for my poetry. I understand that perfectly and completely. And it doesn't bother me in the least. Yet I *protect* this "non-darwinian" activity of mine jealously, because it will make me a much better hunter-killer overall.

Those engineers who take the time to get to know a couple crit-lit types as undergrads... who befriend psychologists, sociologists, or poets... who take a few courses outside their majors... who go to conferences and expand their horizons and even accept that maybe a freaky-ass world view, while not their own, may be just as valid as theirs... these engineers may come out *better* at what they do.

Because we (as a whole) are the *environment* not an individual species. Virtual worlds are, I think, big enough to be important to lots of different people for lots of different reasons.

Are some of the lit-crit types full of their kind of crap? Yes. Are some of the software engineers only interested in the software and none of the social implications? Yes. Are some of the VC types only interested in making a buck? Yes. Are some of the Red-Light types only interested in having sex online? Yes. Vegas-types only want to gamble in the VWs? Yes. Tolkeinites only want to get they elf on? Yes.

Lots of views, eh?

Writing and talking about how they all intersect is fascinating... just fascinating... ; )

[greglas]

Randy --

Thanks for that slice of virtual worlds circa 1991. It sounds like that conference was pretty awful.

I was going to write something in response to Chip's statement about "the darwinian workings of reality," but the point of it seems to be promoting disengagement with those of us who find substantial value in the "academic humanities."

I'll just give up on this thread...

[Matt Mihaly]

Richard Bartle wrote:

It was in response to a similar wash of up-its-own-backside rhetoric that I wrote A Post-Modernist Essay.

That is the funniest thing I have read in a long time.

--matt

[nate combs]

Everyone, Greg >

Well.

I was hoping that this discussion would have gone a different route (see the 2nd half of post). However, bested by Chip's words from over a decade and a half ago...

I'm guessing one wouldn't have to dig very deep in the TN archive to guess where my instincts lie here. Yet to Andy I give my largest handshake: what a marvelously spirited and eloquent defense of the alternative viewpoint. Perhaps he's mad, perhaps I am. I don't think that is the point. Played out in his sporting defense comes a rambling though intricate exchange of ideas. I'm sorry Greg is exhausted by it.

I often think that what goes on on TN, at its best, is like what goes on at game developer conferences.

IMHO. Game developer conferences are the last best example of enlightened amateurism left in the professional sphere. Seemingly they fly against the forces governing every other endeavor, academic or professional, where talent and energy has become increasingly specialized, forming stove-pipes of conversation. A modern world requires specialization, and perhaps too these forces will eventually drive game and virtual world development...

The level of discussion in game dev circles, relative to their referential established discipline, has by and large seemed to me amateurish, even if gloriously so. I've been to many presentations where I thought them, at least on some level, a thin but exuberent gruel of some sort of pop - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-engineering, whatever, mysteriously mixed.

Yet, together they can sometimes form a brilliant and illuminating synthesis.

However a synthesis requires more than one part, more than one participant, more than one language. Better this blog, this discussion for them all.

I believe, I guess, the heart of a game is the heart of an amateur. From such comes creativity. Chew that one over.

Have fun!

[greglas]

Nate, I've got no problem with anything you've said. I, too, am generally delighted by listening to game designers (and other artists) pull in ideas of all shapes and sizes to explain what they think they are doing or need to do. I'm often a passionate amateur myself in a variety of areas. Indeed, as Garber points out in her book, we're all amateurs when we're at our most interesting.

What I'm getting from Chip and Randy (and to a lesser extent, Richard), though, is hardly the endorsement of an interdisciplinary eclectic or amateur approach to learning. Instead, it's pretty much the smug pillorying of the "word salad" of "postmodernists" and "deconstructionists" (in Chip's case, the whole of the "academic humanities") by those who consider themselves more adept at "the darwinian workings of reality."

Yes, actually, it is tiresome trying to respond to that kind of thing. Should I start by defending the enterprise of the "academic humanities"? I don't have time for it.

[Thomas Malaby]

Hats off to Andy for an incredibly well-voiced statement showing, as I see it, how our stance toward all of these perspectives must ultimately be pragmatic rather than dogmatic.

I continue to be surprised at the excesses one finds on all sides, some replicated here. No one approach to accounting for the phenomena of our world has a corner on the market; their incompleteness is inescapable. (Sadly, hubris is also quite widely in evidence.) Yes, the play of meaning in discourse is consequential in human affairs, but it's not all there is, so it is not always determinative. Yes, the material conditions of the world are consequential in human affairs, but they, too, do not account for all we see. And yes, the strategies and tactics of power relations (surveillance, biopower, discipline) are consequential in human affairs, but they, finally, cannot account for all we see. Why this leads some to think we are stuck in a postmodern dilemma of hand-wringing is beyond me; we can still develop sound arguments, marshal evidence (broadly defined), and make reliable claims (though the ways of doing so will not be unitary). So we don't have a warm blanket of transcendent certainty to wrap ourselves in -- too bad. That doesn't mean we can't say anything.

And as for Darwin, he is the perfect person to invoke here, but not for the reason you think, Chip. It is as unfair to him as it is to Adam Smith to hold them up as trumpeting some version of truth through unfettered competition. Darwin saw no inherent progress in evolution, no crucible of competition which necessarily yields the better. He saw what we so easily forget as we reach for the comforts of certainties: that the world is a messy, unpredictable place where there is no grand plan, and which will never be compeltely tractable to human control. Does that mean he was a postmodernist? No (though perhaps a poststructuralist, I guess). It means he was humble about the capacities of human knowledge. Everyone is well served to read him again from time to time.

I agree, Nate, that Terra Nova is as promising a place as anywhere for the productive discomfort that ideally appears when divergent opinions but shared goodwill meet, but at times I'm left wondering about that optimistic view. Perhaps Jake was right when he replied, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

[Cory Ondrejka]

I hope that nobody is arguing against the humanities in principle. Clearly human culture produces art, literature, music, and myriad other forms of communication, just like culture has produced mathematics, logic, and science.

Confusion, defensiveness, and anger arises when attempts are made to assert that different cultural tools are equally useful (or valid, effective, correct, etc) in all domains. Given the contentious nature of this thread, let me try to keep things civil by choosing a safe, calming example.

So, let's talk about religion. Specifically, old books.

Given that we have various examples of religious writing going back thousands of years, clearly there are a host of tools that might apply to studying the old books. Linguistic analysis could help understand where and when they were written, how they have changed over time, how transcription errors were impacted by printing, or the impact of changing cultural mores on translation choices. Carbon dating could help date specific examples. Studying old books as literature could help demonstrate how they influenced (or failed to influence) other writers throughout history. Cognitive science and neurobiology could help explain why so many people find these old books compelling. Art history could help track how stories from the old books spread across cultures. Anthropology could understand the impact of that spreading. All of these approaches generate testable and falsifiable assertions about the real world. In each of these cases, appropriate tools are applied to maximize understanding.

Because understanding is what scholarship is all about. Despite its well known liberal bias, the real world does allow for falsifiable assertions to be tested. Pronouncements without testing simply become dogma, which does nothing to advance understanding, and problems come about when someone wants to insist that they do. It would be like relying on the old books to explain events in the real world rather than biology, physics, mathematics, sociology, or economics! The tool kits offered by those fields do a demonstrably superior job of explaining the real world, so it shouldn't come as a big surprise when proponents of old books respond with anger, derision, and attempt to avoid the discussion. Defenders of old books who generate the least coherent arguments may even achieve a local maxima of defensibility.

To return to the topic at hand, it is important not to choose dogma in other aspects of human understanding. Music is unlikely to be the best tool for understanding embryonic stem cell development, but the really cool thing is that if for some particular case it is, the process of testing those assertions will surface that fact. If biology consistently provides better tools than music, that is measurable and the musician shouldn't get bent out of shape when biologists default to their tools. Nobody is shocked when genetic music (http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm) fails to set the world on fire. Nor should the musicians complain when the neuroscientists start to explore why humans enjoy music -- even if their theories go against music theory -- since the assertions will be testable, falsifiable.

Yes, the world is a complicated place, but throwing up our hands and saying "well crap, that's unknowable" has been demonstrated time and time again to be wrong. The most empowering, exciting, and spiritual view of the human condition is that we're good at figuring stuff out! This isn't saying that all human effort should go towards explaining the real world or that we'll ever know everything, but the trend line is towards greater understanding, despite the FUD and dogma that so often oppose this trend.

So, I hope that while we can celebrate all forms of knowledge creation and exploration, we should be comfortable accepting that different tools can be more and less effective in different domains and that domains differ in what we mean by "effective." More specifically, certain domains require approaches be tested against each other in order for progress to be made. If an approach or field moves into a domain where this requirement exists, it is foolish to claim "No, no, don't judge the efficacy using the tools of science. I'm special and get to play by different rules."

[Cory Ondrejka]

Thomas> Darwin saw no inherent progress in evolution, no crucible of competition which necessarily yields the better.

Sure, but differential survival of replicators will result in replicators that are well adapted to replicate within their environment (yes, where "environment" includes other replicators, the changes the recplicators themselves make to the environment, the mechanisms the replicator uses for replication, etc etc etc). There is no need to invoke a value laden term like better.

If you are trying to understand billiards, you could write out all the equations, spend a lot of time in pool halls playing, or watch "The Color of Money." Depending on what you were trying to understand, you could define better in a variety of ways and any of those approaches would be best.

That does not mean that watching "The Color of Money" is the best apporach to building a physical simulation of a game of billiards nor that tensor analysis would help you decide when your opponent is going to throw a game because of a bet. But, in both cases, you could pick an approach that led to greater understanding the domain you were curious about. In both cases, certain approaches get to be smugly superior to others, which is ok, because none are superior in all.

And, you could devise ways to test whether they really were superior or not. Hell, you could even devise a way to test whether my assertion about their superiority is correct, which is very cool.

[F. Randall Farmer]

Here's the deal.

Chip and I didn't start this thread here today - We started it 15 years ago. We didn't ask to ressurect it here or now. The original comments were not aimed at anyone that participates here (that I am aware of.)

My point in including the original discussion thread was to set context and to show *where* the collision started, not the suggest current state of affairs.

2Cyberconf took a turn into the 'less-than useful' for us. It introduced a two-worlds collision to us that, apparently from this thread, has still not sorted out much, which I agree is a shame.

[I did see a glimpse of hope for the future of this dialog in the form of a certain Ludium attendee, who was attempting to live in "both worlds" and was being somewhat rejected by the humanities side as a result...]

But, I will not accept a summary that says that we didn't at least try to deal with this rift. If you read my original position statement carefully, you will see that the contrary is true - I called for dialog and did get a bit of it in the form of the thread that I archived. Unfortunately, the xCyberconf community, as it existed at the time, did not have the will and/or skills to bridge the gap. So it goes.

So - I'd like to turn this positive and make one of the same calls I made back then: Could someone recommend something to read from the deconstructionist circles that 1) would help with understaning how to build online communities and/or virtual worlds and 2) would be readable by someone outside the discipline?

I have been able to find great texts in sociology, economics, cultural anthropology, architecture, and media, etc. that meet these requirements that have had sigificant effects on my virtual communties/worlds. I look forward to reading (and recommending) more.

Randy

[Thomas Malaby]

Exactly, Cory -- no argument here (I wasn't the one implying that a Darwinian process meant the production of something better, or more true).

And, as the grandson of one of the best pool-players in the depression-era Ohio River valley, I love the pool example. :-)

[greglas]

Cory, thanks for trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Strange that you never mention reading and interpreting these old books as a useful tool. ;-)

Cory> More specifically, certain domains require approaches be tested against each other in order for progress to be made. If an approach or field moves into a domain where this requirement exists, it is foolish to claim "No, no, don't judge the efficacy using the tools of science. I'm special and get to play by different rules."

Corresponding, I suppose you are saying that if certain domains do not require approaches to be tested against each other -- or if certain domains make the notion of "progress" or "verification" inherently problematic -- it is, in those case, foolish to rely solely on the tools of science?

Cory> "I'm special and get to play by different rules."

This is actually Richard's argument for virtual worlds, I think. :-)

[F. Randall Farmer]

Here's the deal.

Chip and I didn't start this thread here today - We started it 15 years ago. We didn't ask to ressurect it here or now. The original comments were not aimed at anyone that participates here (that I am aware of.)

My point in including the original discussion thread was to set context and to show *where* the collision started, not the suggest current state of affairs.

2Cyberconf took a turn into the 'less-than useful' for us. It introduced a two-worlds collision to us that, apparently from this thread, has still not sorted out much, which I agree is a shame.

[I did see a glimpse of hope for the future of this dialog in the form of a certain Ludium attendee, who was attempting to live in "both worlds" and was being somewhat rejected by the humanities side as a result...]

But, I will not accept a summary that says that we didn't at least try to deal with this rift. If you read my original position statement carefully, you will see that the contrary is true - I called for dialog and did get a bit of it in the form of the thread that I archived. Unfortunately, the xCyberconf community, as it existed at the time, did not have the will and/or skills to bridge the gap. So it goes.

So - I'd like to turn this positive and make one of the same calls I made back then: Could someone recommend something to read from the deconstructionist circles that 1) would help with understaning how to build online communities and/or virtual worlds and 2) would be readable by someone outside the discipline?

I have been able to find great texts in sociology, economics, cultural anthropology, architecture, and media, etc. that meet these requirements that have had sigificant effects on my virtual communties/worlds. I look forward to reading (and recommending) more.

Randy

[Thomas Malaby]

@Randy: Well, finding a way to articulate what the humanities can contribute to "knowledge work" and information technology is the explicit aim of Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool, but I haven't had a chance to crack it. A brief glimpse suggests that it's not exactly written for a wide audience, I'm afraid (but it's so on point, or at least it's trying to be, that I thought I should mention it).

[Thomas Malaby]

@Greg: Here and there in Cory's post he acknowledges that "testing" may not apply as the standard for verification for all knowledge claims (which is a damn good thing, since not everything can be replicated; take most of evolutionary biology's purview, for one, or parts of geology for another, and that's just to consider a couple of sciences). I chalked this up to different languages for talking about this stuff, which to a certain degree we must be flexible about if we're ever going to move forward. The pool example is on point, although I note that we have little reason to believe not only in the universality of testing, but also of measurement (as suggested at the end). In the end, it becomes, again, reliability or usefulness (not in a utilitarian way!) which lie at the heart of what we believe to be true (not to be a broken record or anything).

[Mike Sellers]

(A few comments slipped in while I was writing this)

Quite the straw man being erected and bashed over Chip's comments on Darwin. He said:

I'll just add that the core of my beef with the academic humanities is not that they necessarily produce a higher proportion of foolishness than any other activity (they may, but that's beside the point). It's that they've been far too successful at establishing institutional arrangements to insulate themselves from the darwinian workings of reality. Consequently what value they produce is buried much deeper in crap than it is in my world. [Emphasis added]

This was not a comment about Darwin himself or his outlook (postmodern or poststructuralist or anything else). Chip's point, I believe, is that the intellectual insularity provided by the impenetrable jargon of what postmodernism has become has kept at bay the acid tests of good ideas.

When you can say anything you like with tortuous language, whether it makes sense or not (and I do not agree with Andy Havens that this is only a problem at some imagined extreme ends of academia), then your ideas go untested. There are no consequences, no meaningful exploration or evolution of significant ideas. Authority and group-think rule the day, fed by an intellectual swamp of ever more ambiguous and gordian language. No one wants to 'fess up that they don't understand a word of it or point out that it makes no sense, that the postmodernist Emperor has no pedagogical clothes (no one except maybe the odd physics professor who also becomes fed up with this sort of intellectual dissembling).

On the other side of the coin we have the narrow-minded linear-thinking developers who remain willfully ignorant, from the POV of at least some academics (as evidenced here), of everything not immediately applicable to their next project. To these philistines considerations of the manifold intellectual underpinnings of virtual worlds in how they are designed and experienced is not only irrelevant, it's nonsensical.

There's a lot of crap on this side too, just different in kind, not amount, from what Chip noted in academia. Here the problem is that the darwinian forces are too active: developers don't have time to protect seedling ideas that might grow into something useful, much less coddle them in swaths of logorrheaic academic papers. Good ideas are mowed under with the bad; developers don't wax poetic about the essential paradigms of cyberspace because they're too busy trying to get something, anything, actually done.

Terra Nova is a rare place where these two worlds can sometimes come together. When they reinforce each other it works wonderfully; both sides learn from the other. When they interfere -- when ungrounded postmodernist thought meets with disdain for anything not immediately and technically useful -- then we see the gap between academia and industry at its widest.

Myself, I think Chip's original essay should be required reading by academics and developers alike (and not just because it pays homage to Danny Kaye, though recognizing that has its own value). Personally I have as little use for postmodernist "sound and fury, signifying nothing" as I do for excessively dogmatic technical views of what virtual worlds are and will thus always be. Neither view is as uncommon as we might like to think. But there has got to be a way of synthesizing academic and technical views without giving in to the blindspots of either.

[Cory Ondrejka]

Thomas, do you anything that doesn't involve gambling?!

Also, as someone trained in science and engineering who spent a lot of years in the "science == truth" camp, I would like to thank Jim Gee for writing books (and Constance for giving me the reading list) that helped me to change my thinking on the topic. I am pretty sure that it is possible to create accurate models of what happens in the world and I often still default to the position that the physical modeling of the game of pool is the "true" nature of the game. But as I tried to explain, there are other valid ways to get at the nature of pool that might have nothing to do with the physics.

But -- and this underscores Randy's comment -- I didn't change my mental model by being told that I just didn't understand my Derrida or Lacan. Instead, Jim writes incredibly clear prose that covered the terrain in a way that I found completely approachable. Where's the equivalent book for Randy's deconstructionist list?

[greglas]

Randy,

OK, truce. I haven't read it yet, but I think Ian Bogost has a book that might fit the bill. Ian learned from Derrida, who coined the term you're interested in. Alex Galloway's book Gaming also has some discussion of Derrida in the context of play. No promises that they will help you design, but I'm sure they have some interesting ideas.

Btw, it sounds like that 91 cyberconf was not just a clash between comp sci types and lit crit (broadly) types, it sounds like it was a clash between presentation cultures -- slides vs. MLA-style "paper readings." Getting anything meaningful from the latter is really an acquired skill (that I have not yet acquired). Also, I'll concede to having seen a fair share of pointlessly obscurantist jargon in lit crit circles. As an undergrad, I studied with Shakespeare with Harold Bloom and lit crit with Paul Fry back in the late 80's. It was very dense stuff, but I loved it, and it taught me ways of thinking that I use every day.

But... I'll never forget a grad student replying to a point made by another grad student by saying "Let me clarify that my prior statement was not made in contradistinction!" Apparently, what this promising scholar of the English language meant to say was "I agree."

[Thomas Malaby]

@Mike: Of course there is; we agree, I think. Though I would ask for a bit of consideration of the fact that the language of academics is also a technical language, one that uses specific concepts with hard-won nuance to convey complex and often counter-intuitive ideas. Of course there's a lot of bad, obfuscatory writing out there in academia, but I find the reflex of assuming any important idea must be possible to put in plain speech (especially on the fly, in not-to-be revised posts to a blog) to be a marker of arrogance, not sharp criticism. Cantankerous and not intellectually humble physics professors can be cases in point, not sages of good writing. Dismissing ideas in this way is rarely done for anything but strategic purposes. Besides, the best of that kind of writing is usually honed over years of presentations, papers, and research, as Jim Gee's writing shows (perfect example, Cory); to expect the juggling of these new thoughts here to be perfect prose denies the advantage of the medium -- the back and forth that we're having here.

@Cory: I'm still thinking about the right text; but since I fall more on the social practice rather than representation/discourse side, I'm not sure I'll think of it, to be honest (and it may not have been written yet). On gaming specificially, Bogost's and Galloway's, which I've looked at (I like the Bogost in particular), are certainly worth a try, Randy. The Galloway is more in the Hardt/Negri decentralized control school, which isn't really deconstruction; it's more poststructuralist (to the extent these are useful terms at all; I'd just rather not go on for five paragraphs).

[Thomas Malaby]

@Mike: One other thing, btw. I don't think I was misreading Chip, although I would be happy to hear otherwise. It's pretty clear to me that the suggestion is that the competition of the free market winnows away a lot of crap, leaving a higher proportion of better, valuable ideas, whereas humanities departments, insulated from the market (this is ridiculous in its own way; there is an economy there, as everywhere, it's just not always about market capital), produces a lower proportion of valid ideas to crap. It was this suggestion that merited, imho, the response about Darwin.