Seth Schiesel, in reviewing the newest iteration of the Dragon Quest empire engages with, deflates and at once reinforces all kinds of assumptions which we don’t really hear voiced out loud but are forced to sort of assume some people hold; and for that I am grateful. He also implicitly connects playing RPGS to trains and subways which I am also grateful for. The review is flawed, for one, by a kind of subjective problem which normally I would embrace:

I have never — not once — seen anyone over the age of about 20 playing a DS in public. But I do see guys in their 20s and 30s on the subway playing sports games on Sony’s competing PlayStation Portable device fairly regularly.

The journalist hasn’t seen something, who cares? His point is that adults don’t seem to play the DS on subways. I see many who do. Perhaps all this does is show that however (or whenever) Mr. Schiesel commutes his route misses all the adult DS players. Maybe he has a blind spot when it comes to female portable users? I sat next to one this morning, Mario Karting from Graham to 6^th ave on the L, but again that was just one person’s reporting.

The real importance of this review is in his knock on Japanese RPGs as being claustrophobic-causing, constrained, “on rails.” Like a subway. This resonance between the very space in which he can’t seem to find DS players and the kind of play he doesn’t want to find here, in the US is interesting. Are Japanese RPGs some how better in places and settings which are like them, the light rail and subways of modern Japan. Do they just fit better there? If so why not in New York City? Is this just one more case of NYC being not American and too American at the same time?

There is another important thread to the review, that is that the DS is essentially a juvenile device, just as games are (finally) becoming OK for adults to play with in public and even I suppose right about for a major newspaper.

“So there will soon be a need – perhaps there already is a need – for something that may seem a contradiction in terms: an ethnology of solitude.”

And therefore if they please, let them suppose I played at tables for my diversion, or if they had rather have it so, that I rode on a hobbyhorse. For what injustice is it that when we allow every course of life its recreation, that study only should have none? Especially when such toys are not without their serious matter, and foolery is so handled that the reader that is not altogether thick-skulled may reap more benefit from it than from some men’s crabbish and specious arguments. - Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

Sounds good right?  But check it out, Erasmus already is saying that folly isn’t really folly, that fun has a benefit (wisdom) besides fun.  Too bad, I means till good but whats wrong with playing at tables for their own sake?

Goffman’s prisoner’s with their bouncing balls were trying to transform, through playing a game, their prison wall, to change the prison wall into a goal, net or backboard (he is not clear, but I picture them playing handball), and in this way we see how play works to redefine, recover, and recuperate space. However, the other key dynamic of his game is that the play situation is temporary, lasting only as long as they are playing; as soon as play stops, the backboard reverts to being a prison wall. The other time-based dilemma of the prisoners is the time they spend in confinement -the duration of their play occurs against the backdrop of the much larger time frame until they are free (by serving their time or dying in prison or even being executed).

At the risk of being overly dramatic, I would suggest that this is the situation in which we play with our DSs, a situation not of a prison but of empty time spent in depot waiting rooms, airport boarding areas, subway platforms, and in transit. As Henri Bergson says: “When we evoke time it is space that responds to the appeal” (Bergson 1972). The ethical and political problem we face when we describe play this way, as transformative, even liberating, but only temporarily, is that no real freedom can be contingent and yet this is where we are left. If we need to kill time, it is because that time is arduous and oppressive. Maybe there is possibility for a more lasting, freer, transformative play. But the situation I am working on, in which I am attempting to understand the DS (and other mobile media) functioning as a stopgap, a time filler and time killer, a palliative technology - is not to say that it is not legitimate, or germane or important. The prisoners would admit the ball wasn’t going to free them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t want or need it.

Fidelity as music version of “good” graphics

So wordpress has trouble with malware?  Sheesh I do not feel like updating this, I am terrible at following directions, just ask anything I’ve ever baked.

This speaks to many things I’m working on at once but most of all it makes me think touch screens might not be the future.

The relays between these object forms might finally disclose the life and longing of the constitute materials; the oscillation enchants dyed leather into a thing that drifts in excess of any object form.  It allows us to imagine, I think, a world where the material around us-the denim of your jeans, the glass of your watch crystal, the wood of your chair seat - has as the object of its desire, perhaps, the desire to be some other object.

- Bill Brown, The Refabrication of Things

NO Privacy features, total twitter rip off!

This is the kind of thing I feel I have to think or write about google’s buzz but I just don’t care about it, let me see how it goes I guess.