Investigations of a Dog

Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better – you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes – but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.

This week I have been mostly reading Keith Jenkins and 6 years worth of Scary Go Round. I’m also looking after a coal fire, which means breathing in an unusual amount of hot ash and carbon monoxide. Therefore if I post any really mad ideas in the next few days it’s probably best to ignore them.

The other thing I read was an article by Brian Rejack about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (the WW2 computer game that I posted about ages ago). First thought: if only I’d known you could get published in Rethinking History just by writing about how BiA isn’t as realistic as it claims to be. He didn’t even have to cite Derrida (although there is a bit of Barthes). Second thought: if only I’d bothered to look at the extras in BiA. I ignored them on the grounds that I already know quite a lot about WW2 and that I have the research skills to find out even more whenever I want. Do I need to be patronized by pop history factoids? Well, it turns out there’s a lot more to it than that.

One of the central points of the article is that extras can change the way a game (or DVD, where this idea started) is perceived and interpreted. The photos in the BiA extras are a major part of the games claims to realism. They include composites of original photos of WW2 mashed up with screenshots taken in-game, with only the change from black and white to colour showing where one begins and the other. (I’ve also just noticed that one of the composite shots is on the back of the box, but I don’t think I ever looked at the back of the box. So much for close reading…) With this attention to historical detail, surely Gearbox can say “This is How It Really Was”. But it doesn’t really work. When I wrote about the game I was mostly interested in tactical realism, which I think it ultimately fails at, despite being an improvement over MOHAA and CoD. They might have based the levels on maps and photos of the real Normandy, but does the real Normandy have those strange earth banks in the middle of fields with convenient dips in them that you can shoot over when you’re in the right position. If so who put them there and what are they supposed to be for?

Rejack takes a different approach, pointing out that the characters in the game are not emotionally engaging and don’t react to anything like real people. Even the death of Baker’s best friend in a cut scene isn’t particularly moving. Another weakness is that the game “presents a view of history as a straightforward sequence of events, with no sense of competing interpretations or multiple viewpoints”, although the sequel Earned in Blood does attempt something like that (as I mentioned here).

As a comparison, Rejack offers Facade, which involves more sophisticated interaction with NPCs and much less shooting. I’m not sure how excited I can get about a dinner party simulator, but I’ll report back after I’ve tried it.

Since posting about Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s article on gender bending in computer games, I’ve been thinking about early examples of female player-characters. Esther mentioned Gauntlet, a 1985 arcade machine (later converted to the C64 and other plartforms) where players could choose from 4 characters, one of whom was female (Thyra the Valkyrie). That was one of the earliest games where male players could choose to swap gender but not the only one. Below are some Commodore 64 games that I remember from the 80s in which boys could be (or in some cases would have to be) girls. (more…)

For the first 9 weeks of this year I didn’t read any books or articles – mainly because I’ve been concentrating on Python programming and XML markup. This weekend I broke the embargo in style by reading two exciting new pieces: Karl Steel’s ‘How To Make A Human’ and Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’. This might sound like a horrible cliche, but both articles are about the blurring of boundaries.

Karl argues that in the middle ages the animal-human boundary was maintained not just by asserting that animals were different from humans, but by subjugating animals to humans. Owning and killing animals was necessary to maintain the distinction between animals and humans. He concludes with the suggestion that taking away the right of the lower classes to hunt was seen as taking away their humanity. This is something that I’m likely to be quoting a lot in my work on horses in the English Civil War, as it could equally be suggested that when soldiers took away people’s horses they were also taking away their humanity.

Esther suggests that gender swapping in online gaming is likely to be a lot more common than many people think. She points out how common it is for players to ask female avatars whether they’re female in real life. This suggests a certain amount of anxiety about gender bending, but although this anxiety might ostensibly be based on an assumption that playing an avatar of a different gender is deviant, the assumption undermines itself. If the question is asked so often, that leads to the conclusion that gender swapping is quite normal, even if you don’t want to admit it. If it’s supposed to be so unusual why waste time asking every female avatar if she’s really a man?

Esther’s article focuses on an issue which was largely glossed over in the Fibreculture article that I posted about the other day: we really don’t know how many women are playing online games because there’s often no way of knowing who’s behind an avatar. If someone plays a female avatar in game but posts on the forum as a male there’s clearly some gender bending going on, but which way? Is a forum persona necessarily any more real than an avatar in a game? (See also my old post on roleplaying in Livejournal) Therefore Fullerton, Morie and Pearce might be assuming too much (or should I say too little?) about female participation in gaming. Could it be that female gamers adopt male personas when playing stereotypically masculine games? Nobody knows whether they do or don’t. Ultimately Esther shows that even when mainstream gaming is dominated by a narrow range of gender stereotypes many gamers are undermining those stereotypes in ways that are really not that deviant or unusual. As Paul Westerberg said, “tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?”.

1. Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, ‘A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space’, Fibreculture, (2008).
2. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’, Eludamos, 2 (2008).
3. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.

Via Grand Text Auto I found an interesting article in Fibreculture about gendered space in computer games and virtual worlds. I definitely agree with the authors that game designers tend to cater for a very narrow range of gameplay styles which conform to a particular masculine stereotype. Anything which encourages more diverse experiences through different gameplay and different concepts of space is very welcome. On the other hand I was a bit disappointed that the article seems to reinforce gender stereotypes more than questioning them. Although the authors claim not to be calling for more “pink” games but to be encouraging an “androgynous mind”, they still seem to be assuming that violence and competition are male concerns which are of no interest to women. For example they refer to FPS as “distinctly masculine”. Defining games as “male” or “female” is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s frustrating that the authors recognise this and try hard to avoid stereotyping women and feminine games (occasionally failing, as when they say that in Second Life “fashion is a prevalent form of player productivity, dominated by female players”), but easily fall into the trap of stereotyping men and masculine games.

Also they seem to have got the links between gender, spatial reasoning, and FPS the wrong way round. The cognitive research they cite to support the argument that FPS favours males isn’t quite as recent as the research I mentioned here which shows that playing FPS increases spatial reasoning skills and that girls don’t benefit from this as much as they could because they’re put off by the idea that FPS is just for boys. This perfectly illustrates the problems caused by stereotyping games as masculine or feminine.

Chris at Mixing Memory has posted about a psychology experiment which suggests that playing First Person Shooters improves spatial reasoning abilities, which also leads to improvements in mathematical skills. This is interesting in itself, but it also relates to his previous post about gender in maths, science and engineering, which looked at evidence for stereotype threat: the expectation that women are weaker in these areas causes them to perform below their potential, and this adds to the myth that women are actually worse, so the stereotype is perpetuated. There is plenty of evidence that on average women do worse at spatial reasoning than men, but the evidence from the experiment Chris cites strongly suggests that this is down to cultural factors rather than innate sex differences. A group of people who didn’t normally play FPS was made to play Medal of Honor, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in spatial reasoning abilities in both men and women. It seems likely that women have failed to benefit from this effect in practice because the perception that FPS games are only for men puts them off.

Another Mixing Memory post on the subject of games mentioned an experiment which found that the amount of blood in Mortal Kombat affects the aggression of the players. I can see right-wing alarmists who hate games deliberately misinterpreting the word “arousal” to portray gamers as sadistic perverts,but it looks like an interesting piece of research. I don’t know if this research has anything to say about gender (I can’t get at the paper itself) but studies of aggression are highly relevant to investigations of the relationship between war and gender, such as Joshua Goldstein’s work (which I really want to finish reading when I’ve got out of the quagmire of English Civil War historiography!).

(I also regret deleting the Gender category. I wasn’t using it for anything that wasn’t also covered by women’s history, but it would be quite useful here.)

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).

There’s an interesting article about Real Time Strategy games over at God Is In The TV (mainly a music zine, but they cover all kinds of culture). This piece is much better than some of the drivel written about gaming by professional journalists. It suggests that the conventions of the RTS genre are changing, with resource management increasingly going out of fashion.

It’s a couple of years since I was heavily involved in RTS gaming, but my experiences tend to agree. I noticed this trend when I made the switch from Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (which might better have been called Age of Star Wars – it was basically Age of Kings with a Star Wars skin on it!) to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. In SWGB there were 4 resources, and managing their extraction and use was a major part of the game. The first 10 minutes or so of game time (less in real time as it was commonly played at double speed!) were mostly spent gathering resources, building, and making more workers. Nobody who knew what they were doing would advance to tech level 2 before they had at least 20 workers. If the game wasn’t ended by a rush in level 2 or 3 it turned into an attritional grind. At maximum population in tech level 4 it was best to have about 60% workers and 40% military units. DoW was a very different kind of game. There were only 2 resources and the main one accumulated by taking and holding strategic points rather than extracting it with workers. Even with their special abilities it was rarely worth having more than 10% of your population slots filled by workers. However, tactics needed to be more sophisticated than in SWGB and units had to be micromanaged a lot to get the best out of them.

I don’t know whether these changing fashions are driven by the game developers or by demand from gamers, or whether it’s a bit of both. It’s hard to say whether these changes are making RTS games more or less realistic. As I’ve said before, strategy games always reflect arbitrary decisions made by their designers more than they reflect real life. But it’s maybe more important to note that changes in gameplay might be related to changing perceptions of war. The old style games which encouraged resource management tend towards a John Childs view of war: that war is attritional and usually ends with the exhaustion of one or both sides. The newer style with less resource management tends towards a Malcolm Wanklyn view which makes tactical contingency and innovation more important than a determinist emphasis on resources. (Maybe there are better examples but I’ve picked two early modern historians whose work I’m familiar with.)

I’m not sure how significant this all is. As far as I know RTS isn’t a very large genre. If the tastes of RTS players are changing that doesn’t necessarily say anything about changes in popular attitudes to war. As a final thought it’s interesting to note that the reduction of resource management in RTS gaming is going on at the same time as increasing anxiety in real life about global warming and peak oil. Things would always get tricky in SWGB when the nova crystals ran out late in the game, and I remember one game where carbon became ultra-rare because we’d used up every tree and rock on the map! Is the new style a way of escaping from these issues rather than confronting them?

I’m trying to get some “proper” English Civil War related work done this week, but at the weekend I did some more First World War stuff. In April I posted about World War I on Flickr, when I uploaded my great-grandfather’s photos from Cottbus PoW camp. Now I’ve added his letters, and another photo which I got from ebay. Although he isn’t on it, it was taken in the theatre at Cottbus and one of the men has the same “Bing Bong Boys” navy outfit:

I’ve now put each letter/postcard in its own set to make the link between the front and back of the same document more explicit. The sets are then arranged into collections. Some people on the Great War Forum were able to help me locate Cottbus Camp No. I, so now most of the photos have been placed on the map.

I also discovered that another Wenham brother might have died in the Great War. I don’t know why I hadn’t ever looked for Wenhams on CWGC before, but I found a Charles Wenham who could well be one of William’s brothers. Some of the evidence is circumstantial and I need to do more digging to be sure, but the epistemic probabilities are quite high. So far it looks like he joined 10th Lincolnshire Regt (Grimsby Chums), served overseas, was wounded and sent back to England but died of his wounds. Unlike the soldiers who died overseas, his body was brought home and buried in Cleethorpes cemetery. Again the Great War Forum has been a great help, and you can see more details on this thread.

And with regard to the other World War, I played some more of Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood. I was still a bit curious about the post-Hill 30 storyline, but so far it’s been quite boring, and I gave up when I got into a silly tank level that’s suspiciously similar to the silly tank level in Road To Hill 30 that I complained about before. But there are more trees this time…

Gary at Victoria’s Cross linked to yet another piece of lazy journalism about computer games. This is the other side of the coin from why aren’t there any World War I games: Why Are There So Many World War II Games? There are so many things wrong with this article that it should have been easy to knock up a critique of it in a few minutes, but I’ve been too busy with other things so I’ve only just got round to it. Anyone with half a brain might want to skip the rest of this post. Lazy blogging which just points out the obvious errors of lazy journalism in far too much detail is arguably as bad as the lazy journalism itself.

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The latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at Blogging The Renaissance.

I’ve turned off the comment timeout plugin, so comments on most old posts are open again, and should stay open as long as they don’t attract huge amounts of spam. I’ll be manually closing comments on posts which are getting spammed too much but I hope most of them will stay open.

Good news: Calendar of State Papers Domestic, one of the most important printed sources for British history, will be available online later this year. Bad News: it’s a paid subscription service. It remains to be seen how much it costs, but it’s particularly annoying because the project is funded by a charity, and the material is probably in the public domain, having been published by HMSO more than 50 years ago (although my understanding of Crown Copyright could be wrong here, as it was earlier in the week!). More details at the IHR website.

Battle Through Time was a computer game released for the Commodore 64 in 1984. It featured a time travelling car and levels based on World War 1, World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam. Just another example to bring up when lazy journalists say there aren’t any WW1/Korea games, or that WW2/Vietnam games didn’t start to be made until this century. And to emphasise the links between cinema and gaming, the background music included “Suicide Is Painless” for the Korea level and “Ride of the Valkyries” for Vietnam.

And I’m still looking for Military History Carnival Hosts for September and afterwards. If you’re interested, e-mail me or leave a comment.