jill/txt

Esther recently finished her PhD on first world war popular culture, and now, among other pursuits, she’s turned her attention to World of Warcraft and its constructions of war and conflict. Recently she’s written about the symbolism of the Horde’s Zeppelins versus the Alliance’s sailing ships, about the tension of deforestation, colonialism and exploitation from either side, and about the implications of a military parade by one faction during a peaceful Faire. When I checked out the PvP ranks - that is, the titles you get when you score points in player-versus-player fights, so by killing players of the opposite faction - I had to laugh at the way the same symbolism is expressed here. One of the lower ranks, for instance, is “Corporal” for the Alliance and “Grunt” for the Horde. Would you like to be a Grunt? Near the top of the scale, your Horde character might be a Warlord while your Alliance equivalent is a Field Marshal. See, I might rather be a Warlord than a Field Marshal. Sure, “Warlord” is what we always call the Other side’s bosses, it’s a little derogatory, they’re primitive, really, is what we’re saying, but it also sounds a lot more fun and powerful than the repressedly WASPish Field Marshall. I know very little about the miliary, but based on my vague understandings from popular culture and a war movie or two I’m convinced all Field Marshals speak British, are deeply boring, are sticklers for rules and very picky about tidiness and orderliness.

Now I’m wishing I knew more German and French so I could see what words they’ve chosen to use in the translations.

T. L. Taylor raided Molten Core while in flight. Dude!!!

Like Linn, I’m eagerly awaiting her new book on Everquest. My copy is probably mid-Atlantic right now. Presumably not raiding Molten Core.

Oh I so totally want to raid Molten Core in flight.

I wandered into the stacks and leafed through old issues of Norsk litterær årbok, the annual of Norwegian literature, which has bibliographies of every article published in Norwegian that is about “literature”. The categories of literature discussed end by mentioning “trivial literature” (from the examples given this includes comics, young people’s literature, science fiction and fantasy) and “various”. Electronic literature would, I suppose, be included in one of those, if included at all.

Downstairs I leafed through the most recent issues of journals in my field(s). No, there are no print journals of electronic literature or new media, but I had a look at some others. In the January 2006 issue of PMLA I found a piece by Peter D. McDonald about “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature,” and was much cheered to be reminded of the following:

Of the many productive clearings that theorizating created, one of the most significant centers on the question of literature, as Eagleton emphasized in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). Starting in postwar France, notably in the writings of Blanchot, Barthes, and Derrida and then extending to the Anglo-American world int eh early 1970s, especially through the journal New Literary History, doubts about hte viability of literature as a stable or even valid category of discourse gradually came to form the basis of a new theoretical consensus. This consensus grew largely out of a reaction against various postwar studies - Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948), Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949), and Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) are especially noteworthy - which, it was argued, reinforced long-held beliefs in the possibility and desirability of treating literature as a clearly demarcatable object, possessing a definable essence. This project, which could be traced back to classical poetics, was, the critics claimed, at best ill founded or at worst impossible. On the one hand, they noted that the literary (however it might be defined) is never restricted to what might conventionally be called literature; on the other, they pointed out that one of the peculiarities of literature (on certain definitions) is that it is always disturbing or overturning traditional ideas of the literary. That these problems at the level of description also frequently presupposed or felt the impact of powerfully normative uses of Literature as an honorific only complicated matters further. Literature, in this sense, did not simply refer to a putatively distinct category, distinguishable in some stable way from, say, pornography or philosophy; it constituted the Literary as an especially privileged public discourse located in or even at the apex of a cultural hierarchy. Behind this privileged position lay the accumulated interests and valuations of various individuals, groups, and institutions as well as the long, always fraught history of Literature’s struggle to defend its often imperiled sense of cultural distinction (against, for instance, journalism, cinema and other new media, political writing, or less acceptably Literary works. From this new recognition of the instability of the category a very different set of methodological protocols followed. In place of a quasi-scientific search for essences, there developed a new preoccupation with teh ideological, historical and institutional conditions that made the category of the literary possible. Instead of repeating or contesting assertions that took the general form “This is literature,” inquiry now focused on radically situated statemnets of the form “X said, ‘This is literature,’” where the demonstrative was understood performatively. (..)

This is familiar, but easily forgotten in a world of literary annuals and university departments. So this is all very well: we may say (performatively) that hypertext can be literature, or that blogs are literary, but what does that achieve? What do we really mean? Simply that we want the evolving cultural forms that we love to be taken as seriously as Ibsen? That we who work in them or study them want the same cultural credibility as an oft-published conventional author of novels or a professor studying Shakespeare? And what does it mean when we are told that no, new media is not and cannot be literature? (Yes, I was recently told this, though unfortunately with the caveat that I can’t tell “the press” or “the general public” about it yet (!) so I’ll have to leave it at that for now.)

I for one had forgotten that there was even such a concept as “trivial literature”. What an offensive term.

I’m in the lovely new university library coffee shop, upgrading Wordpress and finishing a review I’m writing of Gisle Hannemyr’s Hva er Internett? You want the review? Here it is in (very) brief: Great book! If I’d known about it in November my 60 web design and web aesthetics students would be reading it right now; it’s perfect for teaching. Good coverage of internet history and excellent combination of cultural and political aspects with technical explanations. Perhaps a little too political towards the end - I mean, I absolutely agree, but at times the rationale for including DRM technology in a book about the internet is a little strained, but he does sort of tie it in. Oh, and the bit about blogs, podcasts and wikis is two pages tacked on right at the end, so obviously as a blogger I think that’s a cop-out, but there are other books about these things so I’ll live.)

There are students in groups at various tables. Some are discussing Spanish grammar, a group of five are planning a semester abroad and are discussing the technicalities of the European Transfer Credits System, the girls behind me are quietly studying and taking notes. The group behind me’s just packing up to go to the university bookshop and buy an extra book. Some of the most enthusiastic students in my class this year were here earlier, ecstatic about the project they’re working on. This university has absolute model students. I must remember to keep coming here when I’ve met a few too many of the unenthusiastic ones.

I just had my first World of Warcraft marriage proposal. It was utterly un-charming - I was in Warsong Gulch, a battleground where ten Horde players battle ten Alliance players, each time attempting to capture the other team’s flag. It’s a fast-paced and very exciting part of the game, but unfortunately I was stuck doing defence, looking after our blasted flag while the rest of the team was off slaying night elves and gnomes. Even more unfortunately, I was not alone. A level 39 orc hunter was with me. He started off with an unusual but affable enough “I like you”, escalated a second later to “pretty troll” (huh?) and then started spamming “i love u”. I tried to fight back by roleplaying the impatient bloodthirsty troll with no time for this love thing, just wanting to get on the battle field, but he kept going. I made use of the “/slap” command and got angry with him (in character) and he proposed: “plz marri mi”.

Resounding laughter was the only response, from both Jill and my troll, and I arranged a swap so I got out of the defense job and out of range of this orc. But can you believe it the guy kept at it, whispering “i love u” and “marri mi plz” to me every split second, spamming me so I couldn’t see what the raid leader was saying.

I considered telling him I was a 57 year old man, but decided a simple /ignore seemed wiser. It was really unpleasant, though, being stuck defending the flag with such a harrassing person. Especially when he started whispering instead of using /say, so that the other people who were occassionally present couldn’t see (”hear” - /whisper sends words only to one person, /say broadcasts them to the room) what he was doing.

But what IS that? I mean, most guys seem to think all female characters are played by boys anyway - though about 30% of WoW players are women. So did he assume I was male and want to “marri” my troll anyway? Did he think it would lead to some kind of WoW-sex or something? Maybe his tactics sometimes work? Or did he just want to annoy me? And does his behaviour count as harrassment? I mean, it was certainly unpleasant, but it occurs to me now that I could have asked him to stop in the /raid channel so everyone would know what was going on - and I could even have reported him to a gamemaster, though I don’t think he quite warranted that. I probably should have asked him publicly to stop, though. Conceivably he actually doesn’t realise how unpleasant that kind of behaviour is.

[Edit: Turns out he was proposing to the other female troll in the battleground too. And still whispering to me when I logged in again. I guess he’s just one for the /ignore command. But will that make me not hear what he says even when other people present hear it? How weird.]

I heard a lot of very good things about the BlogHer conference in California last year - well, not only is there another BlogHer coming up (July 29-30), Swedish women bloggers are also planning a women’s blogger conference in Sweden! I’m feeling kind of reticent about planning more travelling (maybe reading and blogging and trying to send stuff to journals instead for a while will reawaken the conference urge) but this might be a fun thing to be involved in.

There’s BlogTalk too, in Vienna October 2-3, and the deadline for submissions to that is April 1.

I’m off to a faculty meeting at Voss tomorrow, where all the heads of department and vice heads and pro-deans and contra-deans and office managers and whatever we all are are going to discuss things like reorganisation, success criteria for cross-disciplinary research collaboration and internationalisation. Unfortunately this involves being on a bus in the city at 8 am which in turn involves leaving home at 7.30 which I do realise is late by some peoples’ standards, but for me it means leaving home a whole hour before school starts. That means my daughter has to go to before school care, (morgen-SFO), which has happened all of twice before in her life and which had her in tears at bedtime this evening.

Of course children know from birth that mothers are suckers for tears from children who don’t want to be left at daycare of any kind. I just dropped my guard because she hasn’t done this for so long. Obviously she’ll be fine. She’s nine and a half. And she’ll spend the night with her loving (and beloved) grandmother (once she’s landed after her business meeting in another city). And I’ll be back Friday at 4 pm.

I still feel like an absolutely monstrous mother who is no doubt scarring her child for life. Oh dear. And the poor little darling…

I love Hanne-Lovise Skarstein’s interactive documentary from the F-train in New York. Hanne-Lovise has been working on interactive documentaries here in Bergen for a few years now, but moved to Brooklyn last year. Take the F-train is a beautiful little documentary which combines video of the place with audio interviews and animations of the characters in the piece. You put the characters you want to ride with into the train, and then you can listen to their stories by mousing over them while inside. Most of their stories are about being from elsewhere and yet being at home in New York City. At least most of the ones in languages I can understand were. I was particularly happy to find Hanne-Lovise herself as one of the characters in her own story. There’s an interview with her discussing the piece too, in Norwegian.

Her piece is part of Digitale Fortellinger, a series of new, Norwegian, digital stories sponsored by Norsk kulturråd, PNEK, BEK and NRK.

Bergen Student-TV fulgte gjesteforelesningen til Talan Memmott sist torsdag, og har laget en reportasje som ikke bare viser hans arbeid, men også gir korte videoglimt fra en forelesning på HUIN105 Webdesign og webestetikk.
“>Bergen Student-TV reports from Talan Memmott’s talk last week - quite amusing seeing the from-the-back view of the auditorium. That’s one of the rooms I teach in!

7% of Norwegians read blogs daily, and 840,000 read blogs at least once a week, according to a survey by Mandag morgen, writes Dagbladet. There are about 4.6 million people in Norway, so about 18% of the population (infants and the elderly included) regularly read blogs. I’ve ordered a copy of that issue of Mandag morgen from the library, since subscriptions are rather expensive.

OK, so everyone in Norway who doesn’t own a Mac uses MSN Messenger, not AIM or iChat. I clearly need both. And Skype. All running at once - or, if I can follow this rather complicated-looking explanation of how to integrate them, I might manage to end up with something like this:

I spent the afternoon at the Steamwheedle Faire, a big role-playing event on our World of Warcraft server that I’d really been looking forward too. I’d got a dress for my troll warrior, to make her look festive rather than warlike, since the Faire was a cross-faction event, and in our guild we’d discussed how we’d role-play the event. But when I actually got there, I was overwhelmed, and found myself less participatory than I’d imagined and more interested in how such an event shows what doesn’t work in World of Warcraft.

I think the main problem is that the interface is not at all optimised for role-playing. The visual and gestural interface works well for fighting and exploring, but is very limited for interpersonal communication other than attacking each other. With huge numbers of people present - there must have been more than a hundred - the visuals become close to useless, and you rely almost solely on the text chat for figuring out what’s going on.

World of Warcraft uses basic commands similarly to MUDs and MOOs, so I can type “/say I’m so excited” and other players near me will see the text “Zarastra says “I’m so excited” in chat window and a talk bubble over my head with the words I just said. (That’s a made up character name, I don’t think I want my troll too easily connected to her player.) In a text-only world this works quite well. Either you’re in the room or you’re not, and so /say can work even if there are a lot of people present. In a graphical world, though, proximity matters. I want to stand next to my friends, and I want to remark on how people look or on what they’re doing. At the Faire, everyone lined up for drinks and raffle tickets. I saw a friend from the guild, and so I tried to talk to him - but since the chat window was rolling past so fast with all the conversation, he didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t connect my “hi” in text chat with my being right next to him. He couldn’t see the talk bubble over my head because I was just behind him in the line. Roleplaying is supposed to happen in /say and in emotes like /wave or /me taps Nalia on the shoulder, but those things weren’t working because there were too many of us. Add in the lag I was getting as my computer struggled to render a hundred odd humans and dwarves and trolls and it was quite a frustrating experience.

What also worked well were events that play to the visual. The Mithril Guard had a parade, which looked great - a bunch of dwarves wearing blue all in very strict formation. We couldn’t understand them though, and when they seemed to stop very abruptly, just dispersing without taking a bow (you can bow in WoW) we wondered whether we’d offended them somehow, or what had happened. The lining up was sort of confusing but looked good from a distance. There’s also a certain pleasure in the fireworks and dancing.

What I enjoyed most, though, was crossing the high level zones in a huge long procession escorted by high level guild masters. I think this worked so well because this is one of the things the interface is designed for: exploring and moving around a varied landscape. We were running along so there was no real need for much conversation. And we were doing something together, with excitement. Looking forward to the event was great fun too. It was a good excuse for talking with other players (”Are you going to the Faire next Sunday?”), and having decided I needed a dress to wear to the Faire gave me nice little self-motivated “quest”.

I love that people organise events like this - Stomina Teacup, the guildmistress of Kaboom! Inc, a gnome guild, is the main mastermind, and along with The Mithril Guard, Kaboom is clearly the most active roleplaying guild on the server. At any rate, they organise most events. Hopefully, in time, we’ll have graphical interfaces where communication and role-playing are as well-supported as fighting and exploring.

[Edit: Esther also posted about the Faire, with some really thoughtful points on roleplaying in WoW.]

Kristin was one of those students who in her second week of the web design by blogging class I taught last spring said “I want my own domain, and which blog software is the best and I don’t care if I have to learn php to set it up?” She’s been blogging ever since at Dietro Vetro. Enthusiastic students rock. This semester she’s UiB’s professional, potential-student-catching blogger, at studblogg.uib.no.

I actually have a little bit to do with it, since some of the information people at the university contacted me a few weeks ago to see what I thought about the idea of running a student blog. It was great fun spending half an hour talking about ideas with them - almost made me feel like one of those groovy experts who spends all her time just chatting with people and brainstorming and then moving on without having to do any of the dirty work. Most satisfying. And it really is so cool working at a university where they’re up for trying new ways of doing things.

It’ll be very interesting to see how the strategy works in terms of luring potential students to actually apply for our university. I think I’d be captivated if I were a potential student, anyway. Kristin’s very up front and funny about the fact that she’s being paid to do this, and I know being paid to blog changes things. Her first post is great - I mean, if I were a potential student, I would love being able to read about how a real student lives, what a flat costs and what kinds of things a bunch of students sharing a house get up to. There are useful links to sites with info about houses, but they’re not presented boringly, and there are fun links to her own past blog posts about how a rat died in the kitchen wall (yuck) and so on.

Does anyone know whether other universities have tried this kind of campaign?

Yesterday Scott Rettberg spoke to our webdesign and web aesthetics students yesterday about electronic literature. Here’s a photo and links to the works he discussed. I was particularly happy about how wonderfully the students participated in the discussion, even in English. We have great students! Scott will be returning to Bergen in May, and will work with the web design and web aesthetics students on close readings of websites. This autumn semester he’ll be in charge of the Digital Media Aesthetics course, which is a combined upper level undergraduate and MA level course. It will be great having him at our department.

Tomorrow Talan Memmott, who’s in Sweden this semester, will be speaking about Digital Authorhip: Writing Through New Media. And Bergen Student-TV asked about coming to video it and interview him, isn’t that great? I’ve never “met” the Student-TV people before, but as a very enthusiastic ex-member of the Student Radio I think it’s going to be way cool. They don’t seem to do video casts yet, which is a pity since I have that shiny new video ipod, but they do put their shows on the web. I’ll let you know if Talan shows up there.

The table of contents for the Second Person anthology is out - I have a short piece on quests and narratives in World of Warcraft. There are lots of other interesting looking chapters too, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it!