Tag: Quinn Norton

Bookmarked Video Games as Literature – A Side of My Own – Medium by Quinn Norton (A Side of My Own)

We make video games and play them in order to live.

Quinn Norton asks the question, what is literature and where mediums like comics and games sit with this. Quinn explains that mechanics matter in there ability to change things.

Mechanics matter in literature. Apocalypse Now (and the arguably even better documentary Hearts of Darkness about the film Apocalypse Now) reached for the apotheosis of film. Joyce did the same for novels, e e cummings for poetry, Shakespeare for plays, 2pac for rap, and etc., insert your favorite author, or as we call them now, creators, here. Or maybe not your favorite. Maybe your least favorite, because they stick in your soul like a piece of gravel in your shoe, and you’re going to have to stop one day and change everything just to get them out.

That’s literature for you.

She gives the example of Portal 2. Its medium is essential to what it is. A part of this is the very nature of the author.

You couldn’t write a Portal book or make a Portal movie or ink a Portal comic, Portal could only be Portal.

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For many people, the conceptual problem with Portal and other video games, as literature, is authorship. It can’t be literature without the auteur. How can a team of people be a singular creator of a literary work? But idea of the lone auteur creating from the depth of his singular soul was always a myth.

The ability to bring change comes through the interaction involved in reading and responding.

Literature is made in how it acts upon the world, not how it is pretended to be born fully formed from the head of a single man.
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You can find literature at every level of the gaming world, from small indie games like Hollow Knight and Undertale, to multi-million dollar budget “AAA” games like Witcher, an open world game of vast detail where moral choices determine everything about the story, and most of the endings aren’t happy. Wide open, generative landscapes in games like Minecraft often let whole communities myth-make together, whether they’re chasing the Ender Dragon or not. What they all have in common is choices that matter, that they contain or build worlds that you make as much as consume, and that have the potential to make you.

It is interesting to consider this alongside Doug Belshaw’s work in regards to digital literacies and the importance of process. I am also left wondering about J. Hillis Miller’s ‘obligation to write’:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

Maybe when we play we compose?

Bookmarked Using the Internet to Raise Your Children (Medium)

This isn’t a HOWTO sit your kid down in front of a computer and have them turn into a genius. There is nothing that does that, there is nothing good that doesn’t involve effort from adult caregivers. Education is a conversation between people who care for each other, an energetic passing of culture and skills between generations. It takes our full attention in the moment to do it right, and that’s valuable, even when we don’t have nearly as many moments as we’d like.

Quinn Norton reflects on learning alongside her daughter. Although this learning is ‘work’, it can be fun work, especially when it is focused on interests. She supports this by suggesting a number recommendations to spark learning. My biggest takeaway was Quinn’s point that without pauses and reflection, music, podcasts and videos is merely consumption.

Cruising media without pauses feels like learning, but it’s not. If you don’t follow up the information by interacting with it, it’s in one ear and out the other. Redundancy helps, too. If you’re trying to teach your child about elemental particles, choosing a series of YouTube videos from different sources, with pauses each time to discuss them can be great, but the choosing and the pausing, to write or discuss notes, are what makes it learning instead of passive channel surfing.

Read Write Microcast #018()


A reflection on the paralayse associated with ‘getting it right’ and things breaking down, rather than learning to live in a world where there are times where things break.

In Walkaway, Cory Doctorow suggests the differences between disaster and dystopia is often defined by what people do when things breakdown. And things always breakdown.

Links mentioned:

Bookmarked The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger by Quinn Norton (The Atlantic)

It is strange to see such a version of yourself invented and destroyed by networked rage. It made me sad and angry, but even more, I think, it inspired a horrified confusion in myself and those familiar with my work and my character. A digital effigy of me was built and burned.

Quinn Norton discusses the complexities of online identity and the associated context collapse. She shares her experience of being hired and fired by the New York Times after a Twitter account was created that retweeted the past out of context.

Marginalia

Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later.

Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool.

We are powerful creatures, but power must come with gentleness and responsibility. No one prepared us for this, no one trained us, no one came before us with an understanding of our world. There were hints, and wise people, and I lean on and cherish them. But their philosophies and imaginations can only take us so far. We have to build our own philosophies and imagine great futures for our world in order to have any futures at all. Let mercy guide us forward in these troubled times. Let yourself imagine, because imagination is the wellspring of hope. Here, in the beginning of the 21st century, hope is our duty to the future.

Bookmarked Email Is Dangerous (The Atlantic)

Email has changed since then, but not much. Most of what’s changed in the last 45 years is email clients—the software we use to access email. They’ve clumsily bolted on new functionality onto the old email, without fixing any of the underlying protocols to support that functionality.

In my work with schools there is a lot of conversations that seem to end with “just email [insert content] to them”. Although this is convenient, it is not always the best practice. In this post from Quinn Norton in The Atlantic she shares why. Continuing to remind us how everything is broken, Norton gives a history of email and many of its inherent flaws. This comes on the back of the latest discovery of bugs associated with supposed encrypted email.