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When I was making this website I soon found that I
needed "room" to add the odd comment now and then.
I could have written a Blog, but I'm enough of a realist to know that I
do not have the time. So this is more my corner for the occasional
note.
Why I called it mews is explained
below.
·
mews archive no 1
·
mews archive no 2
·
mews archive no 3
·
mews archive no 4
·
back to mews
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Because I'm so busy at the moment there are 265
unread mails in my gamelist directory and 33 unread issues of
Gamasutra. Fortunately I glanced over the latest mails today and
found that Steven Poole has been so kind to put a pdf version of
his famous book
Trigger
Happy
online. As I have the original 2000 version, it is a great way
to be able to read the revised edition. And it is a great way
for my students to 'own' their own copy and not have to borrow
the one from the library. Thank you Steven from a grateful Game
lecturer.
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Assasin's Creed
finally arrived from France. Unfortunately I have a lot of work
this half semester with new classes and bachelor essays and
master theses, so I only had time for a brief session. All I can
say at the moment is AMAZING. It's everything a hoped for an
anticipated and even more. Stunning graphics, absolutely
captivating music and the gameplay so far hasn't tripped me up
yet. I can't wait for the end of the semester so that I can
totally immerse myself in this game. It will probably end up in
my all time favourite list.
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I attended the opening symposium 'Games as
Science' for GATE
(Game research for training and entertainment, N.B. the website
is a mixture of Dutch an English) in Utrecht.
Joske Houtkamp's
talk on affect and game space was especially interesting for me.
Also interesting was the idea someone proposed (can't remember
who, sorry) to have adaptive games i.e. games that adapt their
gameplay to the experience of the player. That way everybody
could in theory finish a game and not get caught after the first
hurdle.
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This year I participated in the
Nationale
Kraker Competitiewhich
is an internet quiz that tests your abilities to find
information online (partnered by Google, NRC.next, the Dutch
Library consortium and the Dutch government). Although there
were a few glitches (that are still being discussed on the
website) and round three was a disaster, I very much enjoyed the
experience as it let me to unknown databases, old newspapers and
interesting stories. It is amazing how much you can find online
these days. Sometimes the search was exasperating and I spend
more hours than planned, but what can I say, it just was
addictive. And I now know all there is to know about the theft
of the jewels of princess Anna Paulowna the wife of the later
King Willem II of the Netherlands.
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In anticipation of the game
Assasin's Creed
and as it was my birthday I bought a Playstation 3 (there are a
lot of technical complaints about the XBox 360, so I opted for
the Playstation in stead). As I'm clearly not part of the
targeted demographic for this console I had to buy a separate
game (Pirates
of the Caribbean At Worlds End)
as I will probably never even open Resistance or Motor
Storm. My impressions so far... Pirates is graphically o.k.
(but if you play PC games on 'heavy' hardware its not as
impressive as it is made out to be) The game suffers from the
same problems as other Playstation games from the past, the
entry level is playable, but soon after the number of button
combo's needed is just to much (at least for Digital Dinosaur
me). We also tried a Blu Ray DVD but as we usually watch digital
TV I can't say I'm that impressed. We haven't tried it with the
beamer yet, perhaps that will convince me. For the moment the
Wii is definitely the better choice as it gives you this
incredible new gaming experience.
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It's official. I'm a Digital Dinosaur. I do not
have a Hyves page (although I do have a
LinkedIn profile).
I do not submit videos to YouTube, although I love to find
interesting material for lectures there and I love it that more
and more TV stations put their programs online). I only use
Picasa on my local hard disk, although I appreciate family
members putting their photos online so that I do not have to sit
through hours of holiday-snaps .
I do not have a Blog (reasons stated above). I only occasionally
use MSN (you have to keep up with all the nephews and nieces
once in a while). I have not Skyped for almost a year now (as I
now have a flat rate phone tariff). I only make my student's use
Furl but do not Furl myself and my Wikis are mere experiments.
Two weeks ago I discovered a great online Dutch source for
genealogy research (www.genlias.nl)
and consequently investigated and documented a large part of my
family-tree (in a specialized computer program) but I refuse to
put my family tree online in GeaNet. When my uncle wanted me to
get involved in a Google spreadsheet collaboration listing the
family's snail mail addresses I was only concerned with privacy
issues and blatantly refused. I do a reasonable amount of
shopping online, but will give my second hand stuff away rather
than sell it on. I'm not part of the Einstein generation and
this website is technically backward (as it's not dynamic and
doesn't use XML, us dinosaurs prefer to html by hand and put in
the odd JavaScript just for good measure). But I am addicted to
e-books and prefer to read my fiction on my pda-phone (which
incidentally also doubles as my mp3-player, video-player,
digital camera, handheld game console, satnav, appointment
dairy, sudoko-solver, anagram solver, dictionary etc. etc.,
three cheers for the people who invented it). Why this new
found concern? Because I attended the VU-tourism conference last
Friday, were it was pointed out to me that as a university
lecturer I'll have to use all of the above in my classes to keep
the Einstein generation interested. Will I do this? Only if I
think that it is educationally sound. Because, lets be honest,
my first and foremost task is turning them into academic
scholars. Which also means teaching them to critically research
this new media world.
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Since we had a typically wet summer and a foot
injury kept me from visiting interesting places I held my own
film marathon (mostly films form 2005-2007). Including a
completely random collection of romcoms ('05-'06), which I
normally do not watch. Interestingly the ones I saw all involved
computers and the internet. The message that came across was
that modern dating and relationships are not possible without
going online. Although the internet as modern liaison was
already featured in You've got Mail (1998) it now seems
to be part and parcel of the genre (depicting white middle class
society where everyone apparently has enough money for a
computer and an internet connection).
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Things start to get weird when you find that
Google somehow knows more about you than you do yourself. O.K.
we all have our Google namesakes (mine seems to be an
architect), but I just found out that I have more Google scholar
entries than I thought there were. Not only are two syllabi of
previous courses listed as books, but my early work helping with
the Old English corpus has also been mentioned in an article I
never knew existed:
"The usefulness [of a corpus] could be
increased enormously if a tagged corpus were available so that
syntactic strings can be looked for systematically. As far as I
know there is only one place where work is going on to develop
it. At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam a pilot project using
part of the corpus is under way to investigate the possibilities
and problems in coding the corpus. Participating scholars are :
Ans van Kemenade (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Wim van der
Wurff (Leiden University) and myself (University of Amsterdam).
Connie Veugen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) is providing
programming support." (William F. Koopman. 'The study of Old
English Syntax and the Toronto dictionary of Old English' in Neophilologus Volume 76, Number 4 / October, 1992, Springer
The Netherlands).
I had no idea Wim wrote an article about the
project. Luckily more and more publishers now make their
material available online (e.g. through university libraries),
so you can 're-find' a past you never knew about.
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Like Simonson, Connie Veugen also
refers to Northrop Frye in her analysis of Aragorn as seen in
different media. She starts with a précis of Aragorn’s history
as given in the Appendices, which Veugen points out must be
taken into consideration when adapting the character for other
media, and an examination of the hero-story in world mythology.
She then proceeds to a close analysis of one particular scene
(the meeting at the inn at Bree) in a radio adaptation (Brian
Sibley, 1981), an animated movie (Ralph Bakshi, 1978), a live
action movie (Peter Jackson, 2000), and the Vivendi computer
game based on the book. She takes into the account the
limitations of different media–in the radio play, for example,
every piece of information about Aragorn must be conveyed by
dialogue, vocal style, sound effects, and accompanying music,
while in an animated feature using costly hand-drawn animation
techniques, faithfulness to the original is limited by the
necessary compression of the story and simplification of
illustration. Veugen’s critique of this scene in the Jackson
film points out the very obvious differences between Tolkien’s
hero of romance (in Frye’s terms) and Jackson’s Hamlet-like
conflicted action hero, whom Frodo follows simply because he
feels he has no choice. In the Vivendi computer game, Veugen
draws attention to a fundamental split between the Aragorn
character in the “cut scenes” (scenes that play without
interaction with the player), in which he is closer to the
highromance hero of the book, and the interactive sequences ,
where he is purely a game warrior. The present writer’s
classroom experience has demonstrated that Jackson’s Aragorn,
while visually the closest to Tolkien’s conception,
unfortunately also dominates her students’ perception of his
character and role in the story, even for those who are also
familiar with the book.
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Frank Weinreich, who himself has published
several Tolkien articles, quotes my Aragorn article in the
first part of his critical review of Peter Jackson's
adaptation entitled
Die
Verfilmung Peter Jacksons, Teil I
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In an item on home cinema sets
the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant stated that the Dutch and
the Italian prefer to watch movies at home in stead of going
to the cinema. This partly explains why DVD's sell so well
in these countries.
I would like to add that it does subtract from the media
experience if you cannot afford a good beamer or do not have
room enough for a large screen or if you do not live in a
sound-isolated house where you can get the most of a good
digital sound system. If you are fortunate enough to own the
lot, you can even have your own retrospective of special
directors or cinematographers etc. But it will always lack
something of the real atmosphere.
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Not to say that they do not do
good games at EA, but I was really taken aback by the news
that they have
acquired the rights to Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings books.
OK, the Vivendi game didn't do very well. But, imho, that
was due to a fundamental misconception that you can just
"translate" a complex story to a game medium and that you
just have to ad a bit of hacking and slashing to make it
interactive. The LOTR EA games owed a lot of their
popularity to the films and visually they were stunning. As
the films were also action packed it was easier to translate
the action to the game environment. But action is not what
Tolkien's books were about, so the fundamental question
should be "can you turn these books into meaningful and
challenging games?" My jury is still out on that one.
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The TMG special number was
reviewed in Skrien (no 5 year 37 June/July 2005).
About my contribution Joost Raessens writes: "She links this
type of game [adventure game] beautifully to the literature
of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Dungons and Dragons role
playing game." (translated from Dutch by me)
He then criticizes my point that Jesper Juul does not think
that adventure games are games because interactivity and
storytelling are mutually exclusive ("you cannot have
interactivity and narration at the same time" Jesper
Juul Games Telling Stories 2001. Perhaps I should have
explained that I was referring to a lecture he gave in
Amsterdam called Hamlet, the game? (which concluded
that a game thus entitled was impossible, so that we as
participants decided then and there to make this game to
proof him wrong), but that would have made the note a lot
longer. Still at the time Jesper Juul was rather taken by the
idea that games and stories were not the same e.g. "Computers are not narratives...Rather the narrative tends
to be isolated from or even work against the
computer-gameness of the game." Jesper Juul
A Clash between Games and Narrative 1998. (Yes the old
ludology versus narrative discussion).
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Why this tab is called Mews.
Mews [mju:z] n.
Set of stabling around open yard, now often
converted into dwellings.
As I formally trained as a linguist I found that
Mews would fit adequately because it:
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could be a contraction of M[edia]
+ [n]ews. (A bit of word-formation play. My thesis was on word
formation btw) |
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is the way traditional farms
were build in Limburg, where I was born. I still hope to live in
one some day. |
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of course is the sound cats make and cats play
an important part in my life (this is also why this page uses a
more cat orientated design) |
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