jill/txt

Yoo-hoo! Most of the images are up on elinor.nu, our catalogue of Nordic electronic literature, and it looks pretty cool!

We made the Elinor site all snazzy! The new site is just up, so there are a few issues still, and most of the images aren’t there yet, but it’s still looking infinitely better than it was, thanks to Pixelpikene and their team. What you’ll find is a catalogue of more than sixty Nordic works of electronic literature, with brief descriptions, screenshots (when the images are all uploaded) and links to the websites.

Many thanks to the many people who’ve contributed to the catalogue. The descriptions were written by (and most of the works collected by) Marko Niemi (Finland), Karen Wagner (Denmark), Maria Engberg (Sweden) og Hans-Kristian Rustad (Norway). Solveig Smedstad did a lot of work coordinating all this and creating a brochure earlier this year, and she’s also helped migrate the catalogue to its permanent system. Pixelpikene did the design and programming.

The Elinor network for electronic literature in the Nordic countries was initiated by Lisbeth Klastrup, Susana Tosca, Raine Koskimaa, Patrick Svensson, Søren Pold and Thomas Brevik. And me.

We’re having a launch of the catalogue tomorrow, and we’ll also celebrate the Electronic Literature Collection, which Scott Rettberg is a co-editor of. He’ll present the Collection - which is a wonderful anthology of sixty works of electronic literature from USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Free CDs to the first comers - and snacks as well. If you’d like to come let me know! Room 216, HF-bygget, University of Bergen - at 12:15.

Tormod Carlsen is a Bergener who’s been active in the local neighbourhood associations for a while and is now considering entering more formal politics - and he’s blogging it at Bergensvalget. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out - I think the immediacy of blogging might work particularly well at such a local level. Another kind of local blogging was documented in the New York Times yesterday, in an article about college leaders who blog - with some interesting notes about the ways in which they blog, the kinds of things they blog, and students’ and others’ responses. I might have to forward it to our university rektor…

Suw Charman is one of the blog consultants I met at Blogtalk (I hadn’t even realised there was such a job, isn’t it cool? She goes into businesses when their blogging goes bad and helps them out - and other things.) Suw blogs at Strange Attractor with Kevin Anderson, who’s the blogs editor for The Guardian. He recently posted a nice summary of reasons why the standard media discounting of blogs as bad journalism (basically) is silly. Many of you will already know this argument, but if you don’t, go read the rundown. And I like this:

I often say that my network is my filter, and whether it’s on friends’ blogs, via e-mail or via IM, I’m constantly getting a feed of information that is more relevant to my life than the crap that passes for ‘authoratative comment’ - as Simon Kelner Editor of The Independent called it. What a load of self-important tosh.

[heavily edited after posting]
One of the pieces of unstable art in Stavanger this weekend is Finnish artist’s Laura Beloff’s The Fruit Fly Farm, which is a second stage of a project she started with The Head. The Head is a piece of wearable art - sort of like a see-through sphere with a shoulder strap - that has a mobile phone inside that takes a photo and records a bit of sound when someone texts it (the phone number is +47 93351116) and sends the photo and sound back as an MMS, as well asuploading the photo to Flickr.

The Fruit Fly Farm adds in life, in the form of a fruit fly colony that lives inside the sphere, along with enough rotting fruit to last them a week. The camera in this sphere takes photos from the point of view of the flies, I think, and can be SMSed at +47 93351116. You can see the most recent photos on her website. When you wear the farm, you have what the artist calls “-a wearable fly farm, a personal “pet”, with public access-”

When I was tiny, or perhaps before I was born, in that mythical past of which you hear your parents lived before you remember, my mum bred fruit flies, or drosophila as she taught us to call them, for genetic research. So my family had a special relationship to drosophila, and my sister and I knew all about how fast they breed, and how convenient they are for experiments about chromosones, mutations and inheritance. We never kept them as pets, though, at least, not deliberately.

Per Platou introduced me to Laura Beloff, and so I’ve had a glimpse of the Farm. She had to sew it a “dress” to protect it from the cold. A fruit fly farm as a personal, self-documenting pet. It’s a hilarious. I’m looking forward to getting a closer look at it.

I’m speaking at Article in Stavanger today. It’s a beautiful sunny day here (finally, it’s rained for weeks, I’m sure) and the city is full of “unstable art” installations. Should be good!

I have a bunch of student paper drafts, some MA project descriptions and a nearly completed draft of an MA thesis to read and prepare feedback for and a talk to prepare and oh dear, I can’t think straight. Which is a pity, because the discussions around yesterday’s post about endings and endless stories and World of Warcraft and Lost are fascinating and demand thought.

I can at least quote a bit of Diane Greco’s response that made me smile.

Brooks thinks the end of a story should make sense of its beginning. That this feeling of understanding is what signals “the end” of the story. Aha! That’s the moment, the end. Tout comprende. A perhaps wishful idea. I can see how it might be comforting. But other comforts are also available: repetition, perhaps mastery. Onyxia, as Jill points out, always comes back. She’s playing Freud’s game, fort/da; and so are we. You may lose, or she might, but nothing is ever really lost — a point ironically underscored by the title, in Jill’s post, of the TV series that never ends, in which the loss represented by an actual ending is precisely what is not on the menu.

Not that I can think of more to say right now. See you on the other side of those papers.

Playing World of Warcraft it’s quite clear that the whole point of the game is that it doesn’t end. Sure, you can reach level 60, but when you do there’s the “endgame”, which lasts for ages and in which you battle for reputation and do long quest chains culminating in 40 person raids on various dragons and dungeons. And then you do the raids again, better, faster. Patches give new content many times a year and the expansion pack will be out in January, raising the level limit to 70 and adding yet more content - and presumably this constant expansion will continue for as long as Blizzard can keep us captivated.

Not that dissimilar from the way that TV dramas like Lost are apparently intended to go on forever. Rather than keeping an ending in sight, shows like Lost simply pose puzzles and defer closure for as long as they can - or in other words, until the audience drops sufficiently that the TV channel drops the show.

There are lots of stories in World of Warcraft. One of the major plotlines concerns Onyxia, a dragon who, as dragons can in this world, also takes human form as one of the chief advisors to the humans. Every time a raid kills Onyxia, her head is hung on a stake in the capital city of the faction her killers belong to (and a video of the fight is posted to YouTube by her slayers…). This, in a sense, is a possible ending to the game. However, Onyxia can be killed again and again, as can every other mob in the world. It’s a MMOG, and Blizzard’s goal is to get us to play for as long as possible, just as the creators of Lost want us to watch for as many seasons as possible.

Lost and World of Warcraft have opposite approaches, though. While Lost uses permanent deferral, World of Warcraft tells us all the answers as soon as we’re curious. We’ve already seen the ending: Onyxia dies, the bosses will all be killed. And the next day everything will be back to normal. Nothing will ever change. Seeing the endings happen for other players shows us our own potential endings and reassures us that the end of the story does not mean loss: everything will still be here. True, if you kill Onyxia, she’ll be dead for you for five days. But she’ll be back.

Years ago, Peter Brooks wrote about endings and our desire for them, writing of “the play of desire in time that makes us turn pages and strive toward narrative ends” (Reading for the Plot, xiii) and of the importance of the idea of an ending for the excitement of the middle, writing “of the desires that connect narrative ends and beginnings, and make of the textual middle a highly charged field of force” (xiii-xiv). We read, Brooks writes, because we want the end. This is our narrative desire - we want to know how it all works out. The end of a story is a moment of loss, too, though: it is the death, in a sense, of our living in that fictional world.

The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot. (Reading for the Plot, 94)

Lost is an example of a narrative that uses our expectation of an ending (there are puzzles, so there must be answers) to make the entire series into the “charged field of force” that you usually get in the middle of a narrative, before the ending. But as we begin to suspect that there is no ending, that charge lessens.

World of Warcraft does something different. It tells us the ending straight away. You would think that would obliterate any tension and excitement. But quite the contrary, when we see Onyxia’s head hanging high we want to kill her ourselves, too.

Obviously World of Warcraft is more than a narrative. It is a game, and in games we know what’s going to happen, or what we want to happen. We want to score more goals than the other team, get all our tokens to the last square, kill all the monsters, catch all the other kids, play all our cards and yes, of course we’ve seen other people play and win before.

Or - let’s compare World of Warcraft instead to a story that allows the endless generation of other stories. The King Arthur stories had no real ending, as far as I can remember. They’re always trying to find the Holy Grail, but they never find it, do they? That mythology sets up a structure - some characters, a goal, some conflicts - that then allow story-tellers to tell as many stories as they please set in this fictional (historical?) world. Isn’t this as useful a comparison as the comparison to games? Both seem useful strategies for understanding what World of Warcraft is.

I titled this post “The end of endings”, but that’s not really what’s happening, is it? On the contrary, World of Warcraft emphasises endings and goals by making them visible as potentials you can achieve, not by keeping them secret. World of Warcraft isn’t about puzzles, it’s about hard work, navigation, strategy and mastery. All the answers are out there, you don’t need walkthroughs. Anyone can get to the endings, so long as they play hard enough for long enough.

It’s just that the nature of deferral has changed.

Terra Naomi used YouTube for a “virtual tour” this summer - so instead of driving around the country as she’s done previous, she put videos of herself playing her guitar and singing on YouTube. Go have a look at the video of her song Say it’s possible, for instance. Now notice that this video has 72 video responses and almost all of them are from other people who are playing their own versions of her song. Isn’t that just insanely beautiful? I mean, the idea, of people sharing and creating and performing for each other together alone like that? And to think that I heard someone worried that kids these days just download music, they don’t make it anymore.

Terra Naomi’s website explains her YouTube success well - the last stuff is, as Stephanie Booth writes in the del.icio.us link where I found this (can I link to that?), the most interesting from a new media perspective.

This morning I’m talking about blogs and learning for my university’s Kompetanseforum i IKT og læring. I’m going to base this on my keynote in Hawaii (ssshh, don’t tell anyone that it was online and I wasn’t really in Hawaii, let me pretend I was wearing a lei on the beach) about blogs, web 2.0 and learning, and depending on what people want I’ll also talk about the Wikipedia, Flickr, and give some practical examples. The people who go to these talks have lots of ideas and experiences of their own so I’m thinking flexible is good.

Every quarter, the people at the blog tracking site Technorati share their statistics about blogs. The latest State of the Blogosphere came out November 6, and a quick skim leaves me with the following notes:

• The number of new blogs created and posts per day is levelling off, though it’s still double what it was this time last year. This slowing may be real or it may be due to improved spam filters at Technorati; we’ll have to wait and look at stats for the next three months.
• 39% of blogs tracked by Technorati are in English. Many caveats about the language stats (and I didn’t read them).
• Looking at blogs with varying degrees of authority (how many people link to them) it’s clear that there’s a correlation between posting often (at least 18 times a month) and having medium or high authority. Low authority blogs post only 12 times a month on average.

This post is a collection of links that I’ll talk about for the communication association here in Bergen tonight. The rest is thus in Norwegian.
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Last night I made myself a human. There are dozens of low-level humans and elves and orcs on my account, actually, because my ten-year-old adores making new characters, but this time I made one for myself, thinking I’d try to make someone who’s not caucasian, to see how possible that is. She’s pretty convincing, don’t you think? Once I was playing Scura I noticed how incredibly light-skinned everyone else in the game seemed to me. Before I hadn’t really thought of that. And I was a little upset that there were only straight-haired hairstyles. Should perhaps read Kolko or Nakimura’s books.

I wonder whether players in the many non-Western countries on average choose different-looking avatars to Westerners. Do they have different options when creating a character? Does it bother them that there are so many more shades of snow-white skin than of darker skin-tones?

Another reason for making a human: I want to try the Onyxia quests from the Alliance side - but I guess that will take a lot of investment of time. Even my horde character is still only level 42. Ayayay.

Years ago Shelley Powers wrote about getting a phone call from the IRS asking questions about her taxes based on what they’d read on her blog. Now, as noted by Digme, the Norwegian tax authorities are implementing a system that will automatically search the internet and “unstructured information” (as opposed to formal databases) to find assets that have not been reported to the tax authorities. It’s not really an issue of “Is Google Evil?”, is it - it’s simply surveillance. Which is fine, sort of, in a way, if you didn’t do anything bad and as long as the government is trustworthy and all the other governments are too and we’re not at war or in a fascist regime. Unfortunately most countries tend to be in one of those situations at least once in a lifetime, don’t they?

I’ve been trying to figure out how many people play WoW in different countries, and today I got an email from davesgonechina, who was asking the same thing.

Generally, people say there are nearly seven million WoW players now. [Add ref] However, as far as I can tell, there are five million Chinese players alone - I think these are in addition to Western players (EU and US).

This blog post explains that Blizzard has licenced WoW China to the company The9, and that as a publicly traded company, The9 has to release quarterly reports on revenue etc. That means we can get lots of data from those quarterly reports.

The report for the second quarter of 2006 states the following:

In the second quarter, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft attained peak and average concurrent WoW users of approximately 630,000 and 330,000, respectively, in mainland China. As of June 30, 2006, over 5 million paid accounts have been activated*.

The footnote to that reads:

*Activated paid accounts represent the number of CD Keys that we sold to customers and have been activated by the customers to log-on to the World of Warcraft game in China.

So 5 million people play the Chinese version of WoW.

T.L. Taylor also sent along this recent presentation that Vivendi (who own Blizzard who develop and run WoW) gave to their investors. It says WoW from Blizzard has over 6.5 million customers (June 2006), but you can also see that all their other games have sold a lot more - the single-player Warcraft games, Diablo, Spyro, etc, though also over many more years.

This chart seems to show WoW players according to “East” or “West”. Presumably that means Asia or Europe/US/Australia? If so, it’s clear that the five million Chinese players (only about 4 million in “East” (i.e. China, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea) in the chart, which shows data from the first quarter of 2006) far outnumber the Western players, and that they’re growing a lot faster than the Western players.

The chart below is also from that same Vivendi presentation to investors, and shows the different regions and languages covered.

Makes me feel rather humble - sure, we think we know World of Warcraft, but do we really? Can we really, without knowing what it’s like to play the Chinese version. Even the interface is rather different from the European version, as this YouTube video that Lisbeth shared (it’s for her death stories project) shows - look at the size of that text sliding up the screen during combat! What cultural differences might there not be between an Asian server and a Western server? After all, T.L. Taylor has showed that there are large differences even just between a US server and a European server.

Does anyone know of research on these things?