Andy’s New Media Blog

There wasn’t too much in today’s reading that seemed particularly new to me, but it was definitely interesting to hear someone talk about the benefits of the internet before many of its most popular features were implemented.  Still, the most interesting part of the article was the discussion about http and how it allows for reaching information worldwide.  It made me realize that I have always taken the “worldwide” part of the www for granted.  It is interesting that the people that set all this up were able to recognize from the beginning that it could be used for worldwide communication, instead of just something works only within different state networks.   Although most of the sites I regularly visit are American, or at least created by and for English speakers, but it would be interesting to see how different the internet would be if each nation had their own individual version of it.

The whole time I was reading Turkel’s article on video games, all I could think was how many more things she would have had to talk about if she had only waited a few years for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to come out in America and confirm nearly everything she was thinking about video games.  More so than most arcade games of the time, games for the NES like Zelda and Mario were big breakthroughs as far as immersing players in unique and interesting environments that weren’t derivative’s  of other cultural objects like the knights in Joust.  The NES also solidified the “closed cartridge” system which started with the Atari 2600 and essentially kept everyone but Nintendo itself from making cartridges for their console which is something that Jarish was rightly concerned about.

Nintendo really took some of Turkel’s ideas to the next level by creating game worlds that were highly structured and rule based but also incredibly artistically inventive and make the player feel like they are in a truly unique space.  Of course this makes it very easy to get lost in the simulated world as Turkel puts it.  For instance, I can’t remember how to do long division by hand, but somehow I still know how to find the secret whistles in Mario 3 that let you skip straight to world 8.

One of the main aspects of the chapter that I will definitely need to spend more time looking at for my project is the idea of games as a sort of zen experience because they allow the player to be in an extremely focused state on something that is completely under their control.  Obviously this idea gets very complicated with the increasing popularity of online games where large groups of people of varying skills and attitudes are all expected to interact and play with each other in the same space.  Interestingly, instead of causing a chaotic experience that disrupts the zen, the opposite occurs and people seem to be even more entranced by massively multiplayer online games than with traditional single player games.  This is most likely because the introduction of other personalities makes the illusion of the simulated world even more convincing because of the inherent unpredictability that comes with actual human interaction but I need to think more about it.

I really enjoyed reading the story Immigrant, but I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. On one hand, it does make sense that there could be technological/cultural/biological improvements that could potentially be detrimental to humanity’s progress as a species (the atomic bomb anyone?) but that doesn’t seem like a sufficient reason to keep all of humanity in the dark the way the Kimonians do. My main problem with Bishop’s conception of the Kimonian’s plan as a form of education is the fact that so much of the time the humans spend on Kimon is devoted to the Kimonians and their way of doing things. If the purpose of people being there is to help “improve” them then one must ask if they are really being improved or just made in the Kimonian’s image. I agree with the idea that humanity cannot be forced to improve itself, but if we are to improve it has to be through a means that is meaningful to us and not through some outsider who claims to be inherently superior.

Another random thought: Are the Kimonian’s really helping humanity by taking all of its greatest minds and keeping them separated from the rest of their species that could benefit from their expertise?  Would Einstein and Da Vinci have been sent to Kimon to tell stories to alien children if they lived during the time of this story?