Archiv des Autors: Wey-Han Tan

„Zitat“

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Due to recent events – the public interest in Guttenberg-practice-of-quoting – I’d like to post an article on the topic which originally was published in „La réalité dépasse la fiction.“

Zitat

Zi•tat, das; von lat. citare (=herbeirufen). Ein einzelnes mediales Fragment bzw. Formelement aus einem bereits existierenden Werk, das in einer Neukontexualisierung einen Bezug zu diesem herstellt. In Wissenschaft, Juristik und Religion beliebt als legitimierende bzw. exemplifizierende Referenz, in der Ästhetik meist als Hommage oder Parodie bzw. als sicherer Plagiatsersatz für Künstler anzutreffen [siehe Marketing]. Das übliche fremdreferenzielle Zitat leistet dabei eine vernetzende sowie stabilisierende und Identität stiftende Wirkung auf kultureller, das Selbstzitat auf individueller Ebene. Insbesondere in einer zunehmend beschleunigten Welt im Wandel erhalten Zitate durch ihr Wesen der Beständigkeit und Abgeschlossenheit die Rolle von unveränderlichen Orientierungspunkten – oder zumindest als Schnappschüsse von diesen. Weiterlesen →

Neue Medien (er)spielen!

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„Der sinnliche Trieb will bestimmt werden, er will sein Objekt empfangen; der Formtrieb will selbst bestimmen, er will sein Objekt hervorbringen; der Spieltrieb wird also bestrebt sein, so zu empfangen, wie er selbst hervorgebracht hätte, und so hervorzubringen, wie der Sinn zu empfangen trachtet.“

– Friedrich Schiller (1795): „Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen.“

Medien bestimmen, wie wir uns ausdrücken und was wir als Mitteilung erkennen können. Gleichzeitig sind Medien selbst Artefakte und Gegenstand von Veränderung. Ob die Form einer Vorlesung, eines Computerspiels oder eines Sammelbands: Das, was erwartet, gesagt und verstanden werden kann, ist gleichermaßen Bedingung und Ergebnis des Mediums. Würde ein Radio z.B. neben der Funktion als Empfänger noch zum Sendeapparat für Jedermann werden, wie Brecht es sich 1932 vorstellte, würde die Verschiebung der Grenzen des bestehenden technischen Mediums und seiner Sendeformate eine Neudefinition nötig machen: Es wäre kein Radio mehr. Weiterlesen →

What are Alternate Reality Games (ARG)?

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An Alternate Reality Game – or ARG – can be seen as a webbased offspring of Webquests, Roleplaying Games, collaborative writing, massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and the german concept of „Planspiel“.

The ARG’s form is predominantly a forum-like website, interlinked group of websites, or any other form of (webbased) communication plattform, where gamemasters and players create a media-rich, developing background on a certain topic, event or place. Narrative and subjective contributions are especially favoured, since one main goal of ARGs is the immersion of the players as well as sharing personally relatable descriptions, meanings, feelings, thoughts, fears and ideas. Another mainstay is the development of in reality usable knowledge, strategies and networks, either for preparation of the event or to prevent it. Weiterlesen →

About the virtuality of media

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One of mankinds greatest achievements is also one of its greatest obstacles in furthering the means to represent and thus reflect and understand ‚reality‘. Languages provides us with a seemingly simple way of assigning words to concepts to reality: Language, photographs, film, hypertext, games – all seem to be clear cut and distinguishable in their forms. All have a specific relationship to time and space in their acts of creation and those of reception.

Language flows linearily, like a string of pearls coiling around the topic it tries to grasp, like the touches of a blind man trying to shape a sculpture out of thin air. Photography resembles an afterimage of a landscape illuminated by lightning, freezing a changing, moving world into one to behold in all it’s details, for once unchanging. Film moves our view like a puppet on a string, taking us relentlessly by the hand to follow what is laid out for us. Hypertext gives us some choice to choose between forking paths, maybe trace back and forth, like an idle or searching wanderer. And games – games provide us with language, images, moves, and choices, though it can not be found in these but in the rules that let us interpret them, interact with them. Games are what we turn into them by adding rules that differ from, yet resemble those given to us, ingrained in our identity and society.

Mercifully, the first rule of a game is: You don’t have to play, and if you want to play you do not have to accept the rules as they are. This could also be seen as the first rule of all media, of all medium, but is never as clear as in games – or as in arts.
One task suits both very well: Showing the limits and rules of media, of its beneficient and problematic potential, and that a word, a concept, a meaning, a rule system of production and reception, that these may may be altered by the artist, the game designer, the viewer, reader or player in an act of creation.

Causality in history: Chrononauts

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„Chrononauts is a fascinating, whimsical exploration of time travel, causality, and possibility covering many fascinating and significant events of the last century or so.“

– Andrew Looney

„Chrononauts“ by Anrew Looney (2000) is a card-based game where the players play time travellers able to alter historical events by flipping specific cards, linchpins of the timeline. Those altered events may cause a ripple effect by altering follow-up events, some quite obvious, some funny and nifty: Why would the New York World Fair 1939 have German Cake in an alternate timeline?

Weiterlesen →

Visual analysis of gamebooks

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Gamebooks were, during the 80ies and before the rise of PCs and the internet, a staple of interactive fiction. Back then, the next best thing to sitting together with some friends and playing a face-to-face roleplaying game was reading these branching, directed hypertexts in the form of books.
Each paragraph had a number on top, and at the end there was the number of the next paragraph to be read. Sometimes a decision had to be made, e.g. doing something or refraining from it, that would lead to two different parapgraphs.

Two medium-relevant motivations drove me, back then: I wanted to ’solve‘ the text, i.e. bringing the path to a satisfiying ending; and I wanted to know what would have happened if my decisions earlier on were different ones. The latter one would usually take over when the text had been solved – a classic example for the replayability of a simplified narrative possibility space („The Tree“).

Meretzky_TheMysterysOfTheSecretRoom

Screenshot from the animation of the pathways of „The Mysterys of the Secret Room“.

For a beautifully visualised and animated depiction of a reader’s possible paths of ten gamebooks, a description of specific path-formations, and an evolutionary analysis of „Choose your own adventures“ narrative structures – or if you simply had been a fan yourself in the heydays of gamebooks – visit this site: CYOA.

There’s also a path, beautifully documented on the webpage, to second order gaming, to systemic theory or to radical constructivism to be found in one gamebook:

„This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded.
You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.“

Some things can’t be chosen from within the system of rules one adheres to, but has to be discovered or invented by breaking or transcending those boundaries.

The modest artist/writer doesn’t explicitely states his name, but from the story presented I take it to be Steve Meretzky.
This is an extraordinary, and extraordinary beautiful website.

Further readings:

A cabbalistic riddle

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Radical constructivism may find an aesthetic counterpart in beautifully crafted educational narratives used for example in cabbalistic teaching and Zen-buddhism. These short stories are often recursive, layered, or self-denying because of their complex topics (e.g. existence, epistemes, agency), but nonetheless beautiful to behold.

One fine example, though quite concrete, is this cabbalistic riddle:

KabbalistischesRaetsel_Wey-Han_Tan

A young student once asked a renowned teacher about the nature of knowledge. The teacher drew a circle in the sand and explained: Within this circle is that, what we know, and on the outside is that, what we do not know.
We may build our lives on what is within the circle, getting proficient and skilled in the application of what we know. We may also strive to learn what is on the outside, on what we will know one day or may never know at all, becoming proficient and skilled in widening the circle. Or we may think about the thin line of the circle itself, of how it is created, and what its nature and purpose may be.

In a similar three-step-approach, though maybe less accessible and with a different goal, we encounter a short koan from Hui-Neng, taken from „The Gateless Gate“:

Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind.
One said to the other, „The flag is moving.“
The other replied, „The wind is moving.“
Huineng overheard this.
He said, „Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving.“

Lecture „First and Second Order Games“ at the HAW

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On tuesday, December 15th, from 18:00 to 19:30 I will give a lecture with the title „Spiele erster und zweiter Ordnung – Lernen zwischen Konvention und Innovation“ („First and second order games – Learning between convention and innovation“). I will present i.a. the concept of playing with a game’s boundaries, as a means of reflection on the medial nature of games and to challenge a critical view on the presentation of content. The framing is a cycle of lectures, „Games als Motor der Innovation“ („Games as motor of innovation“), held by gamecity at the HAW (University of applied sciences).

Learning facts and rules

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Facts are man-made, as the etymological origin ‚facere‘ suggests. The creation of this kind of knowledge, facts, follows certain meta-facts, called rules. One can see a vague anaologon to declarative and procedural knowledge, „knowing that“ and „knowing how“, both calling for different ways of transfer respectivly acquisition.

While a fact may be taught ‚as whole‘, a rule will stay in it’s dormant stage as just another fact if treated alike. This, too, is already known: To effectively teach or learn a rule, its application has to be an integral part of the fact.

Games and serious simulations both provide for the learning of rules with a „what if…?“ approach. But while a serious simulation approach in the end usually aims for a correct application of rules, games, due to their experimental and fun character, sometimes allow for or even challenge aberratic cognitive behaviour: Misusuing the game (cheating, changin of rules etc.) or enjoying unwanted or dismissed behaviour. While in a serious simulation the final goal may be to be able to safely land a plane, in a playful state-of-mind it may be to crash it in the most enjoyable way.

Compared to Ernst von Glasersfeld’s metapher of cognition, of a blind man who wants to get through a dense wood and bumps against unseen trees, learning with games resembles blindfolded playing tag and hide-and-seek within this very wood: Its character is more mapmaking than pathfinding.

Thus using games just to transfer facts – like in quiz games or linear adventure games, the mainstay of commercial edutainment – forfeits the possibility to present rules and render them experiencable as something cognitively ‚tangible‘.