In other news, I'll be presenting a public lecture on spatial narrative in the Metroid series this Friday. The details are in the poster below: all are welcome!
My essay "Blasto Sacer: Mass Effect as an Allegorithm of Sovereign Exception" is now up on First Person Scholar. The idea for it came from a course I started teaching last year which deals with, among other things, Giorgio Agamben's work on the ancient Roman legal concept of the homo sacer. In short, the piece deals with the philosophical implications of giving government agents a "license to kill," and how the contradictions of sanctioned rule-breaking is reflected in video games that allow players similar agency. (It had originally been scheduled for publication last week, but had been bumped to make room for a reaction to the ongoing "gamergate" controversy.)
In other news, I'll be presenting a public lecture on spatial narrative in the Metroid series this Friday. The details are in the poster below: all are welcome!
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My second update of the day (see here for #1) is the posting of a new piece I've been working on, called "Hogtown: A Satire of Rob Ford's Toronto." It's an imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire, in which the poet listens to a friend who's leaving Rome, fed up with the poverty, corruption, and physical dangers of the big city. Ever since I took a class on Juvenal as an undergrad, in which I translated Satire III and also compared it to Samuel Johnson's famous imitation, "London," I thought that it was ripe for another update. Originally, the obvious choice would have been to model it on Manhattan (the modern equivalent, as John Lennon once pointed out, of Ancient Rome). However, I never had the time or inclination to work on that project. But things have changed! The huge, international scandal(s) that have catapulted Rob Ford and Toronto into the spotlight for the past year, and not for the better, gave me a wealth of material suitable for mockery with the righteous indignation that is required by the genre. And, since it's rather time-sensitive, it gave me added motivation to finish before Ford inevitably leaves public office, one way or another. I'm also planning on putting together an EPUB version later on, as an experiment with that platform -- tentative cover art pictured above. Perhaps, time and interest permitting, it can have Juvenal and Johnson's poems included, as well as notes on the allusions, and so on. It's been quite some time since I last updated the website: that's what a year and a half of dissertation writing will do to you. But, in the spirit of "better late than never," I'm just getting around to uploading some new material. First up, I've posted drafts of the talks I delivered at the 83rd Annual Congress of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, aka Congress 2014, held this year at Brock University. Since this is my last year of departmental funding for these things, and since I have a backlog of material from the last two years, I presented three papers to three different scholarly associations:
Follow the links for text and slideshow images. I know that, thanks to scheduling conflicts, some interested parties missed the talks. My article "Unraveling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative Mood" has finally been published, fourteen months after I first wrote it. (The shorter version I presented, with pictures, at the Canadian Game Studies Association last May is here.) It appears in the December 2012 issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. However, it pains me to note that, despite my pointing it out to the copy editor, there are a number of typos in the abstract -- the titles Braid (a video game) and Life A User's Manual (a novel) are not italicized, and a screw-up with spacing changed the phrase "This technique signals how ..." into the unintelligible "This technique signal show ..." There were even more such errors in the first proofs I was given, so at least some got fixed. Of course, the text file I sent them didn't have any errors in the first place ... It's especially annoying because, thanks to Sage's (the academic publisher's) paywall, the abstract is the only publicly-accessible part of the paper, and it's the first indicator to researchers whether the article is worth reading. Not only that, but it's such an easy fix that I was able to correct the pdf version myself with Adobe Acrobat in about a minute. So if anyone wants a corrected copy of the paper, let me know and I'll send it along just to spite 'em. The Complete Guide to Figure Drawing for Comics and Graphic Novels: Do Clothes Make the (Super)Man?9/13/2012 I've got a two-page "guest artist" spread in The Complete Guide to Figure Drawing for Graphic Novels by Daniel Cooney, out this month from Barron's Educational Series. I just got my complementary copy in the mail the other day, and it looks great. While any recommendation that I give would be biased, I will say that the book strikes a nice balance between the needs of those wanting to draw superhero-style comics and those wanting to draw, well, everything else. Daniel spends a fair amount of one chapter, for instance, explaining how to draw the hang and folds of various common clothes -- suit jackets, skirts, that sort of thing -- which struck me as something I hadn't seen much of in how-to comics manuals. The reason, of course, is that superhero comics usually focus on anatomy, and the clothes are usually of the skin-tight spandex variety. In fact, often artists don't even draw outfits that could exist in real life -- they'd have to be painted on. Mainstream comics have rightfully gotten some grief for this over the years, though there seems little evidence of things changing. A few months back, my two-word entry for The Economist's regular caption competition was used for the title of an article on Kim Dotcom's bust and the FBI shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload. Well, now I've won the latest competition outright, bringing my grand total of words written for TE to eleven! This week's contest asked readers "to provide a pithy caption for a photo accompanying an article in our Business section. Both parties contesting America's presidential election are pouring money into tasteful, fair-minded campaign ads such as this one, showing an actor who looks like Paul Ryan tossing grandma off a cliff." My winning entry (posted under my TE online handle Vectorly) was: "Look, Grandma! You Can See Willie Horton from here!" For those who don't know (including some befuddled TE readers who posted after the results were announced), Willie Horton was a convicted murderer who, after being released from prison as part of a furlough program in Massachusetts in 1986, committed more violent crimes before being recaptured. When the then-governer of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, ran for President as the Democratic nominee in 1988, a TV ad attacking Dukakis over the incident was run by supporters of George H. W. Bush. Media historians and industry operators still cite the Willie Horton ad as a milestone in negative campaigning (as well as race-baiting, as Horton was black and his mug shot was featured prominently in the ad). It is also considered one of the deciding factors in the election of Bush, Sr., who was never particularly popular with voters and had a problem with "the image thing." As Fan Expo Canada 2012 enters its last day, I thought I'd make a shout-out to the various artists, artisans, and hucksters who exhibit at the show. Lots of big companies come to Fan Expo only to replicate their chain stores without any discount or exclusive offers (e.g., EB Games) or just waste their copious floor space (the way Ubisoft has this year). But often forgotten are the little booths set up by local artists, which often demonstrate more creativity and pluck than the big boys. One of the most impressive such booths was selling a card game called The Aberrant Apothecary, as well as other sundries (custom potion vials and the like). Artist Stephen Sauer explained some of the rules to us of the game he had designed and illustrated while sitting at perhaps the most thematically unified set-up at the Expo: the whole thing was an assemblage of fold-out shelves and planks made to look like an ol'-timey traveling shopkeeper's kit. Those looking for more badass artifacts might be impressed by the custom sculptures by Spawning Pool Studios. The kits there might have been pricey, but they had a lot more personality than the off-the-shelf sculpture superhero models sold at the nearby comic-shop retailers, which were in some cases not much cheaper. One first for Fan Expo Canada this year is an on-site wedding (of Amy and Rob Bridges -- congrats!), which had a superhero theme: the Green Lantern oath made it into the vows, naturally. Despite the presence of a platoon of Imperial stormtroopers and other costumed well-wishers, the wedding party itself was more traditionally attired. It's hard to say whether this equivocation represents a move toward or away from the mainstream -- whether Fan Expo is normalizing a themed wedding, or a traditional wedding is normalizing Fan Expo. My instinct is that it's the latter, especially judging by the increased middle-of-the-road press and marketing presence. CBC and CTV were here (either to cover as news or to promote), and press space on Saturday has been more limited than in previous years. "But you don't have to take my word for it." As Levar Burton pointed out in his Q&A session, it's important for people to see themselves represented in popular culture -- whether it's African-Americans (viz. Uhura on the original Star Trek), the disabled (viz. Geordi LaForge on TNG), and so on. And clearly part of the "and so on" are those to whom costumed superheroes or fictional space travellers have meaning. Burton's presence made this all-encompassing nature clear, as his iconic roles on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow made clear. One would guess that the Trekkies would have been the majority of those who came out to see Burton, but despite the two shows being very different, there was a lot of overlap -- many fans of both in attendance. One even said he got into Reading Rainbow after getting into Star Trek. In fact, it seemed from where I was sitting that the Reading Rainbow crowd was more hard-core. When, after a number of predictable Star Trek questions ("What was your favourite TNG episode, Levar?"), someone asked about Reading Rainbow, the guy behind us blurted out, "Finally, a Reading Rainbow question!" THQ's WWE '13 will have a demo at FanExpo Canada 2012. Since Fan Expo Canada is a strange hybrid between an entertainment trade show and a genuine fan convention, it's always interesting to see which big companies are exhibiting, and what they're pushing. For instance, the presence of video game companies at the Expo is hit-and-miss. The local Hand Eye Society of Toronto gamers seemed to be listed in the program erroneously last year, and the XBox booth consisted of just a few demos staffed by suspiciously-leggy young ladies who knew less about the games than I did (and I'd never heard of them before). The Nintendo 3DS exhibit was run like a midway ride. So good luck getting any real industry news. However, this year, some developers seem to be taking a bit more interest in proper promotion. Here's something that THQ sent out leading up to the show: "It’s that time again where we geeks come together as one at Fan Expo Canada! THQ will have plenty for fans to do at the show – hands-on time with Darksiders II and WWE’13, hands-off demos for Metro: Last Light and South Park: The Stick of Truth! We’ll also have an exclusive opportunity with Bryan Williams, Senior Designer of WWE’13 for interviews and guided gameplay. He will be on hand only on Thursday and Friday, so please let us know what time you’d like to drop by if you want." Tim, the protagonist of Braid. Tomorrow I'm off to the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a.k.a. Congress, in Kitchener-Waterloo: it's the big Canadian uber-conference, at which dozens of scholarly associations have their annual meetings. I'll be presenting "Unravelling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative Mood" at the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA) on Wednesday morning. Because I always end up scheduled to give papers first thing in the morning. (If anyone is interested, it's at 9:30-10:45 in 202 Regina, Room 138 at Wilfried Laurier University.) Hopefully, I'll upload a summary of the talk and slick PowerPoint slides sometime afterward, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a picture of Tim, the player avatar/protagonist of Jonathan Blow's Braid, who ironically looks not unlike a conference-going grad student. UPDATE: I've now posted the text of the "Unravelling Braid" talk with some illustrations, too. |
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