Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 14 Mar 2010 21:56
by Choking » 15 Mar 2010 08:47
by icycalm » 15 Mar 2010 18:15
by amadeus » 19 Mar 2010 00:09
My games have addressed food safety and agribusiness, consumerism, personal debt, the global petroleum market, pandemic flu, wind energy, and even the politics of nutrition, the very subject of CTO Chopra's announcement.
Yet, I am not thrilled. I am not encouraged. I am distressed and I am embarrassed.
The real promise of games as educational and political tools is in their ability to demonstrate the complexity and interconnectedness of issues. Games, like all media, can't ever really change behavior; a game about nutrition won't magically turn a player healthy, just as a game about criminality won't magically turn a player delinquent.
This in mind, I offered to share the lessons, good and ill, that we learned from making Fatworld, a game funded by the Independent Television Service about the politics of nutrition. Fatworld has issues, but to my knowledge it is the best example of a game that really tries to deal with the issues the First Lady's health campaign promises to tackle.
by icycalm » 21 Mar 2010 06:06
by amadeus » 21 Mar 2010 10:31
I am a videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).
by icycalm » 23 Mar 2010 12:58
by recoil » 27 Mar 2010 01:47
by icycalm » 27 Mar 2010 16:14
Lurker wrote:The site's not obscure. Icycalm aka Alex Kierkegaard - the handle for the owner of the forum, post, and site that you linked - is pretty well known and very infamous in certain game circles. Anyone that's had to deal with him in any serious capacity does not forget him. Hell, he isn't just infamous, he's actively blacklisted by a lot of people that know what he's about.
I actually encourage you to check out some of his front page articles sometime or dig deeper into the forum if you get a chance. It's a trip, I tell you. This wasn't just some random post you were linked to.
Raigan Burns wrote:I feel like this article is based on a complete misreading of insomnia.ac; maybe it's not clear in that one post, but in general the author definitely *does* think that writing about games is important, and approaching them with intellectual rigour is a worthwhile pursuit and makes a difference.
What he's complaining about isn't *that* the academics exist, it's that he feels they are inept; he's not claiming that the idea of game studies is stupid, he's claiming that the people currently engaging in game studies are stupid. At least this is my impression.
Simon Ferrari wrote:I think it's somewhat intellectually dishonest, and beneath you, to tack this extended discussion of game scholars onto the event of coming across Insomnia for your first time. Here are some things:
1) Insomnia is not obscure; most people who read about games even five inches outside their own social circle read it regularly, 95% out of self-loathing for continuing to read and the other 5% because sometimes it publishes something you haven't read before.
2) The idea that Icycalm is reacting to anything you might personally be feeling is rather absurd. He doesn't care about academia. He's not on Twitter. He's not an outsider struggling to get in. There's one thing Icycalm dislikes, and it's people who don't write exactly how he wants them to, exactly where he wants them to--on his forums.
3) That list on the forum post isn't even a list of academics. He's not even paying enough attention to the sites he lists and the blogrolls each contains to make either a complete or a consistent list. I get that you hint at some kind of elbow-rubbing between designers and academics that creates a de facto game scholar class that cuts across both professions... but that has nothing to do with the fact that Icy is just being sloppy here.
I love you, Matt, but you're projecting someplace you really don't want to project into.
Simon Ferrari wrote:To reiterate, the only issue I had with the piece was that it mentioned Insomnia. Insomnia is a completely different issue with absolutely no relation to our work as scholars.
Here's what I would suggest about Insomnia and it's name. In order to understand anything about that site and the people who post there, you need to:
1) Read it at night, by yourself.
2) Read all of it, over an extended period of time, while in various emotional states.
3) Read the books that Icycalm draws from, and decide for yourself how well he's synthesized their prose styles and ideas with the pursuit of analyzing games. Of course, most academics already HAVE read these (Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein). You're just not used to reading shit on the Internet by people who are attempting to actually think about videogames and human beings through the lenses of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and simulacra.
Eugene Nikos wrote:I'm going to limit myself to pointing out the most flawed passages of this terrible response you have written. It took me a while to read it because you kept going off on tangents.
>If you don't want to visit it, I don't blame you, but let me sum up
Unfortunately your summary has little to do with the forum post, though it is correct until the last eight words. Fortunately, you don't even address this strawman, choosing instead to ramble on about the intricacies of being a gaming scholar.
>By extension, there is no single "goal" or "driving force" behind a discipline like game studies. Everyone brings something to the table. Generalizing like the aforementioned forum poster gets you nowhere.
It is only generalisations that get you somewhere. You even stated the contrapositive of that in the first sentence so really this entire passage is a reductio ad absurdum.
>He simply doesn't grasp the fallacious nature of his argument. ... All I know is that you have to be severely pissed off in order to write that sort of screed.
This is a projection, showing your own thought process, which has nothing to do with him. If my guess is correct, he wrote that post with a nice grin on his face.
>Perhaps the malcontent forum poster was wrong to attack blogs
Here your reading comprehension and analysis skills fail you. First of all, Mr. Kierkegaard was not attacking the blogs -- he was attacking the game academics in general. The blogs are merely EXAMPLES, or in his words "evidence I advance to support my claim that these people and their entire output are worthless". Second of all, your portrait of him as a "forum poster" is quite cunning but unfortunately, fails to the point of hilarity. Yes indeed, he does submit forum posts on forum software. Why not go even further, call him a "Keyboard user", hell go through his website and figure out he's also a "Game player", "Skier", "Basketballer", et cetera, et cetera. If I had to describe him in one word, it would be "Philosopher". However, I don't need to: he has a name after all!
>but the point is well taken as to the general inaccessibility of much of the disciplinary conversation in academic and professional circles.
You're giving yourself FAR too much credit, we understand you perfectly -- you're asking for more money with every article you post. Here, I will quote a single passage from your essay which betrays this mindset:
>Jerks and heroes, the lot of them. The primary difference, naturally, is that scholars--underpaid as they are in the humanities
You'd do well to go through Mr. Kierkegaard's website and reading essays by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Why is it called Insomnia, by the way?
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:And why is "Icy" the primary poster in every subforum there?
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:not that I was really trying; to an outsider, it just looks like a few posts on a forum that's rather barren
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:It certainly *seems* small.
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:But you have to admit, the rhetoric in which we engage can be very intimidating.
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:and I think that it can heighten the sense that *we* don't know what we're doing from time to time.
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Is that a personal feeling? No, not at all. I say as much. I, for one, love the "life of the mind."
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:But is it wrong to ask questions of accessibility of the writing and ideas?
Simon Ferrari wrote:As far as intellectual interests go, I have a lot of common with Icycalm. I just don't have the time or the energy to try to engage him in the game he's designed on his forums and with his persona.
Simon Ferrari wrote:Read the books that Icycalm draws from, and decide for yourself how well he's synthesized their prose styles and ideas with the pursuit of analyzing games.
Simon Ferrari wrote:Of course, most academics already HAVE read these (Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein).
Simon Ferrari wrote:To reiterate, the only issue I had with the piece was that it mentioned Insomnia. Insomnia is a completely different issue with absolutely no relation to our work as scholars.
Simon Ferrari wrote:My thesis proposes a model by which games, which are “half-real” according to theorist Jesper Juul
by icycalm » 27 Mar 2010 21:44
by icycalm » 28 Mar 2010 20:26
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Just ordered 16 works on continental philosophy @ $220 on Amazon. Ouch.
Simon Ferrari wrote:I've read everything on the site. I'm genuinely interested in either the delusion (if he's real) or the humor (if not) of it.
Charles J Pratt wrote:I have to say, I've been getting a little tired of the shtick lately. Doesn't seem like he's saying anything new these days.
nightdreamer wrote:See? What did I tell you, these people in insomnia are losers of the highest order, who happen to be intelligent. Worst combo.
Zarathustra wrote:They think about you a great deal with their narrow souls -- you are always suspicious to them. Everything that is thought about a great deal is finally thought suspicious.
by NighAligned » 28 Mar 2010 21:21
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:I'm not sorry that I started off the post by mentioning the insecure manchild known to some as "Icycalm." Quite frankly, I don't care how many people in the design-scholarship end of game studies know about him; the guy is obviously outside the conversation...
Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Just ordered 16 works on continental philosophy @ $220 on Amazon. Ouch.
by icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 01:53
by icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:06
by icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:15
icycalm wrote:To be outside the conversation is a privilege!
Nietzsche wrote:... for philosophy is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow --
by icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:50
by icycalm » 01 Apr 2010 22:26
Simon Ferrari wrote:Games are numbers
by icycalm » 01 Apr 2010 22:51
Ian Bogost wrote:All of these units of being exist simultaneously with, yet independently from one another.
Ian Bogost wrote:There is no one "real" E.T., be it the structure, characterization, and events of a narrative, nor the code that produces it, nor anything in between.
Ian Bogost wrote:Videogames are a mess. A mess we don't need to keep trying to clean up, if it were even possible to do so.
by icycalm » 02 Apr 2010 17:46
by icycalm » 06 Apr 2010 06:05
by icycalm » 26 Oct 2010 13:18
subhumansockpuppet wrote:The game in mind blog will be abandoned/deleted soon according to its creator Matthew Kaplan.I'll spare you the nitty gritty details; let's just say that since February I have been at a place in my life that is conducive neither to writing nor meaningful contribution to the larger conversation.
I think the articles were pointless moralising. For example:
http://www.gameinmind.com/game-in-mind/ ... -nazi.html
It doesn't talk about
-how aesthetics affects game experience (is it more fun playing on the 'evil' team?)
-whether mini games which 'make players throw dead babies into mass graves, incinerate human beings in ovens, or shoot Jewish, gypsy, or homosexual prisoners on command' could still be fun.
-whether playing games can affect your view of the world (ie. could they be used for propaganda)
All he tries to talk about is 'is it immoral to play games?' He doesn't answer that question at all - just concludes that playing games could offend other people. Which is like saying 'playing games is immoral' is one possible answer to the question. Well duh. I think he has avoided taking a position on whether things you do in the simulacrum affects your character:But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
The only thing he is sure about is that Nazis are bad and still much worse than the Taliban.
I think morality is meaningless in games (or at best the relevant morality relates to a cooperative strategy to win or self imposed restrictions to maximize enjoyment). So M. Kaplan never contributed with his waffle. Anyone agree?