Counter Terra

Counter Counter Terra

Terra Nova is an excellent blog dedicated to virtual worlds. Hopefully the * Terra * theme won't become overused.

UPDATE: NYT has an article on Ludology here.

Truly Counter Terra Revisited

There.com, one of the big players in the virtual world market (?), has been contracted by the US Army to build a "second Earth."

"...the Army needs a high-level training, mission-rehearsal and analytic capability for long-duration, asymmetric operations such as we're in the middle of today in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. A capability that focuses on human interaction more than armor, artillery and helicopters. And most importantly, a capability that enables the Army to train in a virtual environment with the other services, with other governmental agencies and with our coalition partners. That's what we're working on with the Army, and it's a challenging and important goal."

More here and (particularly) here. The aforementioned Terra Nova has some interesting discussion regarding this too.

I suspect such things will be most useful in the near term really only for training/simulating bureacratic procedures and anything beyond that is gravy. And perhaps a kind of spatial orienteering. Near term.

The Underwhelming Theorist and Other Morsels

Alex Golub has provided a nice evening of reading. Here are some jumping off points...

Rage Against the Academe:

The point is not that the underwhelming theorist is a bad person. He's a nice guy who's a good teacher and - as I mentioned above - a jaw-droppingly detailed ethnographer. Nor is the point that jaw-droppingly detailed ethnography is a bad thing. On the contrary - it's a fantastic thing. The point is that the guy is doing something he's lousy at and he's producing stuff that is of no use to anyone (instead of more of the stuff we all want from him - detailed ethnography). He'll never realize it and no one will ever tell him. About the only people who get really worked up about it are young Turk graduate students hell-bent on a mission to tell the world about their dissertation topic and enraged at the mishandling of the theoretical issues of concern to them (i.e. me). But we can't say anything because it means not getting to be in his edited volumes or funded through his workshops. And if we say 'fuck it' and don't pull our punches, we end up looking like rabid assholes: "Why are these young hotshot bigheaded kids being such assholes to Mr. Established and Friendly If Slightly Mislead About His Own Level Of Theoretical Importance? They must be a bunch of cocksuckers." Which, again, is not to say we're not rabid assholes, merely to say that in addition to this personal characteristic we have the additional quality of being correct. To us, Practice Theory looks like Bourdieu's application to anthropology of Heidegger's critique of intentional consciousness as developed in the first division of Being and Time, and given the fact that both Heidegger and Bakhtin were reacting against the neo-Kantianism of the Southwest German School, we could develop a very effective theoretical rapprochement between Bourdieu and Bakhtin through the analytic lens of a critique of subjectivity which could in turn really get us far towards a re-analysis of the literature on Melanesian selfhood developed by Marilyn Strathern which reaches for alternatives to individualism by reifying Melanesian 'dividualism' instead of unearthing alternative streams of thought within our own philosophy of subjectivity and then relating these to indigenous notions of person and group. So fuck you and your practice theory basket weaving.

On a personal note, the above speaks to me profoundly, the difference between ethnographer and anthropologist being a topic of some recent argument.

And, "My country is being run like The Minority Report, except without the Precogs."

And, "The most appropriate way to understand the enormous aethetic potential of video games, and in particular first person shooters, is through the lens of theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas."

He also gets a bit of a dig at Valeri, which I found a little funny.

And his AAA piece is interesting: "It is ironic to note that now, a century and a half after Frazer, American proponents of strict intellectual property and copyright laws appear to operate on principles that are almost eerily similar to those described in the Golden Bough."

Wow, it's late.

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