Author Archive

Intelligently Artificial Goes to the Darkside!

Posted: June 16, 2013 by Twitchdoctor in Announcements
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This is just a quick announcement to let everyone know that you can now follow the Intelligently Artificial blog via Twitter.  Our Twitter handle, in a tip of the hat to McKenzie Wark’s influential book Gamer Theory, is @LucidlyLudic.  There may be some hiccuping and farting while we iron out any wrinkles with the WordPress posting mechanism but that probably won’t end up looking much different than most of the content on Twitter!

Given the impending shut down of Google Reader on July 1 blog aggregation is increasingly migrating into the Twittersphere so we hope that this will provide all of you with some additional convenience.

Hating Women is a Privilege Not a Right

Posted: April 10, 2013 by Twitchdoctor in game design, Game Players, Games and Writing, Technology and Society
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Witchcraft Image by Kelly Garbato

Image taken at the St. Joseph, MO museum by Kelly Garbato. Available via Flikr in accordance with Creative Commons license.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a blog that I like to check in with from time to time.  Written by four experienced UK game journalists, it focuses exclusively on PC Gaming (the fact that this still exists will certainly be news to major game retailers here in the US), the sense of humor resonates with me, and the focus tends to be thoughtfully eclectic.

Recently, one of the team, John Walker, posted an extended discussion of sexism in the gaming world in particular (that is both the world of players and the world of developers) and the tech world in general.  (It is a lengthy article, but if you are a reader of this site you’ll be used to that by now!)  Anyone involved with games who hasn’t been living under a rock (sadly, that actually excludes a lot of gamers, it seems, as will be seen in a moment) is aware of several general issues facing the gaming industry when it comes to gender.  There is the persistent problem of the underrepresentation–scratch that, the massive underrepresentation–of women at every level of game development.  While women make up a significant percentage of players in most casual gaming genres, they are still a distinct minority in many “traditional” hardcore gaming genres.  There is a pervasive culture of harassment of women players in many gaming genres which ranges from downgrading women’s participation by treating that participation as unusual, to the outright abuse that comes from feeling women have no place at all in gaming.  I’ve written several pieces for this blog that have looked at the hate-filled campaigns directed at women who have spoken out about misogyny in the world of gaming, or even at those women who have dared simply to offer an opinion on game design.

Walker’s article–“Misogyny, Sexism and why RPS isn’t Shutting Up”–makes no bones about its intentions.  But the real interest of this article is that for a lot of people outside the game industry the most obvious question would be why the article was even necessary.  So, you are going to continue to call out sexism and misogyny where you see it.  Awesome.  But, er, is there a problem with doing that in the world of gaming?

Oh yes.  A big problem.

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Squeeeeeee! . . . .That is to Say, This Might Be, Ahem, Mildly Diverting, Hrrrmph.

Posted: October 20, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in game design, Game Players, Games and Marketing
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The Origin of it All

It was the fall of `92.  We had just arrived in the country and needed to buy a PC for my grad school work.  We opted for a mighty 386 computer (and sprang for the 40Mhz rather than the 33) and after considerable soul-searching had a ridiculously excessive 1Mb video card installed (how good was this machine?  When I discovered Doom a couple of years later, much of the game played as a blinking, growling, slideshow accompanied by the occasional delayed weapon blast).  I don’t even remember how we found the particular machine, probably through the newspaper (we were young and stupid).  At any rate, it began having some issues pretty quickly.  So I took it back to the rent-a-box place where we’d bought it, somewhere in the anonymous light industrial depths of the city of Orange.  The sales person wasn’t at all happy to see me but quickly established, as I’d suspected, that the motherboard was defective and offered to replace it for me while I waited.  Then he sat me down in front of another PC with an attached joystick and started up a game called Wing Commander.

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Angry Nerds

Posted: June 14, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in game design, Game Players, Games and Marketing, Games and the Media, Technology and Society
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A short time ago I wrote about the avalanche of internet douchebaggery that descended on Jennifer Hepler, a writer for Bioware who had the temerity to. . .well, open her mouth and offer an opinion about games.  Then Reddit got hold of it, and the next thing you she is being subjected to a torrent of misogynist abuse.  The level of pure hate directed at her was as revealing of a new, desperation on the part of hardcore gamers concerning the changing trajectory of game development as it was entirely typical of the neanderthal attitudes toward women held by many players and assiduously cultivated by game designers.

Well, it seems the bottom feeders are at it again.  Recently, pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian put up a proposal on Kickstarter.  Sarkeesian runs the videoblog Feminist Frequency, where she offers thoughtful analysis of specific pop culture artifacts (like the Hunger Games series) or more general media phenomena relevant to gender issues.  One series of videos, Tropes vs Women, looked at a some of the most common stereotypes governing depictions of women in popular culture.  For her Kickstarter project she proposed an ambitious series of videos that would apply the Tropes vs Women concept to the world of videogames.  Given the shockingly retrograde depictions of women in most videogames (if they make an appearance at all) there is obviously enough material for an extensive series.  Sarkeesian is seeking funding to undertake a lot of background research for the videos, since her intent is for the videos to be freely available and supplemented with materials that would allow them to be used as teaching resources (the original Tropes vs Women videos are being used in this capacity).  The problem was, Sarkeesian made the same mistake as Jennifer Hepler.

She opened her mouth.

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Maybe we didn’t lose the future. We just can’t remember where we put it.

Posted: June 7, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in Technology and Society
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This has absolutely nothing to do with videogames, I swear.

English: Artist rendering of SpaceX Dragon spa...

I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the subject of my last post, the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery.  The most obvious reason, of course, is the first successful flight of the SpaceX Dragon, which returned to earth safely after supplying the International Space Station.  Sure, there was something a little odd about watching the footage of that splashdown into the ocean, especially for those of us who developed our early space imaginations during the Apollo era.  It was a little like seeing a cruise ship suddenly replaced by a caravel.  But it was undeniably inspiring.  Even more inspiring is listening to the designers at SpaceX, and even more so the company’s founder Elon Musk (for example, check out this interview on NPR’s Science Friday).  Clearly, this is a man with no shortage of vision.  This isn’t just about launching satellites or supplying space stations in low earth orbit.  He’s thinking about stations on the moon.  About exploring Mars.

Yet, I find myself troubled by the fact that we’ve essentially turned space exploration wholesale over to private enterprise.

To understand why, think about the reasons behind the situation that I described in my last post.  Why is it that we as a collective basically gave up on a commitment to space exploration, to the extent that we even begrudge NASA spending the cost of a Kardashian boob job on anything not connected with Google Maps?  As I indicated, there are a lot of spurious answers –”9/11 Changed everything!” Sit the fuck down, Rudy; or the idea that we should solve earthly problems first.  There are, however, two more credible answers to this.

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The End of the Future

Posted: April 18, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in game design, Games and Life
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Discovery Arrives in Washington DC

On the face of it, this post doesn’t have anything to do with games.  It may, however, have everything to do with games.

Welcome to the Neighborhood
Yesterday, I watched the space shuttle Discovery, atop its modified 747 transport, fly majestically back and forth in the skies above the nation’s capital, on the way to its final resting place in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy facility located near Dulles International Airport.  I’d been excited to see it from the moment I first heard about the planned flyover; so much so that in my eagerness to get to my chosen observation post at Gravelly Point I leaped on my bike and got halfway down the street before realizing I was only wearing one bike glove (and no, it wasn’t a homage to Michael “you want a sweetie, sweetie” Jackson).  Obviously it was a moment of great historical significance and it was an awe-inspiring sight.  It was also one of those “Wow, I’m living in Washington, DC” moments.  As I watched the shuttle, with its gnat-like jet escort arc gracefully through the sky above the Washington monument, the Lincoln memorial, the Jefferson memorial, I was reminded of what I so easily take for granted; that I’m living in the capital of one of the most powerful nations on earth.

But the most powerful emotion I felt was an urge to burst into tears.

Obviously there is a lot of tragic history connected with the shuttle program, but that wasn’t it.  I kept thinking about how this moment might be viewed in years to come.  Future generations will look back on this event and see it as the moment where, in effect, we gave up on the future.

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Our Plays Are Numbered

Posted: March 15, 2012 by Twitchdoctor in Games and Marketing, Games and the Media, Games and Writing
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Game Developers and Game Reviewers in Ancient India. Not much has changed. Creative Commons copyright by Nagarjun.

If you take a casual glance around the media landscape you would be quite justified in thinking that the world of game reviewing is thriving.  There are lots of videogame publications in print, online and (tenuously) on TV, with lots of opinionating being directed at a lot of pixels across a wide variety of platforms.

In reality, video game reviewing is a disaster zone that is helping to ensure a steady supply of mediocre games that are enthusiastically embraced by a player population with frighteningly low expectations and a shallow fixation on gaming technology.

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