Investigations of a Dog

Not really a proper post, just some random things:

Bill Turkel is always right.In the first of his excellent posts on analysing the Old Bailey Proceedings he recommended DownThemAll. This is a Firefox extension that lets you download all the files linked to from a web page in one go. You can set up filters to only download certain types of file, or you can select the files by clicking on a list, then download them all with one click. As well as the obvious benefits for digital historians it’s very handy if you want to download a whole album from LastFM.

Over at Glod’n'Epix Esther posted some interesting thoughts on sexual harassment and gender stereotyping in live action role playing, which also led to some discussion of cross-dressing and gender swapping.

Gary Smailes has launched a new website called OneBook which features brief posts from different people recommending a book. Anyone can submit a post and they don’t have to be very long.

The Difficult Second Article is getting there but still needs a lot of work. Once this is out of the way I never want to hear anything about the causes of the English Civil War ever again.

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Apart from lots of useful historical insights it made me think that my generation’s equivalent of the bible is probably Star Wars.

And finally the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at jliedl.ca.

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.

More on cavalry charges later this week, but today I’m taking a break from that to write about virtual reality. This was one of the many interesting things that Wulf Kansteiner talked about at the Institute of Historical Research the other week. He pointed out that we are now very close to the point where virtual worlds become indistinguishable from reality. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games are increasingly popular, and have both a bigger and more diverse player base than the strategy games and shooters which are the focus of my (stereotypically male) gaming interests. Second Life has moved the genre away from Tolkienesque fantasy worlds towards a simulacrum of a more familiar reality. He also suggested that Artificial Intelligence is reaching a level of sophistication at which it becomes difficult to tell the difference between computer controlled and human controlled characters.

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