The Soma Fountain, by Dave Jones

Click to go to Ducheneaut's PARC information page.

Nic Ducheneaut completed his PhD in 2003 at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

He works as a senior researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He primarily studies online game communities.

You can find a summary of his current projects here, and an extensive list of publications here.

He has a LinkedIn account and a Twitter feed. However, his Twitter stream is locked from general view.

Click the image to go to Moore's MySpace page.

Robert J. Moore formerly worked at Xerox PARC, and has also worked extensively as a game designer. Clicking the image will take you to his MySpace page, which seems to be his primary web-presence.

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Click image to go to Rutter's CRIC homepage.

Links**

Rutter’s page @ Center for Research on Innovation and Competition. He’s a researcher for the Manchester Institute of Innovative Research.

RCCS book review of Virtual Methods (2007)

Rutter’s Digiplay Initiative, focusing on games studies.

Digiplay Twitter

Introductory Chapter of Understanding Digital Games (2006), edited by Rutter and Bryson.

**I could find virtually no web presence for Gregory W. H. Smith outside of references to this article and a book titled Analyzing Visual Data (1992). (more…)

Below is my proposal for Social Media Theory. Yeah… I can really pull this off…

Research on Twitter has exploded over the last year as the social networking service (SNS) has become increasingly popular. Since its inception, the service has proven a remarkably agile tool, especially when networked with other SNS sites. Connecting different SNS sites ad hoc has allowed Twitter to thrive as a communication channel. Relying on previous work that establishes the need for adaptable and articulated connections among different social media (Potts, 2009), this paper extends such work by examining the rather different user interfaces (UI) of two third party Twitter applications, Tweetdeck and Twhirl, in light of Activity Theory (AT) and the concept of affordances. Borrowing from the synthesis of AT and affordances offered by Baerentsen and Trettvik (2002), I argue that when combined with third-party clients, Twitter facilitates communication channels as articulated activities. Instead of fostering either synchronous (like IRC) or asynchronous networks (like blogs and message boards), these streams become persistent (McNely, 2009).

From this basis, I will argue that third-party clients more effectively exploit Twitter’s affordances by making the streams, and thus the user’s experience, modular and emergent. They allow real-time modularity in content by facilitating the near-instantaneous exchange of both written and visual information, as well as quick linking to secondary sources of information. By comparing the UIs of Tweetdeck and Twhirl, along with that of Twitter’s own web-based UI, we can assess the how these clients allow the user to adapt Twitter streams to their own communication needs and praxis. The flexibility given to users via such clients serves as a tremendous signpost to the nature of and need for modular experiences in communication channels as information content evolves. Not only do the social networks themselves need to be articulated and modular, but so do the UIs through which users engage with these networks.

References.

Baerentsenj K.B. and Trettvik, J. (2002). An activity theory approach to affordance. Published in the Association of Computing Machinery’s Proceedings of NordiCHI, Arhus, Denmark, pp. 51-60.

McNely, B.J. (2009). Bachchannel persistence and collaborative meaning-making. Published in the Association of Computing Machinery’s Proceedings of SIGDOC ’09, Bloomington, IN, pp. 297-303.

Potts, L. Using actor network theory to trace and improve multimodal communication design. Technical Communication Quarterly 18(3), pp. 281-301.

Here it is!

So, how the hell did “McLuhan” come to be a more dominant word in this cloud than did, say, “experience”? And no, I don’t have any idea what the “media” is doing out there by itself. Maybe that somehow represents New Media…?

Click the image to go to Wordle.net to see a bigger version.

MARSHALL McLUHAN (1911-1980)

McLuhan was a Canadian scholar who trained primarily in literature, but became widely known as a media theorist and scholar. He began his career at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then went on to spend more than 30 years at the University of Toronto. The university’s Program in Culture and Technology is named after McLuhan.

Selected Bibliography

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message” is the summation of his belief that human society evolves in ways that can be directly traced to the rise, use, and impact of technological innovation. Echoing, though not necessarily subscribing to, post-structural theory, McLuhan argues “the latest approach to media considers not only the ‘content’ but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates” (p. 204). However, he diagnoses culture and society as largely “numb in our new electric world” (p. 207). In his assessment, mechanization has given way to electric speed as the primary operating force within technology. This transition is especially distressing to McLuhan, and he cites it as the cause of society’s numbness: “Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate” (p. 207).

In order to fully assess such technology’s impact on society and culture, McLuhan argues that the scholar must remain detached from the medium and its “lines of force” because “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary” (p. 206). His language always seems to phrase media as a force that operates within culture the way, say, gravity operates within nature. He suggests structurally traceable cause/effect relationships from media to audiences, relationships that have profound effects on the ways audiences (mis)understand meaning. In essence, electric technology overpowers meaning, substituting a kind of spectacle arising from the technology rather than the message’s origin.

Below, McLuhan assesses a 1976 presidential debate between Carter and Ford in light of his theories on media. He argues that neither candidate has any clear understanding of how to operate in a televised medium.

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For @PW: Social Media Theory, I’ve updated my profile here. If you’re interested, click on my name in the banner, or look in the “About Dave Jones” box on the right sidebar.

I have yet to really figure out if or how Torben Grodal’s Embodied Visions (2009) might prove useful from an applications standpoint. But, from a rhetorical one, the book continues to exquisitely express my thoughts on games far better than I have ever been able to. Chapter 7 releases narrativity from the structural confines in which narrative theory tends to situate it and instead articulates it as a functional process inherent to human experiences via neurological mechanisms.

The basic story experience consists of a continuous interaction between perceptions (I see a monster approaching), emotions (I feel fear, because I know or sense that monsters are dangerous), cognitions (I think that I’d better shoot the monster), and action (the actual motor act of shooting that changes the motivational emotion — fear — into relaxation). …

[T]he ability to hold the story (including possible future elements of that story) in our consciousness — an ability that is important for prolonged action patterns — is independent of language: we can perform this holding operation at the nonverbal level of perception-emotion-action. (pp. 161-63) (more…)

For the most part, I liked Quantic Dream’s other game in this vein, Indigo Prophecy (2005). The story was engaging, if it did fall apart a bit in the later chapters. The characters were well drawn. And some of the set pieces were extremely engaging. But I always felt as though some of the gameplay mechanics just didn’t fit the fiction very well. The on-screen interfaces and cues were intrusive, drawing attention away from the action.

In the example below, you can see what I mean. In addition, the “Simon Says”-style button sequence never seemed to have even an abstract connection to the action. I always found myself feeling frustrated because the action kept pushing me in one emotional direction while the mechanics kept pushing me in another.

Their rhythmic patterns don’t even really mesh in any recognizable way. I’m hoping Heavy Rain better synthesizes some of these systems into a more involving experience. The sequence above makes me think games like God of War (2005) have a better idea of how players relate to action sequences via standard controllers. I’m not sure how you’d design a Wii-mote into this experience and maintain its tone.

I’m very happy David Cage and Quantic Dream are willing to risk this kind of experimentation on a highly touted game played on a major home console. Very few other companies are willing to try this sort of high-concept kind of experience.