[...] Raph Koster has replied to this post over at his blog, and Gus offers some interesting thoughts as [...]

[...] 1. Last month’s Harpers has a fun roundtable discussion on video games and education that I participated in a few months ago. (It also included the excellent Ralph Koster, whose book A Theory Of Fun is a must-read for anyone interested in the gaming culture.) Annoyingly, the forum is not online, but Ralph’s got a few followup responses on his blog. [...]

[...] Fascinating dialogue between Ulises Ali Mejias and Raph Koster following from a multi-person discussion piece in Harpers about video games and literacy. [...]

[...] Context: This post started out as a comment in response to Ralph Koster’s insightful and thought-provoking comment on Brian Lamb’s discussion of the recent article in Harper’s Weekly “Grand Theft Education.” After I finished the first three paragraphs I promoted it to post! [...]

[...] kestrell @ 03:06 pm: Media and literacy A heads up to anyone interested in video games and/or writing: the September issue of Harper’s Magazine has an article which is getting some buzz, though it is not posted online. You can read more about the article, including some quotes which also touch upon fan fic and blogs, herehttp://www.raphkoster.com/2006/08/16/a-literacy-of-appropriation/[...]

[...] From SL Creativity Jump to: navigation, search A literacy of appropriation Raph Koster Teaching literacy has always been the central business of schools. School literacy teaching had tended to focus on written literacy rather than on oral literacy, which is mainly learnt outside school. Literacy has never been a fixed body of skills but has evolved with the development of technology, such as pens and paper, and the needs of society as in the Industrial Revolution. For example, handwriting was a major focus of schooling during the 19th Century as the demand for clerks grew rapidly. Then the invention of the typewriter made neat handwriting a less important business skill. However, important literacy technologies such as the newspaper, the typewriter and the telegraph took decades to spread throughout society, giving schools time to adapt. Schools today are struggling to cope with the teaching of new literacies that are often less than five years old but are widespread in society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_literacy The marketing people nightmare is coming true: People are no longer content to express individuality through mass produced goods. Turning of TVs Producing our own culture A literacy that is more inclusive – relate to Davis Other ways to convey meaning & Taking notes with spaces and images Expanding the Concept of Literacy We need to recognize that writing words is the Latin of our modern times. Video and sound are the vulgar languages of the common people, tools for speaking with power – a new potential to speak, learn, a new literacy that’s reviving the read-write culture. Lessig at Wikimania http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/08/larry_lessig_fightin.html [...]

[...] i d e a n t: Video Games, Authority, and Problem-based Thinking (Via Mr. Belshaw.) Here is a great thread of posts pointed out by Mr. Belshaw. Ulises Ali Mejias at Ideant responds to a Hapers Magazine article, which documented a conversation including game designer Raph Koster, who then responded to Mejias’ post. [...]

This kind of statement has always made me wonder whether those ideas were original or derivative. And if they were derivative… from who? And those, were they derivative too? Et cetera. What is the first cause, the big bang, the creator god of storytelling? I mean… if nothing’s original, what was it copied from?

My answer to this is that “originality” means to take life and reframe it in a narrower context. And it’s interesting that Raph often talks about games in the exact same way. And I do wonder about the strangeness of reframing a reframing a reframing of life. (Replace “reframing a” with “derivative of”.) Do we lose the original essence? If we do, is it a bad thing?

Originality isn’t even valuable in and of itself (except in marketing, but only because people think it’s valuable =P). When I was working with my friends developing the game, I would remind them that “uniqueness” isn’t necessarily a good thing: sometimes no one’s doing it because it’s a really bad idea.

When they had that thing called the National Novel Writing Month

You use the past tense. I’ve decided to try my hand at it again this year. =P Do it again, it’ll be fun!

vast chasm between: [snip] plagiarism, and; [snip] [your own thoughts]

That’s precisely what it isn’t. It’s not a creative act to copy and paste. Appropriation would be closer to use someone else’s algorithms to code something even more fantastic.

In the first NaNoWriMo I did, I wrote a fantastic first chapter. It was a prologue where I — oh, [random expletive]. Here, read it yourself. It’s not that long. I appropriated the baby Jesus story without a hint of remorse, yet I didn’t copy and paste. It’s not plagiarism. And because I’m in the mood, here’s some lifting from Grecian myths, same story, a couple pages in. Very light, very delicate, but in both cases, the allusions do most of my work for me. I don’t have to set up the atmosphere of “Something greater is at work”: the continual references do that for me.

The way I understand it, it’s a higher standard of literacy. It doesn’t merely demand that you be able to read, or even simply comprehension or critical analysis. It requires that you have all of that and furthermore recognize what is being referenced. The copying of the Biblical story is useless to someone who’s never heard the Christmas story: my contrasting will evoke nothing.

And I need to start writing for real… I have so much garrulous energy to burn that they’re going into comments on blogs and forums. *mutter*

Writers have always appropriated all through history. Many writers throughout the ages took from the Bible or were influenced by the Biblical themes and narratives, as were artists — entire centuries go by where the major artists and writers are drawing mainly from the Bible.

Writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien drew from George McDonald’s fairy tales. And so on. You can always find something derivative of something else. The question is how much new and unique and aesthetic is forged in this process.

I’m troubled by all these new-fangled college departments I see where somebody is teaching digital arts and “the new literacies” — as if they now have a pass to be illiterate, or unencumbered by literary history, or in a state of constant celebration of “mash-ups”.

I remember spending a torturous 2 days trying to read many of the pieces that were pointed to as the ne plus ultra at the _always black library in Second Life, which prides itself as being new and digital and hip and all the rest. I read and read; none of it was any good that I could see, I mean, not even as good as a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald story. One can hope some of this stuff might age and be appreciated more in 50 years; after all,most writers of the past centuries having to churn out copy for pennies in serials and magazines and such were under terrible pressures, were considered hacks by their era, and only got immortalized later.

I’m wondering if the narratives you partake of, or which get forced upon you, in online games and virtual worlds, reduce or remove any need for linear, left-to-write writing as such. That is, you start making a different story which has elements of textual writing, game action, screenshots, IMs, etc. And that’s what they mean by the new literacy, I suppose, but that “new narrative” or “new literacy” are often merely reworked Biblical or Greek mythological stories. Often my kids will tell me about some game they are playing through with Link or something and I’ll say, oh, but that’s Captain Ahab, oh, but that’s the Cain & Abel story, oh, but that’s the idea of Medusa or Pandora’s box, etc.

When they had that thing called the National Novel Writing Month, I started writing a novel the old way. But it wasn’t working to capture the realities of the virtuality of Second Life. So instead, I started just making a thousand screenshots and capturing all chat, even the dumb chat of the scripted objects and the drop-down maintenance screens. I quickly amassed the 100,000 words needed for my novel. I then cut it a bit and submitted it, but gosh, that’s not writing, that’s type-writing. It had some really masterful moments of course but then I had a computer crash and lost most of it.