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This piece is a few years old, but after spending some time reading Debord this spring, I thought this quote was worth underlining:

Sand and freedom | | Guardian Unlimited Arts

This is the type of empty, rootless scenario that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Rem Koolhaas’ Generic City warned us about – but then, what else should a 21st-century Arab city look like?

If you havn’t read The Society of the Spectacle, it’s worth the time. Even though it’s steeped in the sort of Marixism that we so quickly look down on these days, when read through the context of architecture and videogames, it’s hard to pause. Consider this opening bit:

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Or this:

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

And that’s just the first to paragraphs in the book!

When applied to the urban development in Dubai, you don’t have to have a copy of  the Communist Manefesto on your self to get something out of the insight.

The L.A. Times has a good piece covering some of the fading interest in some parts of the Second Life grid. While the article focuses on why advertisers are rethinking an investment in an online, syntehtic world presence, one line should catch the eye of any urban designer, virtual or otherwise:

Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life – Los Angeles Times

Another problem for some is that Second Life doesn’t have enough active residents.

In its rush to make Second Life a free-market paradise, it seems the master planners of this virtual forgot a basic tenant of urban form–people like to be around people. And while there are an number of issues related to population density at scale–crime, congestion, pollution, etc–there are also benefits. Front row seats at the Super Bowl would loose its joy if you were the only person in the stadium. Too many people in the park and its crowded, but not enough and it can feel kind of dull.

Second Life has made land a commodity and accelerated that trend by offering lots and lots of private islands without the spatial benefit of adjacency to anything but empty space.. The result–there’s not enough people to generate the sort of critical mass that makes a city feel like a city. As it is, Second Life has turned into an episode of the Twilight Zone where a few survivors wander an wide-open, windy and empty urban landscape.

So, while SL dreams of becoming a megamall filled with commerce, it’s really a frontier town, where land is cheap and loners live out their hard bitten lives in solitude.

The amusing central fallacy of 3D environments is that, in most cases, they are not 3D. Instead, they are 2D + time projections of three-dimensional model data. That we can suspend belief enough to find outselevs “inside” these 3D places is a marvel of phenomenology.

Anyway, with that in mind, this Microsoft project bears further examination:

Photosynth Technology Preview

What this tool does, and you can see demonstrated on their site, is to take mass quantities of images of an object or place. The system analyzes the images for similarities and then stitches them together into a sort of 3D model. Image QuickTime VR meets Gibson’s image of cyberspace and you’re on the right track.

I’m not sure if this really counts as 3D. But it’s certainly a virtual environment. And it opens up all kinds of possible connections between the photographic image and  virtual worlds. Looking at Photsynth, it is difficult to see the image of our synthetic worlds as more than sophisticated collections of images.

Something’s been nagging at me lately. In the rush to use “games to teach” we keep skipping over the obvious question: Teach what?

So, it was with some interest I picked up on this item:

Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide

The MacArthur Foundation has decided to contribute $1.1 million behind a new public school in New York for 6-12th graders. The curriculum for the entire school will surround designing video games. The idea is that if children have “gaming literacy”, or in other words, teaching kids about dynamic systems.

All well and good. But can I ask another question–do games really teach “procedural literacy?” I’m not saying that they don’t. Just asking.

As for an entire school based around games, well, that sounds like fun. So does an entire school based around comic books or sports or cooking. In fact, I think this is really the same idea that Disney uses when it comes to building hotels. They call it “themeing”, and I’m down with that.

I’m just not sure that I understand how playing games will make kids any better off that, say, using Google and the Wikipeduia and maybe learning Flash and a little BASIC. All things equal, I’m happy that someone is trying this out. We’ll see how it goes. And I’m equally glad that my kids are not in this particular program.

Heresy, you say? As a videogame researcher and writer, shouldn’t I want my kids to get that extra edge in the digital economy and learn this new literacy? Yeah, well, here’s the problem. My house is full of games and I am sure that whatever lessons games have to teach, my kids soak up on a regular basis. They don’t need to learn non-linear thinking at school. They need to remember to put their coats in the closet when they come home and to pick up their toys.

So what has been nagging? I think that we need to put these notions of computational, procedural or gaming literacy under the microscope and see what’s there. These notions sounded nice when we were trying to find reasons to justify studying games. Now we need to question those very assumptions.

Over the weekend I had a chance to chat with a bunch of people who work in the Colorado ski industry. The key points that stuck out to me included:

• The skiing is a global industry that wants to expand.
• But expansion is often limited by the high cost for new people getting involved in the activity and,
• The marketing and program development tends to emphasize the hardcore over the novice which,
• Is problematic becaue the hardcore is the soul of the sport, but
• More people don’t ski that do.

Sound familiar?

In this short analysis, the ski biz and the game biz share a common delima. Over and over we let hardcore gamers set the agenda and it takes a lot of Wiis or Bejeweled to convince anyone that many more people would play games if they were just easier and more friendly to the first-timer.

To this list of symmetries between videogames and skiing I would add that both are leisure activities very focused on their environments. Where you play is one of the most important decisions you make–Aspen or Vail, Vice City or Norrath.

Beyond that, these features may simply occur as the result of any leisure-focus. Pastimes and hobbies can be defined by their fans, and fans of different abilities and time commitments create a hardcore in opposition to a fringe or casual participants.

From this I still have a couple of questions:

• Is this connection worth noting?
• Can we say anything about skiing or other leisure industries by looking at games. Vice versa, can we say anything about games looking at these industries?