Reading class.

Check out this engaging quasi-game about the semiotics of class in America. The work is actually an interesing blending of game and blog/wiki. A "chutes and ladders" metaphor about the way that taste, consumption, and values indicate and, in some cases, can determine class membership is joined with a thematically organized blog, in which the artist, self-identified as being of working class origins, writes letters of advice to his younger brother on the nuances of class migration.

The blog cites a number of writers about class in America, including Paul Fussell (whose 1983 classic, Class is a lively, if arch, tour-de-force and neo-con David Brooks, who inadvertantly skewered the very class that Fussell naively described as an "escape" from class, his "X class", in his book, Bobos in Paradise.

Conspicuous in his absence is Pierre Bourdieu, the most formidible thinker on questions of class, taste, and consumption. This may have something to do withe Reading Class's focus on the cultural mechanics of class in America, or perhaps he's more interested in the concrete writing of more recent, accessible writers. The letters to the artist's younger brother, Cody, resemble in tone and structure C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters," epistles of avuncular advice from a senior demon to his nephew on the techniques of corruption.

If there is something that doesn't quite work in this piece, it's the game-component. It's a promising idea that could use development: the chutes and ladders metaphor isn't exploited (choices that would lead to a loss of class standing do not, in fact, change the position of the player - the avatar advances no matter what. The socio-economic consequences of class-position, such as access to resources, marriage and family options, financial considerations, health consequences, access to careers, political sway, etc. are not explored. The artist could deepen the game element of the piece and make its impact much stronger. Incorporating data about the structural implications of the class system and its dependencies could turn this into a very articulate work of game rhetoric. The game mechanics as they are actually implemented are broken; the avatar eventually climbs off the screen, and the interface between the player and the work fizzles out. This should be fixable.

Critical realism.

Some time ago, I remarked that I intended to "do theory after Sokal." By this, I meant a commitment to certain principles of discourse. It wasn't meant as an enthusiastic endorsement of Sokal's project--not only are there certain weaknesses in his hoax (that Social Text was not truly peer reviewed being one, and that he was, indeed, actings as a representative of a 'guest discipline' being another), as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies, and the hoax took a lot of its rhetorical power from this sense of real intellectual vulnerabilities in the constellation of ideas against which his prank worked. (As a note, any physicist who took his hoax as some sort of vindication should be directed to the even more-damning Bogdanov Affair which continues to vex physics; this hoax, if it is a hoax--the "perps" have not called their hand if it is--has divided professional opinion, and gone far beyond one case publication in an extra-disciplinary journal.)

Since then, I've learned a bit more about some of the more recent tendencies in theory. I have a phrase to place on these premises: critical realism, a critique of both hermeneutic and positivist traditions that has its origins in the work of Roy Bhaskar. (Bhaskar has since had a religious turn, but the critical realist idea has an independent trajectory.)

To date, Bhaskar's effect is mostly felt in social sciences and the philosophy of science/science studies. To the extent I can, I'm going to see how I can inform my work in the humanities (specifically, exegetical and interpretive work with texts, particularly games) with the same commitment to questions of efficacy and fallabilism.

Some of the key elements of Bhaskar's work may not actually migrate into the humanities very smoothly. But I think I've found a cluster of ideas from which I can build a container-theory which allows me to position my own work in a coherent relationship with that others. (Since many of my colleagues are still working largely with post-structuralist models, it is pretty important that I have some footing for my work which is often outside those models.)

Turntablism on the Playstation.

OK, I'm a little late to this party. Sony Japan has Turntable software for the PS/2. Been out for about a year now, no US release on the horizon. Rather than thinking of this as convergence, I think it's more of a cross-interface passage. An experienced gamer has a rich vocubluarly of gestures and reactions that they can simultaneously channel through the game controller. It may make more sense to turn the controller into a musical instrument than a keyboard.

3 feet deep.

Nice send-up of Bemania games in this video made by Keith Schofield for DJ Format et al. Not only do they swim upstream from the performance-to-play gesture, but they also get in a couple digs at some of the more routinized cliches of hip-hop performance.