Re: [xmca] latour

Hi Kevin,

This parallel is exactly what Latour is emphasizing, on my reading. For
Greimas the "actants" may be human but they may also be non-human. Latour
insists that we avoid imposing in advance an asymmetry between human agency
and material causality. All sorts of things, human and otherwise, have
agency. And, just as in good fiction or a fairytale, "actors incessantly
engage in the most abstruse metaphysical constructions by redefining all the
elements of the world." So the kinds of smart agents that you describe would
certainly be part of an ontology. But for Latour pretty much every kind of
object should be considered a smart agent, or can be so under specific
(assembled) circumstances.

Martin

On 3/8/08 2:46 PM, "Kevin Rocap" <Kevin.Rocap@liu.edu> wrote:

> Dear Martin,
>
> Hm. Definite food for thought.
>
> At some level since Greimas's usage is targeted at fictional characters
> as "actors" and, I guess, the deep narrative grammatical/semantic
> features of those characters (???) as "actants", isn't this, in a way,
> parallel to the roles of motivations, influences and, dare I say,
> objects for a live person/live people? Although I'm not oblivious to
> the possibility of treating live folks as actors and these things we
> commonly refer to as motivations, objects, etc. as "actants", perhaps
> you see what I'm grappling with?
>
> And of course the "characters" in online games are a kind of hybrid,
> being caught in a narrative determined, significantly, by the parameters
> and affordances of the game, but being avatars of living persons (some
> of them anyway) as well as having potentially scripted interactions or
> mixed scripted and "live" interactions (e.g., Luiz's passive or scripted
> character, in his absence, could be dealt a blow by an avatar controlled
> by a living person). But even the "objects" for the living person are
> forged significantly by the parameters and affordances of the underlying
> game narrative, no?
>
> Part of me wants to pull this out of online gaming too. Since online
> gaming, being story-like, does, indeed, resemble aspects of novels,
> etc. And how do we know what characters in a novel are doing while the
> book is on the shelf anyway? Even if they do re-assemble themselves
> into predictable roles and actions when we re-open the book? (they may
> simply not be interested in our interference in their affairs -
> fictional autonomy as it were)
>
> But I think what we are discussing could be described as well with
> regard to things like "smart agents". We, live folks, (and I swear to
> you I am one ;-), do you believe me?) - anyway, we, live folks "educate"
> smart agents to troll the info-verse for websites, newsgroups, news
> items, that may, presumably, be of interest to us, and they do that
> while we're absent. So a kind of "real world" of smart agents, a la
> your delibrations, Luiz?
>
> Thanks all.
>
> In Peace,
> K. (Kevin Rocap's avatar - Kevin's busy today packing, by the way)
>
>
> Martin Packer wrote:
>> Dear Luiz,
>>
>> In games we can alter the course
>>
>>> of events, in fact we are required to do so (our freedom to do it of course
>>> varies greatly, depending on the game's design).
>>>
>>
>> So in each game the player is a particular *kind* of agent (actant in
>> Greimas' terms), with specific kinds of powers and characteristics. And
>> these can transform during the game, right? So there are ontological
>> changes. (Greimas is famous for his diagram of the structural relationships
>> among kinds of actant, see link below.) One could presumably map these forms
>> of agency, the changes, the other agents a player encounters, and so develop
>> a description of the regional ontology of a game.
>>
>> <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/narratology/modules/greimasplotmai
>> nframe.html>
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On 3/8/08 1:26 PM, "Luiz Carlos Baptista" <lucabaptista@fcsh.unl.pt> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Dear Martin,
>>>
>>> Thank you for your comments. It is true that books remain there when we are
>>> not reading/interpreting them. But I believe there is an important
>>> difference between books and online games. In games we can alter the course
>>> of events, in fact we are required to do so (our freedom to do it of course
>>> varies greatly, depending on the game's design).
>>>
>>> As for persistence, one example may make my position clearer: today it is
>>> possible for online gamers to program "macros", small sets of instructions
>>> that automate part of their avatars' behavior. In that book I mentioned
>>> before, Dibbell talks about "farmers" who script the activities of their
>>> avatars when they are offline, so that the avatars keep mining or killing
>>> monsters in order to acquire precious stuff. My point is that we can imagine
>>> a situation in which macros become increasingly more complex, so we might
>>> have cases in which even when gamers don't log on regularly, "they" (i.e.
>>> their avatars) are still playing. It would be a sort of deferred playing,
>>> but playing nonetheless. And the game would go on even if no one would be
>>> there directly commanding their avatars.
>>>
>>> This is already happening, of course. Once I logged on World of Warcraft and
>>> discovered that while I was offline my avatar had been killed (I carelessly
>>> left him in a dangerous area when I left the game). So I was "greeted" by
>>> the message "You are dead" on my screen. And every time I put items in the
>>> Auction House, I know that when I come back someone may have placed a bid,
>>> which will be communicated to me through the game's mail system.
>>>
>>> Of course this is something that's been going on for quite a while. MMORPGs
>>> are direct descendants of MUDs, which in turn came from the tradition of
>>> tabletop RPG. But only now this kind of phenomenon is starting to reach a
>>> massive scale, with tens of millions of people engaged in synthetic worlds,
>>> 24/7 worldwide.
>>>
>>> As I said before, I am still in the "primitive accumulation" stage, but it's
>>> amazing the number of ideas that keep popping up, from a variety of fields.
>>> And the collective intelligence of XMCA is being extremely helpful.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Luiz
>>>
>>> **********
>>> "The brain is a wonderful thing. Everybody should have one."
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
>>> Behalf Of Martin Packer
>>> Sent: sábado, 8 de Março de 2008 17:46
>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] latour
>>>
>>> Dear Luiz,
>>>
>>> Latour has quite strong views about reality, especially in his book
>>> 'Reassembling the Social.' Put simply, he argues that researchers need to
>>> pay attention to metaphysical/ontological issues and be ready to "swim in
>>> these waters." His use of Greimas (he describes his position as half
>>> Greimas, half Garfinkel) is primarily to emphasize the varieties of complex
>>> ontologies that can exist in social assemblies. Researchers need to study
>>> these ontologies and avoid insisting in advance that one specific ontology
>>> is how things 'really' are. These ontologies are not individual but social,
>>> so here his position is different from Dick's, but I think he would agree
>>> completely that writing convincing ficton is about constructing a reality -
>>> inviting the reader to see a new world, or see their world in a new way.
>>>
>>> On your point that online games continue even when one is not online - this
>>> is true of books too, no? It's still on my desk whether I'm interacting with
>>> it or not. That's not to say that they are the same kind of artifact, but to
>>> suggest that reader-response theory might be helpful to you (I prefer Iser
>>> to Greimas, but perhaps the later is more appropriate for gaming). And that
>>> perhaps there is a rhetoric of online involvement that underlies each games
>>> specific ontology.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>
>>
>>
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Received on Sat Mar 8 12:07 PST 2008