RE: [xmca] latour

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

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Received on Sat Mar 8 10:29 PST 2008