I firmly believe that N’Gai Croal – beyond having the coolest name ever – is by far the smartest writer in the game industry today. No offence Chris Kohler, I just think Croal is more insightful. So I was looking forward to his foray into this “Are Games Art?” debate that has been circulating recently (even here on Scrawled in Wax). Luckily, Croal has put together an impressive piece. Among the important things he notes are Ebert’s flimsy assertion of the difference between high and low art, his prioritisation of narrative over simulation and Ebert’s inability to deal with gaming on its own terms.

But rather than write a long diatribe responding to both Ebert and Croal, I’m gonna’ go all blog-like and make a list of my thoughts:

1. While I firmly believe that the ubiquity of narrative and its centrality to human existence means it should be prioritised in some ways, this does not necessitate that new modes of narrative and narrativisation should be dismissed as not artistic simply because they are new. The radical introspection of Hamlet was a marked departure for tragic drama – it doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.
2. The author is dead. No, neither I nor Barthes nor Foucault mean that literally. But the interactive nature of gaming means that is the perfect medium for the postmodern transition away from author-centred approaches to art to ones focused on the dynamic textual processes of meaning-making. Ebert’s insistence on the author reveals a desire to fix meaning, one not only at odds with the spirit of our age, but also in line with the tyrannical ideologies of centuries past (and, let’s not forget, present – what is propaganda but the desire to fix meaning?).
3. Speaking of fixing meaning, Croal does an excellent job of raising the question of narrative linearity and art when he asks “What is the “inevitable conclusion” of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”? Of Jackson Pollock’s “One: Number 31, 1950“? Of Richard Pryor’s “…Is It Something I Said” tour? Of David Chase’s “The Sopranos”? Not all art works the same way.” While Ebert insists on narrative conclusion, the call to Coltrane suggests that one cannot judge art with a linear yardstick.
4. As Frasca has argued, the dominant mode of gaming is simulation, not narrative. This means that gaming is not subject to the same systems of signification and interpretation as traditional literary and filmic narrative. Ebert doesn’t even begin to understand that while Super Mario 64 has a ludicrously silly plot, its design as an interactive piece is simply astounding.

Fundamentally, I believe gaming is yet to reach its artistic potential when, hopefully, its effects upon the cultural sphere will move beyond using iconic images of Mario and GTA as reference points and the economics of sales. But as Croal also suggests, it will require debates like these to take place between more equally versed opponents for the debate to become more fruitful. What is crucial, I believe, is that game criticism act as a node within game development, adding to and enriching what gaming can be.

One final thought: you know how everyone is always saying that money ruins art? What if it is precisely the excess of product – initially made for the lowest common denominator – that produces art? That art is the excess of capitalist production? That in capitalist systems it is only until you get a glut of pop art that any desire for the ‘truly artistic’ arises, due to a desire to create stratifications and the specialisation of labour? What about that eh? Go see Stephen Tolito’s thoughts on early film for something you theory nerds can go chew on.

In response to the rather petulant “I’m taking my ball and going home” hubbub caused by Jason Calcanis, Om Malik has put up a post suggesting ways to avoid ‘Facebook Fatigue’ where he advises that one think of Facebook friends as simply an extension of your real life friends (which sounds eerily familiar to all those email etiquette articles in the mainstream press a few years back). And while I agree with Malik’s suggestion that people must, among other things, simply learn to say no, the entire question of Facebook fatigue seems peculiarly unique to people like Calcanis, Scoble, Veronica Belmont or Malik himself. As a few people in the comments of Malik’s post point out, it is only those who are both in the public sphere and technologically literate – i.e. the technorati – who are inundated with so many Facebook friend requests that it becomes a serious problem. Additionally, while treating Facebook friends as real life ones sounds like a smart plan, it seems to deny the power of Facebook as a place for casual acquaintances to get together and get to know each other. For the time being, this seems like a discussion this lot should have on IM and let the rest of us continue enjoying Facebook.

In an interesting parallel discussion, Mathew Ingram takes Calcanis to task for his technoratic elitism by arguing that comments and audience interaction is central to the very concept of blogging. Calcanis responds in that classically libertarian way by suggesting that freedom is something that is to be taken, not given. But as I pointed on the comments, Calcanis’ claims of meritocracy seem to miss that the meritocratic is always subtly elitist, as it always attempts to erase the hierarchies of power that underpin who rises to the top and how.

The trouble with that idea, however, is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that being a leftist blogger in the uber-capitalist world of Web 2.0 is fast becoming a losing battle.

Last.fm is exactly the sort of service that I think works well on Facebook. If the ostensible point of social networking is to connect with your friends, then sharing your music listening habits – a key marker of identity in North America – seems a pretty good way to do so. Their new Facebook app is , however, subpar – all it does is list the tracks you are listening to at that moment and not terribly reliably. The previous app linked neatly to one’s last.fm profile and had little pictures of a few of the top artists in your list. It seems like a small thing, but those visual triggers are exactly the sorts of cues that would cause someone to click further. It’s also simply more aesthetically pleasing – the new one is rather plain.

I still love last.fm though – it works for me as a music nerd and as someone who’s borderline OCD (Must scrobble, must scrobble and then wash hands seven times…) Hopefully they’ll get their shit together and merge the best of the new and old apps.

Mashable – Last.fm Releases Upgraded Facebook App

If you’d like one, leave your email address – something like fake (at) gmail (dot) com – in the comments and I’ll shoot one off to you ASAP. Ideally, I should have some vague idea of who you are, but it’s not a big deal really.

For my thoughts on Pownce, go here.

Just a quick link to Annalee Newitz’s piece on Alternet about the politics of the iPhone launch frenzy. I think it gets a bit too paranoid towards the end – only in America does fear of government surveillance make you a true leftist – but it’s a refreshing voice of skepticism that doesn’t bash the iPhone because, oh, the Linux-based one you cobbled together in your basement is sooo much better.

Link

Upon their thirtieth birthday, I imagine that most people went out with their friends and got toasted while bemoaning the inevitability of aging, only to wake up the next morning to realise that, yes, they were actually adults and it was time to get on with life. Not me though. What did I do that was so different on that fateful February night, you ask? I stayed home with my family and played with birthday gift: a Nintendo Wii.

But beyond being a commentary on the rather sorry state of my life, the idea of my family sitting round the TV and ‘gaming’ was a rather novel state of affairs, as gaming has never been looked upon too fondly in my clan. But after a couple of glasses of good Australian shiraz had loosened us up nicely, two remarkable things happened: my father, someone who has detested, abhored and reviled video games for years picked up the Wiimote and had a blast playing Wii tennis; and secondly, in perhaps the closest thing to an epiphany he’s ever had, my brother sat back on the couch and said “Oh. I get it now”.

The ‘it’ he was referring to is what I might call the ‘Wii aesthetic’: the glossy white finish, the soft music, cartoonish graphics and ultimately, the plain and simple approachability. As has been said a million times now, it is this sort of capacity to simultaneously appeal to a seasoned gamer like my brother and a complete ‘n00b’ like my father that has been Nintendo’s great coup, leading them to not only dominate coverage in the mainstream press, but the sales charts also. Watching the Nintendo E3 presentation this year, that focus on the mainstream and approachability continued to be front and centre. While there were a couple of announcements for the ‘hardcore set’, the key bit of news was about the exercise ‘game’ Wii Fit.

Using my family as a gauge again, as I watched the address live with my father, he seemed quite excited by the Wii Balance Board and the possibilities it offered for low-impact exercise. A cursory survey of friends and other family members revealed a similar response. So it seemed the Nintendo mantra of expanding the audience for gaming is, anecdotally anyways, working quite well.

But spurred somewhat by the Ebert-Barker debate over the art of gaming, I wonder to what extent Nintendo are undercutting the potential for gaming as a more sophisticated, engaging and challenging medium. That might seem a remarkably odd thing to say about the company that brought us Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64, both arguably works of genius regardless of what you think about their status as ‘art’. But there is rather stark difference between Nintendo’s commitment to the mainstream and, say, Sony, who have insisted that one of their goals is to make gamers cry (and, no, they don’t mean from sticker shock…). Nintendo is attempting to make gaming accessible; other developers are trying to make gaming socially and aesthetically relevant beyond the simple question of entertainment.

To some extent, this is the difference between directors like Spielberg and Kubrick. While both are committed to the potential of film to tell stories and move people, Spielberg is interested in reasserting what we already know – that the truth is out there, that family and friends are good and that the individual will eventually overcome. Kubrick, while not exactly a marginal or underground director, was far more concerned with pushing film as a medium to challenge accepted values and ideas, from the noble war hero to love and desire in a marriage. Nintendo’s Wii is obviously Spielberg in this analogy: innovative, interesting and yet populist to the detriment of the form, placating its audience with the simple as it delights. Wii Sports is a lot of fun – but that’s all it will ever be. If titles like it and Wii Fit are the new direction for Nintendo, then the sort of promise for emotional and intellectual resonance shown in titles like Haze, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Mass Effect or Heavy Rain will never grace Nintendo’s little white console, denying the potential power of these new forms to millions of new gamers.

If the two approaches – gaming as moving towards art and narrative and gaming as entertainment – can co-exist, then fine: my father can use Wii Fit while I enjoy interactive stories and moral dilemmas. The only problem I see is the utter dominance of Nintendo – and the subsequent rush by other companies to hop on board the casual games bandwagon. If Nintendo are allowed to dominate the gaming zeitgeist, moving the industry away from pushing the limits of the form to getting your mother to play Wii Bowling, the industry and gaming will be set back by years – a remarkable shame for an experience that is just beginning to hit its prime.

I’m going to respond to this in much more depth when I get the time, but for now – check out Mark Wilson’s response to Roger Ebert’s assertion that games are not and never will be art. It’s articulate, carefully reasoned and literate – well worth the read.

Kotaku: Art Brings Joy – but a joystick? (yes, that too).

Good read – particularly for curmudgeons like me who think Miyamoto’s focus on the mainstream is ruining the potential of gaming.

Wired – Game Life Blog

Let me first say that Pownce is a smart little piece of webware. The centralisation – and ‘pretty-fication’ – of twittering, email and file sharing is not only practical, it’s actually enjoyable to use. The interface is clean, straightforward and isn’t cluttered with a hundred different options – what you can see is what Pownce can do (uh, WYCSIWPCD?). It also seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way, as this glowing review on Mashable suggests. What they pay particular attention to is that you can do things with Pownce that you cannot do with Twitter or Jaiku: send messages (or links, or files) to all your friends, some of them, or the public, which is pretty darn cool.

Yet at some point, it needs to be asked: when is one more social network simply too many? Pownce, like all other social networks, only works well when others are using it. Getting on Pownce with none of your friends, contact or co-workers using it is like getting on Facebook and having no friends: to wit, it’s pointless. And while Pownce is admittedly great, how many of you are not already settled into a social network? And how many of you would be willing to give up on Facebook or My Mashable or any other destination to transfer yourself – and all of your contacts – over to a new one? I know Rex feels that social networks are almost akin to drugs – when the latest one is no longer giving you a buzz, you hop on over to the next. But I’m just not sure people will be willing to keep moving.

It is for this reason that integration is key. In much the same way that I suggested that Wis.dm would fail miserably as a standalone but do wonders as a Facebook app, webware like Pownce is yet another walled garden that needs to integrate with other existing systems.

The problem, of course, is which systems to integrate with? Ultimately, the web is only a network of walled gardens, one hermetically sealed site after another. That’s why Jaiku seemed so promising to me: it offers centralisation, consolidation and integration, so that your contacts on Flickr might also have access to your last.fm profile or blog posts. Unfortunately, Jaiku only does so much and is to yet deliver on its promises of true consolidation (in fact, they can’t even get their Facebook app right).

The solution, however, isn’t clear. Do we need a “Windows of the Internet” – a (*cough*) ‘neutral’ platform for all social networks to use as a base? Facebook’s F8 platform has already shown the problems that can arise with that approach i.e. using a walled garden to solve the walled garden problem. Or is a set of open standards necessary? At any rate, there is a certain sense of futility now in developing new, compelling Web 2.0 destinations – no matter how exciting your product is, the question is not how you get the user to switch. Rather, it is how you get your user’s friends to switch?

[Update]: All right, I’m an idiot – of course Pownce has a Facebook app: Powncer. Trouble is, I still don’t care – I just don’t see why I’m supposed to move off Twitter or Gmail or both, even if Pownce is better.