I’d have more to say, but need to catch the bus.

There’s a young man living in Brisbane who wears a sweet hat, talks really fast and with his weekly videos critiquing and criticising videogames draws multiple millions of views from around the world. His name is Yahtzee, he’s a British-born Australian, and he’s the king of videogame critics.

My thesis is about online videogame critics like Yahtzee and the communities that have grown up around them over the past number of years. Videogame criticism is still a pretty new deal – as recently as 2006 Chuck Klosterman noted in Esquire magazine that “There is no Lester Bangs of videogames”. Bangs being a bit of a rock star music critic of the 60’s and 70’s. Today there are literally hundreds of amateur and semi-professional videogame critics writing for hundreds of blogs and websites, and since 2007 when I first included myself in their number, I have seen the community explode with activity. My research will look into the particular community I’ve been involved with, document its emergence and characteristics, and use it as the focal point to examine three broad themes.

The first is inspired by an increasing wealth of literature that spells out the co-dependent relationship the human mind has with technology. It is becoming evident that far from simply shaping technology as in the great enlightenment narrative, rather human cognition is to an equal or greater extent shaped by the technology it engages with. How we evaluate the beneficial, detrimental, or ambivalent nature of those changes is an area still in development.

The technology central to my research, and the second broad area of investigation, is the internet. The globalised space of the internet would at first seem to repel or diminish expressions of nationality, but mounting evidence and my own observations suggests that the actuality runs counter to this. For a nation of a mere 20 million, there certainly seem to be a heck of a lot of Australian videogame critics operating on the internet – and Yahtzee, who I mentioned earlier, is just one of them. Why and to what extent the online community of critics attracts or encourages expressions of nationality will be investigated.

Thirdly and finally, I will attempt a reading of the critical videogame community on the internet as a place of resistance to neoliberal principles of capital. I will attempt to argue that internet communities, and the critical videogame community in particular, presents itself as an expression of disillusionment with and resistance to, “the right of capital to exercise its sovereign power wherever and over whomever it chooses” to quote Terry Eagleton. Nine times out of ten these critics do their work and give it away for free, and I think that’s significant.

In conclusion, the arrival of these communities of like-minded authors and critics, working together to develop ideas and expand a field of criticism, expressing cultures and identities that are both global and locally based, has been enabled by one of the most revolutionary technologies of the past hundred years. The Internet and the videogame critic, that’s the subject of my research.

I joined Formspring to examine the practices and implications of a particular social technology, as it falls generally inside the area of study I am focussing on with my PhD. Formspring seemed like a good opportunity to practice analysing the socio-technical structures of a budding social network.

I tried to come to Formspring with as few prejudices as possible, or at least being as aware of the ones I possessed as much as could be. I initially considered Formspring a “fad” and my assessment of it has almost gone full circle. At least having tried it out I feel rather more justified about making the following assessment. As things stand, I find that as a piece of social technology it’s remarkably asocial, though not quite anti-social, and at least fails to promote social connections to the extent other social media has.

The first effect or change I noticed Formspring engendering in me was probably reasonably predictable, but the strength of it surprised me. Immediately after finishing up answering a bunch of the first questions I was posed by anonymous questioners I tabbed back to Facebook and noticed a status update about a friend stranded in a car-park in Penrith with a flat tyre.

The “answer questions” mindset stuck with me outside of the Formspring page, and I began to “answer” the non-question that was this friend’s status. My instant reaction short-circuited rational thinking, causing me to volunteer actual assistance which I would not have been so forthcoming with otherwise since I didn’t know this person exceptionally well. Lets just say that venturing out into the cold night stretches only so far for even my best friends… somehow I was still in “proffer information” mode and it was persisting beyond the Formspring site.

After typing my super-helpful comment where I offered to come help this (rather recently acquired friend) in his predicament, I checked myself. Did I really want to go help this person? It was cold and late. Realistically… no, probably not. Being in the Formspring mode made me at least temporarily more inclined to offer something. The first question raised by this is one of motive – if I was on autopilot was I even motivated by a selfless desire? (Whether that really makes a difference is an ontological debate we’re skip for now)

Certainly some have accused the motivation behind setting up a Formspring account to be one of ego. Simon Ferrari tweeted recently, “So yeah I know I always said I wouldn’t do Twitter, then caved. But I’m never gonna make a fucking Formspring. Seriously.” In a similar vein Michel McBride added comment, saying first “I always just saw it as an ego thing, like people with Twitter accounts who never respond to replies” and then clarifying by adding, “I mean formspring is ABOUT responding to people, but creating one in the first place is pure ego. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not”.

When people say that Formspring is ‘narcissistic’, I presume they’re often expressing doubt at the worth of having a service that allows people to ask you questions – surely if you have a burning desire to ask a question, you just ask someone. There’s nothing inherently narcissistic about being asked or answering a question. A bit of a stigma is attached to Formspring however (as demonstrate above) because using it requires the creation of an account, which seems to say something about the user when they join. That their opinion of themselves includes either, a) thinking that people might want to ask them questions and b) that their answers are worth reading or caring about.

One aspect of the service the importance of which often gets minimised, however, is the ability to ask anonymous questions. This feature needs to be underscored because of the impact it has on both the questioner and the answerer. Allowing for anonymous questions seems to have the main benefit of eliminating the sign-up barrier that would turn a lot of people away from asking a question. Anyone on the internet who knows the users account name can ask an anonymous question, provided that the user has agreed to allow for this.

For the person receiving the questions this adds a lot of confusion in question and answering. Interestingly, of all the questions I was asked on the first evening, only one was by a fellow Formspring user (and even she remained anonymous at first!), the rest were all anonymous (or other Formspring users asking anonymously).

Anonymity means the user has no way of knowing ‘who was who’ in current and previous questions. My natural tendency however, was to guess or infer who was behind each question and it influenced my answers each time. Furthermore, the anonymity fragments any conversation that may happen, and the lack of an ability to “comment” or reply to specific answers felt like a shortcoming. Somewhat interestingly, some of the other users (and I myself on one occasion) found ways around this inability – either through referring back to earlier questions in their answers, or by turning the act of asking a user a question into a comment on a previous answer. But unless a user is signed into their account and poses a question visibly then conversations get fragmented fast. Users answering questions may as well treat every question as though it were from a completely different person, but this goes against our natural instincts to guess who the anonymous person is.

The ability to ask anonymously makes the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory only completely applicable to Formspring. The percentage of people receiving (and answering!!) rude and downright abusive questions was very close to 100. I asked a few inappropriate questions anonymously myself, just because I could. The seductive nature of anonymity is indeed a near irresistable force.

And lastly, the most importantly thing for anyone interested in the composition and make-up of Formspring to realise is that it rolls out a decidedly Socratic (or rhetorical) method of persuasion. The aforementioned inability to comment on an answer, which would turn it into a threaded discussion, means that a question is posed and the user is charged with answering it in a decidedly rhetorical manner while a near-silent audience looks on. The Socratic method has it’s pro’s and con’s, but it’s hardly the manner that I want to employ on a social network. As an aside, this exercise has actually been extremely valuable as it has led me to discover that I greatly prefer a dialectical method, involving a back and forth between parties in an attempt to reconcile differences of position and opinion.

It’s important to note that this Socratic method I’ve identified here is being employed by Formspring as a conscious and deliberate choice. Formspring as a piece of technology was designed and that design did not just fall from the heavens. It behoves us to examine and question both the implications and the validity of this approach. For me, and in light of Formpsring’s perceived role as a piece of social software, it meant an unwillingness to continue using the service, and I have since deactivated my account in response. As I said on twitter, I may not have been the first on the bandwagon, but I can still be one of the first off it.

As part of the initial stages of our PhD research, all UWS post-graduate students are required to complete an online “postgraduate essentials” unit. It involves reading through a series of ‘modules’ explaining everything from how to use the Uni library and facilities, to how to apply for Human Research Ethics Clearance.

Before we can complete a number of these modules we are asked to post a message on the discussion forum to answer a question about the issue being addressed by that module. Module 8 instructs us to

Go to the topic Ethical Issues and post a response to one of the following questions: What are some of the ethical implications of the research design you are proposing for your confirmation of candidature? How might these implications affect how and when you apply for ethics clearance after Confirmation?

Because it’s a requirement of completing the module, the forum fills up with a string of single-post threads, and no one reads or responds to anyone else’s perfunctory postings. I think it’s sometimes useful to think about online social spaces as an imaginary geographic space, so if it were what would this one look like? One possible way to visualise this board would be to see it as a room full of people, necks all craned back while they talk to a figure above them, none of them looking at or interacting with each other. The disclosure of full personal names adds to a sense of a presence in the discussion board – ‘Benjamin Abraham’ or his representation as invoked by his full and proper name is there in the room preserved.

But the flesh-and-blood Benjamin Abraham is not always there, so it’s as if a statue or a simulacrum of him is left there in his place. Date and time information next to the message content that comes with these statuesque-textual objects gives a sense of a chronology to their appearance. At 9:43pm on the 25^th of May 2009 the Benjamin Abraham statue appeared in the room and with it came the words, “One of the main ethical implications of the research I’m proposing…” etcetera, etcetera.

The people in my imagined ‘discussion board’ space are all staring up at a central figure for a reason. While most of the respondents launched straight into their answers, the beginning of their post launch straight into an answer to the question, at least one person didn’t. One user started with a salutation before beginning their answer: “Hi there. My DCA project…” and they signed off with a “Cheers” followed by their name. This changed my initial opinion of the space from one that felt like many people speaking to no one in particular (or to an empty room), to seeing the posts as speaking to some invisible or high above Other.

It demonstrates, I think, the awkwardness in this use of the discussion board for the module. Who we are writing/speaking to in answering the question is not immediately clear, and it initially nearly led me to copy and paste the question itself into the text of my post. This may have the effect of looking like I was talking to myself, but more simply it may be as if I were trying to follow the essay response technique of including a restatement of the question at the start of the answer. However this would still maintain the sense of projecting to an Other in the form of an audience, and while I opted out of this approach as a time saving device, several respondents did prepend their answers with a restating of the question.

At any rate, the imaging of this online social space as geographic space can go some ways to explaining the awkwardness I felt when formulating my answer. My initial desire to include a restatement of the question in my answer can be seen as an attempt at formalising a response – almost like reading a speech off a piece of paper to avoid meeting the gaze of the in this case spooky and invisible audience, the unknown Other. The postgraduate essentials discussion board experience was a strange one, and a rather uncomplimentary pairing of threaded discussion format to an arbitrary question & answer format.

The lack of a visible questioner/audience/reader makes answering the question without either restating it or addressing someone makes the process feel strange and arbitrary and the answerer foolish.

There’s a phenomenon that happens whenever someone tries a ‘pay what you want’ exercise online that’s always mystified me. People often get angry, express disappointment or even serious feelings of being ‘let down by the human race’ – all because some people want to get a ‘pay what you want product’ for free. This reaction has always confused me for a couple of reasons, predominantly since by all appearances doesn’t paying ‘what I want’ also include paying nothing?

I got into a semantic discussion the other day with Travis Megill of The Autumnal City about the Humble Indie Bundle. At that time I was seeing a lot of re-tweets and general bemoaning of the fact that the humble indie bundle was being pirated on torrent sites. Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker is apparently commenting on the same situation in a post about the Bundle, indirectly referencing those torrenters, when he says, “You might today be feeling a little sad for one reason or another. Perhaps you are feeling ill toward particular fellow humans.” I remarked on twitter that I didn’t see what the fuss was about – the sellers of the bundle are letting people pay what they want for these games already, clearly some people are just choosing to pay nothing implied by the ‘pay what you want’ slogan. Or so I thought.

Travis informed me that you couldn’t actually input $0 and still get the humble indie bundle, instead you get shown a picture of a ‘starving indie game dev’ with a puppy-dog look on his face. Joe Tortuga informed me that the least you could pay for the bundle was 1c. For people paying via a credit card in a foreign denomination (i.e. non USD currency) they will also get charged a conversion fee, possibly on top of a credit card surcharge, making the minimum purchase price somewhere around a dollar or so.

Cost breakdowns aside, I had assumed that “pay what you want” comprised being able to choose to pay nothing. Yet this is clearly not the case, the next question being why? Is this an ambiguity in the ‘pay what you want’ phrase itself? Clearly it’s an issue as even John Walker in the same Rock Paper Shotgun article jubilantly notes that “people…needn’t have paid anything.” Even Walker seems to be under the misapprehension that people don’t have to pay something, which is not quite the case.

It’s possible that he were simply commenting on the fact that people needn’t have bought the bundle outright, but it would be odd to make a big deal out of that issue since that’s a possibility with any product. You can always choose to not buy something. Alternatively, perhaps he’s mentally conflating paying ‘almost nothing’ with the technical definition of ‘nothing’. The trouble with this is that it implies a shared standard of what is a ‘nothing’ amount of money, which may or may not be the case.

One possible explanation for the confusion around ‘pay what you want’ could be that it’s picked up a particular perception from political positioning of proceeding sales of the same type. The first and still most notable of this type of exercise was Radiohead’s In Rainbows album launch, with its ‘pay what you want’ ethos that was also an attempt at ‘sticking it to the man’. Thom Yorke and the band were making a statement about the music industry and music labels in general – namely that you don’t need a label to distribute your album anymore, that you can get the internet to do it for you, and that you don’t have to sell at the same old ‘price points’. (Obviously, there are always going to be limits to this approach since it’s not going to be viable for every band or indie game developer. Not everyone can attract press attention like Radiohead but their point stands – the internet is here today and the structures of the 20^th Century are being challenged, even undermined by it.)

One of the first ‘pay what you want’ sales by an indie game developer was 2D-Boy’s experiment at selling their game World of Goo at a ‘pay what you want’ price point. Incidentally, 2D Boy also made paying ‘nothing’ off limits, and placed a similar restriction of a minimum price of 1c (which I didn’t realise at the time). Regardless, once you set your price that low you might as well be giving it away for free as I’m certain it begins to costs the seller more in bandwidth than is recouped off a 1c sale. The seller is obviously aware of this potentiality and is counting on consumer’s own goodwill and sense of fairness in pricing. In the long run it seems to works out at a net benefit, as the numbers clearly show.

But according to the stats in the above-linked RPS piece, over 16,000 consumers paid 1c for World of Goo. If they all downloaded the game, with the World of Goo client even a paltry 67mb, multiply that by 16,000 and you get over one terabyte of bandwidth that 2DBoy now have to pay for with 16,000 cents. With this in mind, I think 2DBoy are less disadvantaged by P2P torrenters since they don’t incur a bandwidth cost.

The Humble Indie Bundle adds another layer on top of the World of Goo sale approach, however, in that it has also opted to split your choice of the amount with a pair of charities. Since both amount and split ratio is now left to the purchaser to determine (with a suggested split of 50/50) it makes the issue of what one should pay for the package an even murkier affair.

Furthermore, I also wonder what effect it has on the overall bundle that it’s a mixed charity and commercial venture. ‘Cause-related marketing’, as its known in marketing circles, is hardly a new tactic and apparently quite an effective one. The stats have indicated that from the money brought in from sale of the bundle about 1/3^rd of the money is going to a charity, indicating that not everyone is following the advised 50:50 split. Certainly the end result is much more beneficial for the charities involved than the veritable con-job of “1c from every dollar goes to X charity” often employed by commercial type products, and the organisers of the bundle are to be commended for that.

However even if the motivation behind the use of ‘cause-related marketing’ was a genuinely altruistic desire to benefit charity while running a sale, it does leave open the possibility to read it as though the Humble Indie Bundle is trying to double down on the social guilt and stigma that is being employed in place of a DRM system. In any ‘pay what you want’ situation the seller is deliberately opening themselves to potential abuse and relying on social pressure offset the downside. By adding in an element of donating to charity it adds further compulsion to enforce behaviour through social expectations, and clearly it’s working incredibly well for them.

Viewed like this, the hand-wringing and moral outrage that inspired my initial comments over twitter as well as this subsequent post can be read as complicity in a free and distributed form of social DRM. And I’m not entirely convinced that I want to be a part of that – or at the very least, I don’t want to be an unwitting part of that. According to Travis Megill, torrenting the humble indie bundle makes you an ‘asshole’. PC Gamer in a blog post call downloading the game for free, paying nothing (not even one cent) “a little bit dickish.” Both fine and valid points of view, especially since these people aren’t even donating to charity. But given that most people weren’t donating to charity (or not in amounts to equal the amount directed to the developers) why isn’t there more of a cry going up about those people?

I guess I’m less willing to quickly condemn the ‘pirates’. Is it even really piracy if they’re giving it away for almost free anyway? Are there other benefits the sellers get from that 1c sale? And if the pirates are torrenting, at least they’re not taking up bandwidth. There’s also a big expectation with the internet, and perhaps this is changing in select pockets like amongst indie game supporters/purchasers, that stuff is supposed to be free. It’s extremely unlikely, but some of the piracy could even be a kind of protest against the 1c requirement, since it’s been remarked (I forget where) that the gulf between “free” and “1c” on the internet is a huge span that many people are not willing to cross. Clearly, when it comes to indie games, that’s not quite so simply the case but the idea ought to be kept in mind.

As I think I’ve shown above, the phrase ‘pay what you want’ is hardly clear and unambiguous – even when the actual payment mechanism is less ambiguous, preventing the purchasing of a game for zero dollars and zero cents. The bundle is ultimately a very unique and appropriate product of the internet – exhibiting something some important aspects of its nature: it’s both technical and social; expectation and implementation; and it’s got the inherent push/pull aspect of information wanting to be free and simultaneously expensive. I’m reminded by it of Alex Galloway’s concept of ‘protocol’ as described in his book of the same name. Built to appeal to the techno-utopian ideologue who speaks out about ‘free as in freedom’ but who then furrows his brow at ‘free as in beer’. So where do we position ‘free as in pay what you want’? Capitalism has never been ‘free’ except in the manner of being ‘free to buy or to not buy’. The ‘pay what you want’ movement merely extends the ‘freedom to choose between’ to the amount you pay.

Here’s a torrent for the Humble Indie Bundle if you must pirate the game. I won’t judge you. There may be nothing ultimately wrong with social DRM, but politically speaking I’m much less enamoured with the ‘pay what you want’ approach than I was before I took the time to critically examine it, finding it now much less revolutionary than I first thought.

The bottom line though is that I’m really glad a bunch of indie’s got paid.

So I should mention I was interviewed by Mark Johnson of the Game Taco podcast a couple weeks back, and it’s just now made its way to the world-wide-winterwebs. In the interview (my part starts about 1hr 7mins into the cast) I talk/complain about the techno-social ordering of the internet, the games blogging community and its cyclical ebb and flow, a whole lot of stuff about Permanent Death (always a popular topic), Critical Distance and then some! Afterwards the other cast members have a bit of a discussion of some of the content of the interview, in which the following gem is uttered:

“I like his shit… but his copy editing is just not professional.” – Mark Johnson

If my blog ever had, or needed to have a boxquote, this would be what I put on it. He’s totally right, by the way. I’m a poor, poor editor of my own work but until someone volunteers to do it for free, it’s all you’re getting – straight from my brain to the page to your screen. There’s just something about reading back over your own work that makes the distance necessary for good copy editing nigh on impossible to maintain. All I see when I read over it is what I wanted to say, not what’s actually on the page. Anyway, Mark deserves props for asking some rather good questions, which is always harder than it looks.

One person who always makes it look way too easy, however, is Michael Abbott. While I haven’t actually had the chance to listen to it yet, his latest Brainy Gamer podcast features the dynamic duo of Jamin Brophy-Warren and Chris Dahlen, founders of the excellent Kill Screen magazine. Having had the pleasure of meeting them both, I feel safe in saying they’re both worth listening to. Go have a listen when you get sick of the metallic sound of my voice.

In case you were under the mistaken impression that the videogame blogosphere proliferated solely under the purview of English-speaking users, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.

‘Ars Ludica’ is an Italian videogame website that has categories for news, reviews, thoughts and insights. I stumbled across it because someone in a comment linked to my Permanent Death novel – the only reason I would have found it as it would never have been linked to by a big news site, nor would it ever see a Kotaku “Weekend Reader” style reprint. The original article discusses the Ebert ‘games are not art’ position, and it can be read here. Google’s translation function does a passable job: ”Normally, when you deny a possibility categorically, it is obvious fear that the same occurs or is already a fact.” A little broken, but you get the gist of it’s direction.

Another non-English language games blog, and one I’ve been aware of for a short while now, is ‘Botón B‘ (or Button B) a Spanish language blog by a Mexican student. If you’re a Chrome user like myself, when the browser detects a page is in a non-English language it offers you the option to auto-translate it into your native tongue. This is an important and useful thing because it speaks of an expectation that there will be pages out there that aren’t in English, and that they are worth being comprehensible. Whether the developers of Chrome meant for their software to be interpreted this way is irrelevant, the net result is one of convenience (not needing to leave the page to go and fetch a translation increases the chance that a non-native reader will stick around) and acceptance of non-English speakers and their webpages. Another example – Sun B Kim’s ‘Design and Play‘ blog is a Korean language videogame blog. Kim performed the  reverse function, manually translating Michael Clarkson’s GTA IV critical compilation from English into Korean in the hopes of helping out local Korean game developers.

Even more typically ‘Western’ non-English languages have a proliferation of videogame bloggers - The German videogame blog ‘Super Level‘ is a good aggregate curator of interesting videogame related stories, and I was personally interviewed by a German games magazine, GEEMag back in February. While browsing the incoming links at Critical Distance just now, I also happened upon the French language videogames blog run by Eric Viennot.

Jim Rossignol, always a man with his finger on the pulse of videogames and culture, wrote about his time in Korea exploring the StarCraft crazed gaming culture of that nation for PC Gamer UK, later republished at Rock Paper Shotgun, and which finally ended up as a basis for large sections of his book This Gaming Life. Rossignol’s got the right idea, and his awareness of the broader international games scene is anything but a liability – pro-level cheating in StarCraft recently came to the fore and Rossignol reported on it for RPS (sadly hampered as it was by a lack of translation!).

Are you beginning to doubt the prevailing narrative of Anglophone-centric videogame blogs as the centre of the blogosphere? The Kotaku’s and the IGN’s of the world are in Enligsh, which can’t even be said to be the most widely spoken language on the planet, and yet you would hardly infer from their coverage the existence of such a disapora of non-English sites (with the occasional exception of a link to some bizarre/exotic/weird/laughable Japanese site, invariably invoking a sense of exoticism and distant curiosity). Simply gaining entry into the network of non-English blogs proves difficult without a Chrome-like auto-translate – how can one know which link goes where?

All of this is to say that we aught not believe the unspoken assumption propagated by the big English news sites; that not everything good and worth reading about videogames has been said, or has to be said, in English. I’m glad I’ve got Chrome and it’s translate feature to explore the non-English corners of the web. There’s gold in them there hills.

If we consider twitter an extension or usurpation of the social space/function that blogs used to inhabit/perform, then this talk by Chris Weingarten can be read as further evidence of the ‘creative nihilism’ that blogging exhibits. If the “real time web”, as Weingarten calls it, completely destroyed the things which loss he is here lamenting and didn’t bring anything new with them (even if it doesn’t properly replace them) it might be valid to describe the process as pure nihilism. But since it is in fact bringing somethign new, what Geert Lovink calls a “dense cloud of impressions” around a topic, it’s useful to describe it as a creative nihilism. Weingarten is here just focussing on the destructive/negative aspects of that creative nihilism.

On a more positive unrelated note, I read this news article about an as yet unpublished study from the UK that found public servants who responded in the 80’s to a questionnaire by saying they were bored were more likely to be dead now than their non-bored colleagues. Not that I needed further convincing, but this seems like compelling evidence for Jim Rossignol’s thesis that boredom is a serious and important issue. Obviously, there’s a lot at play here – personal dispositions and temperaments for one, the kind of work one does, for another – but I see a lot of potential good that could come from the collision of games and the elimination of boredom.

At 2am yesterday I was in a 24hour internet café with a couple of friends, and putting aside the horrible quality of the PC’s, it was actually a pretty sweet experience. It was never boring – even the boring bits weren’t proper boring – because we had entered into a space with the express purpose of  playing videogames. It’s a special kind of thing the internet café – just make sure you pay the extra $1 to get the good computers, or you’ll end up spending all your time waiting for the games to load.

So I’ve got this thing going on over at Facebook. I’m calling it “A Week of Worthless” and here’s what I say about it on the event page:

Have you ever stopped to think about what you are doing when you post ‘links’ to your Facebook profile? Implicit in the act of sharing a link is the idea that a link is worth following; that it is worth one’s time and attention.

‘A Week without Worth’ is an online art performance that will challenge attendees to re-examine and re-think the default relationship with the internet hyperlink as employed by social networks like Facebook. By presenting a series of Facebook links during the first week of May that are completely unworthy of a viewer’s time or attention the artist hopes to spark thought and debate about the impact of the immanent function of the Facebook link, and the internet link in general. It further aims to make attendees consider how deeply entrenched the culture and practice of filtering and ‘ranking’ has become.

By allowing and inviting comments on these ‘worthless’ links the performance will also problematise the notion of ‘internet worthless’ links by potentially demonstrating that discussion can be initiated and directed towards any ‘worthless’ site, thereby revoking its ‘worthless’ status and disrupting the performance. In actuality, the only successful ‘worthless’ links will be ones that attract no comments, likes, re-links, or other attention whatsoever.

While posting links, the artist will also reflect on the difficult process of finding and even conceptualising the ‘worthless’ internet page, despite the fact that we may (and often do) encounter a multitude of ‘worthless’ pages in a single web browsing session, all of which disappear from our mind and memory as soon as we click onto the next hyperlink.

The performance should ideally be followed on Facebook at either:
http://www.facebook.com/ben.abraham or at http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=614825217

You will need to possess a Facebook account to view the performance, however you should not (I think) actually have to add Ben as a friend. The links and their comments shall be set so as to be visible to any Facebook user.

As a last resort, RSS can be used to follow the performance, however RSS will not reveal the success or failure of the art project as comments and ‘likes’ will not be visible over RSS.
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_posts.php?id=614825217&viewer=614825217&key=dd720f4f7f&format=rss20

Until the 1st of May, any links Ben posts may safely be assumed are not part of the performance.

It’s only been up for about 24 hours and it’s already been a pretty amazing experience. I initally invited only people who I thought would probably “get it”, in the sense that they wouldn’t hate me for experimenting with something different on Facebook. The response has been pretty positive so far, but some unexpected things have happened. I made it an open event, so anyone could invite friends, relatives, or anyone potentially interested in attending a Facebook art-show, and because it was open someone else invited pretty much all their friends to the event. So there’s now 150 or so people, many of whom I have never met, all invited to this weird online performance I’m giving in about a week’s time.

Some people are actually declining to attend. Some of these people will probably just be declining any and every event sent to them – I’ve declined enough events in my time to get that many people just decline them out of habit – but there’s also been at least one person comment (jokingly? seriously? I can’t tell!) that they’re annoyed at being invited. Some people (probably a lot) are also saying they don’t really get it, which was unexpected for me. In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have included the passage about “succeeding” as worthless links. I see now that it might seem as thought the actual linking was the important part of this event. It probably shows my predilection towards conceptual art; my cultural eltism; etcetera, etcetera. The event is really meant as a practical demonstration of an idea. In that sense, this feels a bit like game design. And as I’m being a creator, it also feels kinda scary, having to let go of what this event means and let people have their own ideas about it. It’s scary, but pleasurable, to be on the other side of the creator/audience divide to usual.

I’ll be writing some more about it postmortem, about what seemed to work, what I got out of it and some of the reactions people had to it.

Facebook is a weird thing… or perhaps more accurately, the internet is a weird thing. But I kinda love it too, y’know.

In a widely cited and talked about study from last year Stanford University researchers found that “media multitaskers pay a mental price” for their ability to consume so much media concurrently (the Kaiser Family Foundation said that kids between 8 and 18 “manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes  worth of media content into…7½ hours”). This is generally seen as a negative, as best exemplified by the case of driving while talking on the phone and the potentially disastrous consequences for such divided attention.

However I’m interested in the potential upside of our increasingly fractured and non-structured engagement with media. I don’t think anyone would argue that the incidence of media multitasking has decreased since the 90’s and so I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s 1997 book ‘Life on the Screen’ with increasing interest for it’s relevance to this very topic.

Turkle’s thesis is that “technology [specifically computation] is bringing a set of ideas associated with postmodernism” to its users. One anecdote that Turkle uses to illustrate her point is the story of a student in the MIT computer lab who has the following to say about his simultaneous connection to several MUD’s (this was ’97 after all),

I split my mind. I’m getting better at it. I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window. I’m in some kind of argument in one window and trying to come on to a girl in a MUD in another, and another window might be running a spreadsheet program or some other technical thing for school… RL is just one more window, and it’s not usually my best one.

The aforementioned Stanford study would seem to say that the result of such multitasking is “a big mental price” and that they become “suckers for irrelevancy…everything distracts them.” Unfortunately, the study doesn’t seem to test for whether these distractible media users are more enlightened and open to postmodern ambiguity. Obviously, I’m biased in my opinion that adopting a postmodern perspective is inherently a good thing, but the researchers said, “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it” – perhaps they were looking for the wrong thing entirely?

So I just got finished writing my final post for SLRC, it’ll be up by the time anybody reads this.

And here’s the thing, I wanted to say something about videogame journalism after Michael Walbridge’s recent post “So You Want To be A Games Writer: Don’t”. But I don’t really have anything to add except a resigned sort of agreement with Walbridge.

It’s a tough gig, this we know, but until very recently (think, since Crispy Gamer went down) the prevailing narrative has generally been along the lines of “If you’re good enough, try hard enough, for long enough, you’ll make it into something eventually”. This prevailing narrative is now highly suspect at best, an outright fabrication at worst. After reading Walbridge’s post and linking it on Twitter, N’Gai Croal noticed it and spread it around a bit more before linking to this post by a guy in pretty much the same position as Walbridge, but who has been at it for a lot longer – waiting ten years to ‘make it’ as a games journalist is a long, long time.

Then in the Sunday Papers I think someone (or perhaps Gillen himself) linked to a World of Stuart blog post looking at videogame magazine numbers and their meteoric plummet into obscurity and irrelevance. As I said in my final post at SLRC – blogs are to blame! No really, think about it – if we’re giving it away for free (and there are so many people that are) why is anyone going to pay? It’s an economic reality acknowledged by so many of the professional journalists that come out of the woodwork to comment on Walbridge’s piece.

But we’re not going to stop blogging are we? And even if ‘we’ did, no one else would, so other economic or social or technological model needs to be devised. Enter, Rock Paper Shotgun.

On his personal site, Jim Rossignol writes about how the four horsemen of RPS have worked to create the RPS community and how it really has payed dividends. Heck, I love what the site is doing so much that even I’m a subscriber. It’s interesting to me, however, that even as a community site RPS has to police its comment threads. Again, that decision has payed dividends by elevating the community and the quality of discussion. RPS comment threads can be counted on to be some of the best out there on the net (as long as neither piracy nor DRM gets a mention – which is itself such a well known fact amongst readers that it’s become a running gag and another testament to the sense of community the site has engendered).

One last cool thought by Mister Rossignol, “Online readers begin to regard certain sites as bases from which to head out onto the web from.” Facebook, Twitter, and (for PC game enthusiasts) Rock Paper Shotgun. The holy trinity.