Hall, who invented a forerunner to the world wide web, said the problem of a scarcity of girls studying computer science was "getting worse" despite huge efforts from the scientific community to address the issue.
Hall, the dean of the faculty of physical and applied sciences at the University of Southampton, told the Guardian that girls still perceive computing to be "for geeks" and that this has proved to be a "cultural" obstacle, so far impossible to overcome.
Hall is right to worry about the lack of women, and to look toward cultural factors that might be contributing. But the perception of nerd culture is a real problem, and it’s more nuanced than “women don’t want to be geeks.”
Sometime in the last couple of decades, it became cool to be a nerd (which is different from a geek though the two are related). When I was young, my favorite caper films involved some kind of “hacking into a mainframe” that I found fascinating. Young Lex Murphy, the girl in Jurassic Park (who was roughly my age at the time) could hack into things. And then there were video games, which were also really cool. I knew that programmers made those, and I wanted to make them too. So if tech is cool, and women are using just as many gadgets as men (if not more), where is the disconnect?
If you look at the young men in the average computer science department, you will find that most of them self-identify somewhere on the “nerd” spectrum. Keep in mind that they do not see “nerd” as a derogatory point, simply as a cultural identifier and useful shorthand for people with similar interests and personality traits. That said, I would guess that many young people come to computer science with an interest in making computer games, or from a more deeply-entrenched identity within nerd culture, so examining these cultures is a good first step toward understanding the lack of women in computer science.
Neither gaming culture nor nerd culture are particularly welcoming towards women, and many women looking in from the outside—even those that share the same interests as nerd guys—do not want to enter an environment in which (they think) mouth-breathing basement dwellers will view them as a sex object. This stereotype, though not representative of everyone in the culture, is accurate enough that it will probably be confirmed as the woman enters the culture, whether she’s told “there are no girls on the internet” or sexually harassed on a web forum or video game. Many women within the culture have found that men (and even other women) assume they don’t belong or are feigning interest to be more attractive to men (or sell to them). And then there’s the problem of many girls not wanting to be in such a small minority, which in turn compounds and perpetuates the previous assumptions about the environment. The more women there are in the club, the more women looking in feel that it’s safe to be a woman in this environment. It’s not that girls are scared of being unpopular, many just don’t want to interact with what they see as a hostile culture.
So the culture that feeds into computer science classrooms isn’t particularly female-friendly, but surely the atmosphere in the classroom is better? Unfortunately, the lack of female role models means that girls often feel out of place or avoid asking questions for fear of confirming stereotypes.
We need to create an environment where girls feel safe and comfortable, an environment where it’s okay to ask questions, where girls won’t feel judged for their sex. And when we’ve done a reasonable job of that, we need to make sure the larger community knows that computer science is welcoming to women. Hopefully once women see that they won’t be alone to fend for themselves in a classroom full of troglodytes, more women will be willing to join the club.
Michael Breidenbruecker of RJDJ, the studio behind the sound-based augmented reality game Dimensions explains how augmented reality uses real life to create a different immersive gaming experience that he calls “personal gaming.”
This should totally be a companion to your real life," he adds. "Most games are designed so that they need your full attention -- you either interact or you don't, but when you interact, you're in that world. What we tried to do is make it work in parallel to whatever you do, to your life, really. You just put it in your pocket, and everything around you is enhanced.
Games that don’t require the player’s “full attention” aren’t new; interruptibility is the bread and butter of the casual game market. However, the idea that this might actually make the experience more immersive is interesting.
Historically, two schools of gaming (and really, digital narrative as a whole) have emerged: one which embraces immersion (console gaming, board games, CAVE installations, the novel), and one which embraces interruptibility and integration (Words With Friends, Angry Birds, serial fiction, blogs). In the past, the two have seemed to be at odds. Even ARGs, which require real-world interaction, are played through the lens of the game environment, and the very idea of “alternate reality” suggests escapism. They require one’s “full attention” to achieve their immersive effect.
What, then, does it mean to be immersive if the aim is not to be carried into a trance? Is the future of gaming—without venturing into gamification—that I might be immersed in a game while buying milk and stopping by the post office?
What is it, exactly, that stops us from being completely seduced by the increasingly impressive modeling of virtual faces in videogames? […] The left side, as one researcher put is, “does the initial heavy lifting,” while the right side ultimately makes the call. But with recent improvements in facial modeling (such as L.A. Noire), will game developers ultimately be able to trick the right side of the brain entirely?
Perhaps this kind of research may be the key to traversing the uncanny valley.
Responding to Lori Emerson’s comments on the introduction of the term “electronic literature” by the ELO, Jill Walker Rettberg begins a history of the term’s use, as well as an analysis of how the terms of the field have changed over time.
We’re arguing semantics, but it’s important to recognize the continuity of a field, even if we’re now calling that field something new. A rose by any other name.
Susan Arendt would like to thank L.A. Noire and Rise of Nightmares for failing:
As the year comes to a close, we tend to look back with affection on all the great gaming experiences we had - but I don't want to do that right now. Instead, I'd rather take a look at two big, fat failures: one that will be remembered more for the meltdown of its development team than for its actual gameplay, and one that likely won't be remembered at all. Though neither game did gangbuster sales, they were important for a very specific reason. Any game can fail by simply being boring, or poorly made, or uninspired, but these two games failed trying to be spectacular, fresh, and new.
Haptic perception is of vital importance to reading, and should be duly acknowledged. The reading process and experience of a digital text are greatly affected by the fact that we click and scroll, in contrast to tactilely richer experience when flipping through the pages of a print book. When reading digital texts, our haptic interaction with the text is experienced as taking place at an indeterminate distance from the actual text, whereas when reading print text we are physically and phenomenologically (and literally) in touch with the material substrate of the text itself.
The problem with this argument is that it makes assumptions about the virtues of haptic feedback, positing that some subconscious phenomenon occurs that shapes the reading experience when we physically touch a book. The physicality of the book does not bring us any “closer” to the materiality of the signified. We can’t rely on the assumption that the ability to touch or feel our content enriches it without an argument for why it does, and many of the current arguments can be explained by bad interfaces or other outside factors. Superficial arguments, like that haptic feedback signals to the reader where she is in a book, ignore the fact that much of this information can be easily mimicked by other technologies: completion percentage or a scrollbar with a “page x of y” display are now familiar substitutes for assessing how far one is in a story. How many of us really physically feel where we are in a story beyond the first and last few pages anyway?
Mangen isn’t just interested in ebooks; she writes of hypertext fiction:
In Narrative as Virtual Reality [Marie-Laure Ryan] concludes that ‘the hypertext format could provide the type of immersivity of the detective novel, as do some computer games, if it were based on a determinate and fully motivated plot’ […] I will argue, however, that when it comes to the (in)compatibility of digital technology with phenomenological immersion, plot is not the whole story. In my view, the incompatibility has at least as much, if not more, to do with the sensory-motor affordances of distinctly different materialities of technology than with plot.
(This explains why early stories like Esther and Ruth, which were designed for the sensory-motor affordances of the scroll, worked so poorly in the form of the codex book that they were soon forgotten. – MB)
I’m skeptical that haptic feedback is really at issue here. One can imagine a work in which tactile sensation is important (“words that yield” takes on a new meaning) but surely haptic feedback is not the only—or even most important—component. Do touch or—more broadly—mimetic sensations encourage more immersive experiences, or are other factors at play? How does agency contribute? It seems plausible that certain physical actions illicit Pavlovian conditioned emotional responses, but is there research to support such claims? Is touching an object, alone, enough to trigger such a response?
Kat Austen asks "What gives scientists—and writers—credibility?"
It’s intuitive, but being told it by a chap at Microsoft Research added the gravitas needed to move it from “common sense” to “information”. His position there gave him credibility.
It's obvious for scientists and researchers but writers? (I believe this attitude is antithetical to the spirit of science. Nobody cares where you’re from if you’re right. If your sums don’t add up, nobody cares that you have a job at Harvard. – MB) Austen means science writers, but is this true for novelist and eLit writers as well?
How important do you think institution is for credibility? Tweet replies to @HTLit hashtag #eLitCred
Creator Katie Shannon and executive producer Amy DePaola introduce 617 The Series, a new media project aiming to bring TV-formatted serial episodes directly to the Web. The production quality is high, and the acting is great (Nick Apostolides , who appeared in Mark Bernstein’s The Trojan Girls, steals the show as Sully).
Aside from a few standout examples of high-quality short web serials, the television and film industries have lagged behind the publishing and music industries in terms of producing content designed primarily for Web distribution. Shannon and DePaola hope to change that.
Musicians like Amanda Palmer and Jonathan Coulton have embraced self-publishing on the web as a way to connect more directly with fans. DePaola shares her hope for 617 to have the same connection with fans:
We can control the content that is addressed in the series as well as make the experience for our audience more fulfilled by providing a curtain behind the show. Right now we allow our audience to experience more than just our pilot by providing spoof videos, which allow you to learn more about our characters, as well as a podcast where Katie and I discuss the creative initiatives that we are taking. As our funding increases we hope to expand the interactive experience that our audience can have with our cast and production.
The next step for 617 is to secure funding, and the producers have created a Kickstarter project to expand the show into a multi-platform new media experience. DePaola explains the project:
The web based platform allows us to understand our audience more. That is a no-brainer these days. For us to figure out how to better engage our audience we definitely need more funding for our social media and marketing campaigns. We'd love to expand into applications and games for our audience to participate in that are inspired by or related to the characters on our show.
The Kickstarter deadline is January 16. The money will fund production of two more episodes and the marketing behind the social media aspect of the show.
The New River journal of digital writing and art recently released its fall 2011 issue, which includes submissions from established and rising voices in the electronic literature community.
Changed
by Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams
Sunflowers on Quaker Church Road
by Chris Funkhouser and Amy Hufnagel
Concrete Perl, The Two, and Through the Park
by Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova
The Olin and Preston Institute
by Jason Nelson and Creative Writers of VT
Mythwatch.org
by Alan Bigelow and You
Interesting new work that we look forward to reading.
Stacey Mason teaches Tinderbox in the shadow of the Woolf’s.
Eastgate recently returned from another successful Tinderbox Weekend in San Francisco. Tinderbox users have been calling for more tutorial materials and hands-on instruction, so this weekend focused less on case studies and more on group instruction.
Eastgate took a more classroom-style approach to this weekend, with Stacey Mason leading sessions on mechanics while Mark Bernstein and Mark Anderson supplemented with talks to establish context and provide use cases for the lessons. Attendees were even given a broken dashboard which they worked together to fix. Toward the end of the weekend, we looked at a prototype Tinderbox outline reader for iOS.
As is always the case at Tinderbox weekends, the fascinating attendees came from a wide range of backgrounds. Hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson attended for a first-hand look at Tinderbox as a hypertext system. Nelson is a well-known avid note-taker, who was never without a tape-recorder, pen, and paper, and he had several interesting contributions and ideas for future iterations of Tinderbox. Nelson also honored attendees with a demo of both ZigZag and Xanadu interface implementations.
In preparation for what sounds like a very promising reading session at MLA 2012, Alan Bigelow answers several questions at the heart of electronic literature today.
At one point Bigelow asserts that no idea exists which can only be conveyed through an electronic medium, no idea that can't be conveyed through traditional media. "It's the idea that counts," he says, not the delivery.
While I think this is superficially true, there is a powerful performative aspect to electronic literature unique to the form, and which can create a different relationship to the work than other forms. This isn't to say that this connection can express a certain idea that others can’t, that it can express it in a different way than other forms. The role of the reader's relationship to an avatar, for example, might make the player directly responsible for a catastrophe. This doesn't always happen, but the fact that it can makes electronic literature very different. It's the difference between reading "To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself" and feeling the regret of knowing that you, the reader, killed Duncan out of ambition and a lust for power that you actually felt first-hand.
Bigelow also argues that the story is more powerful than the level of interactivity, and I think he's right. You won't actually feel sorry for killing the king if he hasn't been properly developed as someone you should feel sorry for killing. Likewise, a flashy interactive piece loses its impact if the story isn't good enough for the interaction to mean something. The problem with things like vooks is that there needs to be a good reason for the piece to have video, sound, or "interactivity," and it needs to be part of the original concept of the work, not an awkwardly interjected afterthought. The story and impact have to gain something from a piece being interactive, otherwise interactivity is just a gimmick. And gimmicks are not art.
The issue of misogyny in video game development and gaming culture is not exactly new, but within the academy we tend to treat it as a solved problem. So, when I read Nicole Leffel’s incisive look at the culture of dismissal that blankets the topic, I wanted to hug her. She puts into words a vague feeling I couldn’t express clearly at the last few “women and gaming” panels and events I’ve attended. Recognizing that women play games does not absolve the sexism of these games.
Feminism takes many forms which can often seem to contradict each other, and it can be difficult to reconcile what the “correct” approach to feminist problems should be.One school of feminism suggests that treating women with special reverence is a form of charity that subverts the idea of equality, that we should ignore gender differences altogether. Another school suggests that by subverting gender differences we are suggesting that femininity is something which should be suppressed, and we should therefore celebrate differences. One school wants to be freed of sexual objectification, another wants to embrace the power of female sexuality. How do we please everyone?
The last “women in gaming” panel I attend was at Pax East in Boston, where the women commented that they weren’t offended by women being sexy, they were offended by their lack of characterization or the ability to play a female character at all. This took me aback a little; surely these women weren’t saying it was okay for Lara croft’s gigantic breasts to be growing with each game while her outfits get smaller and smaller. But they were. They praised Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball for having a huge roster of female characters, excusing the fact that every one of those female characters wears skimpy bikinis and has animated breasts. At least they had a selection of female characters. It was as though the entire panel had set out to prove that they weren’t jealous of the female characters, a claim often thrown around to dismiss accusations of objectification, so therefore you could trust the rest of the feminist things they were going to say.
Objectification is a point on which feminists could easily find common ground. Games are fantasies of control, and there is a difference between being sexy and being objectified. When role playing, people like their avatar to be ideal: attractive, powerful, cool. If the character is too sexually focused, the character is no longer realistic enough for the player to attach consciousness to it. The problem is not that women in games are sexy, it’s that the sexiness is not styled in a way that women are meant to relate to.
In most games, excessive sexuality is either offensive or comedic. Either way, women are on the butt-end. It’s not hard to make a character attractive without making her grotesque. These are not instances of women actively using their sexuality for empowerment. Players are able to manipulate oversexualized characters into submissive positions or subvert their agency in other ways.
Laura Mulvey’s idea of the subjective male gaze posits a power difference, inherent in film, that derives from the subversion of the female who is styled by males as an object for male pleasure. In games, this is the equivalent to male developers creating a half-naked female character with grotesque proportions and physics-defying jiggle mechanics, but the difference between a sexist character and a non-sexist one is more complicated than how naked she is; the issue comes from why she is half-naked.
Characters like Kratos or Conan run around shirtless, but their bodies are not framed or able to be manipulated in a way that is designed to make them them the object of sexual fantasy. Their purpose, rather, is to enact male power fantasies. They are the character a male wants to identify with. Naked female characters, on the other hand are generally not there there to for women to identify with their sexual power, they are there to pleasure and serve the (heterosexual) male audience. Overly stylized sexuality prevents any audience—male or female—from being able to relate to the character.
Stay tuned for more on agency and identity in female characters.
Patanoir, Simon Christiansen’s brilliantly clever IF piece, introduced me to the concept of pataphor—and by extension pataphysics, a concept of “physics beyond metaphysics” or “the science of imaginary solutions.” Patanoir opens with the definition of a pataphor:
Pataphor (noun):
1. An extended metaphor that creates its own context.
2. That which occurs when a lizard's tail has grown so long it breaks off and grows a new lizard.
- Pablo Lopez
This definition, and understanding of the concepts behind it, allow for interesting play between language, concepts, and the imaginary. If John controls a chain of events, feeling constricted and even suffocated by it, Mary might stumble in upon John’s actual dead body, tragically choked to death by the chain.
Patanoir explores this idea through the lens of the protagonist, you, a private detective who has come off your medication against your doctor’s advice. Anytime the text uses a simile and something is like something else, you can interact with the metaphorical object because, well, you’re crazy.
>x baron
Thin, as though his skin had been draped over his skeleton with nothing in between. Dark blue eyes, like deep lakes carved into his face. His hair is grey.
> dive into lake
You dive. The surface of the lake approaches quickly, until it fills your entire field of vision. Then the cool water surrounds you.
This structure leads to interesting puzzles and creative solutions. While at first it seemed to make the puzzles too easy—most can be solved by examining everything in a room, with similes being huge flailing pointers toward clues—the character implication for these strategies became more interesting than the puzzles themselves. Sure, you can enter the room, skim the text and scan for the keyword “like,” but such a reading suggests that you’re more a part of the protagonists delusions than the reader’s detached and objective reality, interesting implications for reader-protagonist identification.
In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each layer while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose alternate histories and memories. My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.
Christine Wilks’s Out of Touch is an exploration into loneliness and the fetish (and artifice) of human connectedness inherent in social media, a theme to which many of us can relate.
by Mark Wernham. Machine #69 recalls Ryman’s 253, and especially Bob Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 both in its embrace of arbitrary connection and its fond nostalgia for the era when cheap booze, good drugs, fast cars and hot guns seemed to offer everything worth wanting and when nothing was worth wanting very much.
A new hyperromance for the Web. Sparsely linked, La Farge’s new hypertext nods at Stephanie Strickland’s design and to Michael Joyce’s direct address to the reader. but brings a new voice and sensibility to Web fiction.
Multimedia notes from underground, where a traumatized girl furnishes a cozy space in an underground tunnel. Script by Lynda Williams, music and code by Andy Campbell and Matthew Wright. A web work that’s especially nice on the iPad. (The floor lamp is a nice allusion. Get it?)
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