Sunday 27 December 2015

Dreaming of a white fish Inform XMAS

It was Jean Baudrillard who postulated that we'd all end up speaking in ironic quotes in the hyperreality he also postulated. I think he also coined the phrase 'hyperirony', but Google isn't confirming that point right now, and the ace essay I wrote about this during my degree is both twenty years old and not located in the house in which I'm typing this post on an iPad+bluetooth keyboard combo.

I'm weary in life of being spoken to in ironic quotes I don't understand, but of course when I do it to others (minus the 'not understanding' part) I expect I'm doing it well. I choose source material judiciously, not from obscure hipster cartoons screening on pay TV in another country, for instance.

Often I choose to quote The Simpsons, as they have covered almost everything, and usually done it better and funnier than others. So, my general XMAS message is:

"Have a – nice Christmas!
Have a – nice Christmas!
Have a – nice Christmas!
Non-Christian friend"

PS I am irreligious.

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In Inform-dom, we have been gifted a new version of Inform. It's 6M62:

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19449

I like these letters, 6M62. They look bold and ground-touching. Not like my least favourite letters of late, '6L02', who looked veritably frail and consumptive.

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In my own Inform-dom, I am well advanced in progress on my CYOA extension. There's still lots to do, though. More coding, making examples, some testing. But the work goes on. This is no vaporware.

Occasionally I speculate on the 'you need an interpreter' paradigm of most parser-based games that grew out of the modern community. Sometimes it feels like it just shifted the obligation to update software so that it keeps working from one group of people to another. That's a simplistic summation, but in the current situation, I don't think I ever worked out if anyone has a particular idea about where the emphases of compatibility should be. The core idea that the games are just words and that users should be able to control the appearance of the words is a good one, except for the million exceptions including graphics, sounds, and various UIs that authors want to use. And being an author and not being able to control stuff can be maddening. So even when the onus is left on the interpreter to be kept up to date (and not your game), from an author's perspective, you may end up with multiple versions of your game where one thing is broken in each one depending on where/how the user plays it, or where it never looks the way you'd really like it to.

That sounds a bit dispiriting, an effect enhanced by me writing it in a dispiriting fashion. But it's not like this is a new situation. Plus, this is XMAS! So get confident, stupid! The reason I vexed on these points a little here is as a prelude to pointing out how I'm going in almost the opposite direction of my traditional design impulses (which are author-biased and pro specificsim) in my choice-based extension. It harkens back to the 'the game is just the words' idea. The author links the word(s) to a choice or, uh, link, but the player can receive these any way they want. If you (THE PLAYER) want hyperlinks for your touch device or for clicking on with a mouse, you can have them. If you want letters of keys you could press, you can have them. You can also have both. So the approach is intended as a bit fire-and-forget for the author. Stop programming interfaces and just put your content in, and expect it to work on desktops, mobiles and in screen readers.

Now, one of the eternal vetters of ideas at intfiction.org, Peter Piers, said 'What if the author wants to override something? eg block hyperlinks, or keypresses, or whatever.' Certainly it remains that there are ways to do this, but as work on this extension has continued, I've realised which basket it's throwing its eggs into more forcefully, and that is the 'let the player control the interface' basket. The controls are simple and plugged into the game by the extension, so it's an extremely far cry from having to hack Gargoyle's template to force it to print in your particular favoured shade of ectoplasm green :(

So! This extension has a design emphasis about how it's going to do things. I think it's a good one for this project.

5 comments:

  1. The Baudrillard reference caught my attention in Feedly. I was fascinated by what I studied of Baudrillard, though I've only read two of his essays---including one of the relationship between simulacra and science fiction, which was interesting to me.

    How does Baudrillardian hyper-realism inform your art, or your efforts as a digital creator?

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    1. Hi Bainespal! Thanks for reading. I had to delete my first attempt to post this after a mess-up.

      I didn't follow where Baudrillard went later. That is, I read a lot of him at the time I started university, and my course was thick with postmodern and related theory. In retrospect, I think it had only just come down from academia to bachelor students in solid form in the late 90s, but it had yet to go gangbusters, reach high school English or partially eat itself.

      I guess Baudrillard is bound up in my worldview because everything he described when I read him was happening or happened not long after. He described modern life as being full of symbols disconnected from their sources, constantly reflecting upon each other, and the trouble with being sincere in such an environment. So the idea I was quoting in my post concerned the growing tendency for us to speak to each other using (pop) media quotes.

      (When I said 'sincere', I made it sound like Baudrillard was morally concerned, but that wasn't his outlook. He mostly writes like someone fascinated by a smashed mirror which happens to be unbelievably complicated in its smashedness. A lot of the post-structuralists are like that, which is why I find them pretty tedious on the whole. But obviously I've got time for Baudrillard.)

      The phenomenon of ironic quoting has gone way beyond where it was as described in earlier Baudrillard writings. A lot of us barely even share the same 'vocab' now. Globalisation and the increasing nicheness of almost every market and genre means people are decreasingly watching or reading the same things as each other. Then, they don't even couch their quotes with context. So you've got folks taking stills from films, using the meme font, putting a corrupted quote on the still, dropping it on their facebook unannounced to convey some transient thought about a passing political but ill-formed ill idea perhaps only relevant in their country, and doing so from a different time zone to half the recipients.

      The result is supposed to mean something, but upon even a little consideration, it's already gone through quite a numbing number of iterations to get where it is. Is much of value left? Was much present to begin with? Why do we do this instead of type something from our head? Again, Baudrillard didn't go in much for the value judgments, but these seem to be the obvious value judgments for me that are intensified afresh after a bout of reading him.

      Though also - his writing can feel like prototypically obscure humanities academia. But I guess the difference is that I found a lot of Baudrillard's ideas useful.

      So Baudrillard described the kind of communication environment we've entered. And he didn't even live to see it exponentially intensify with the smartphone / social media combination. Being aware of that right at the start of trying to make art as an adult definitely informed what I was doing. I do react against contextlessness, certain kinds of pop reference-fuelled material, or the approach that values it, and too much reliance on the idea of the smashed mirror of ideas. I mean, when people shorthand a whole idea by reference to a trope, as if every incidence of that idea is the same, that can piss me off. I always feel like saying: Describe this idea, this time.

      I probably also have to attribute a little of the above to the typical 'finding fault with the habits of the generation after us as we grow older' human habit (I'm Gen X in year barriers). But I'm confident nobody can say I'm doing so from a position of not participating in The New.

      I hope this has been sufficiently eloquent. I wrote it at the end of an exhausting day mostly spent with my charming but pretty hyper three year old nephew.

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    2. This is good stuff, a topic that I find interesting and important on several levels. Thanks for taking the time to discuss it with me!

      My texts in the class where I first encountered Baudrillard mentioned the continuity between hyper-realism and basic communication theory rather offhandedly. Even though it is true that human reality has always been mediated through communication, the texts said Baudrillard's theories and postmodern hyper-realism are a fundamental leap above the fact of communication being the only foundation of knowable reality -- which I suppose is obviously true enough.

      But the thing that really grabbed me is how completely postmodern digital life exemplifies basic communication theory, how it seems to be naturally drawn from the same realities. The class started with James Carey's notion that reality is produced by communication. I was already a devoted fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's theory of sub-creation and mythological construction as the basis of culture --Tolkien goes deep into semiotic theory in his poem "Mythopoeia" and his essay "On Fairy Stories" -- and to me this all suggested that all media is mythology, and all human interaction (through media, in media, as media) is playing together in our collective mythologies.

      ...which gives me a way to think better of all the meme-sharing, even though I'm inclined to be cynical and arrogant about it. I think pop culture should be meaningful, should be a legitimate source of symbolism for conveying ideas. As you note, in order to be meaningful it can't be mindlessly regurgitated -- we have to describe the idea this time, redefine it, re-create it. Everything being a niche stresses me out, because I don't have the time or inclination to become conversant in very many things -- I'm not even familiar with the Simpsons. (Does being American mean that I have absolutely no excuse, or does it mean that I have every excuse to be a stupid consumer ignorant of everything I didn't choose to "buy"?) I think it's our responsibility to forge connections between our niches and other niches, or at least to thoroughly explore the connections and continuities between the different things that we're part of.

      I'm thrilled to hear that you also conclude that Baudrillard was indifferent to morality and values. I found the end of his essay on science fiction to be chilling in a cold and strange way. He explicitly says that the "violently sexualized world totally lacking in desire" is neither good nor bad, but "simply fascinating, without this fascination implying any kind of value judgment whatsoever." ( href="http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm"Source.) Baudrillard's essays give me the sense that Facebook might as well be the de-facto Ultimate Reality, at least according to his neutral stance toward his own ideology. And Facebook being the ultimate social reality is a very depressing thought.

      Speaking of Facebook, this discussion is awesome, and I want to link this blog post from a status update on my timeline. (I try to use social media to talk about or promote real things, things that are meaningful to me.) Are you good with me sharing this with my (extremely small) network?

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    3. Sorry for the slow response... Holidays and iPhones, etc. please feel free to share, and thanks for your ideas.

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