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Metaliteracy – Week 3 – Intellectual property aka Creative Commons

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Week 3 of the Metaliteracy course is entitled “Becoming A Digital Citizen: Understanding Intellectual Property” and I confess I was disappointed in the week for two reasons. First and foremost, I was looking for a deeper dive into the issues around academic publishing and journals, and instead we were treated to a one-size-fits-all promotional video of how big academic journal publishers are pillaging the land of academic freedom. I learned far more from Michael Geist’s posts about the CRTC hearings back in December on potential reforms to the Copyright Act to address university usage of academic materials.

However, the second disappointment was more about the lack of nuancing of “free” vs. “open”. It is generally pushed by a group of online advocates that “free” is the wrong term, as it confuses free movement with free cost, and the much better term is open to everyone with no restrictions for access or cost. And for this week’s assignment, it was the topic we were assigned, but the expectation was clearly that we focus on how open was “better”.

I confess that I don’t think “open” is any better term than “free” for two reasons.

First, the classic quote is “information wants to be free”, but free in this quote means moving around without restriction. More like “free will” than “cheap”. But it gets corrupted by those who want to argue in favour of things like piracy, even for academic journals, that “information wants to be free” meaning $0 cost. Yet when people talk about “open”, it changes the dynamic. It focuses more on people “accessing the info” (a pull factor) rather than the original idea — information wants to move, it’s more dynamic than static. The latest research on prenatal screening results, the latest findings on cancer treatments, the best plugs to use for charging your iPhone…or, in my case, the best approach to preparing for an interview. People create information and they want to set it free into the wild. “Open” focuses on the recipient, not the creator, but it is the creator who decides on the license.

Second, open doesn’t have to be free cost. We tend to focus on “open” in this sense for things like texts that are written, or software. Information that can be in a digital form and transmitted digitally for “free”. Yet, if I use my example of a book I want to write, I have to pay for internet. I have to pay for a website. I had to pay for the courses I took to learn how to design a site, upload it, and cover ongoing hosting fees. If I worked out that it was $1000 a year to me to make something available, and 1000 people would access it, would “free” be $0 per copy or $1 per copy (which would be my break-even point)?

Equally, back in university, I worked for a technology support office for students located at the university. It was pre-internet, and so if people wanted copies of free software like statistical programs, they had to come to us to get it or find an online Bulletin Board to access from home or the mainframe. Most didn’t know how to do that so they came to us to get copies. It was free to get the software, but our office had to buy disks, print the manuals (a few sheets of paper), burn the software onto the disks which cost both the original costs of the disk plus the staff time to create them physically, and then to put them in an envelope, handle the cash, deposit any revenues, fill out reports like any good little store employee, etc. It was not, in fact, $0 to distribute the materials. But it was “open” to everyone. By the definition espoused, reimbursement for costs incurred would not in fact count as “open”.

I accept there are barriers to users. I accept there are barriers to movements. But I don’t think “free” or “open” gets around those issues. Nor do I think the 5Rs of openness (the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute) are as simply dealt with as the week’s materials suggest. Open Access is not simply the “best alternative” in a “free world”, it just happens to be one alternative. It is descriptive, not normative to me.

If you’ve read my website, you know for example that I have written part of an HR guide for participating in federal government job processes. Government processes and interviews are fairly specialised HR beasts, with major differences from the private sector in what will be asked, how it will be graded, etc. and very little of it is public or written down. So employees or potential employees frequently walk in blind to the processes, make simple mistakes, and miss out on a job they were both suited for and wanted. I used to provide 1-on-1 coaching for people, and it grew to group presentations, and now an online book.

I’ve considered publishing it commercially, but some of what holds me back from that are the same constraints / issues at play here. I think the info should be both free in cost and open for access. I gained the knowledge from people who helped me along the way, and I want to pay it back for others. But at the same time, I don’t want people simply coming along, copying all of it, and publishing a book under their name. It is commercially viable in an online format. I don’t mind people sharing it but I’m not writing it so others can make money off it.

And yet another side of me is conflicted. Writers should get paid for their work, and far too many authors have been ripped off over the years by bad contracts. I am not yet finished the work, and on an irregular basis, I waffle between the options. I would love for it to be completely public domain, yet I would be incensed if someone made a profit off my hard work and writing. So, the compromise would seem to me to be almost simple — no commercial uses. And yet I also feel a bit of a twinge when I look at adaptation. Reworking my materials? Remixing it? Tweaking and editing it and then sharing as their own, even with citation? Hmm…

For now, I’m likely to be comfortable with no adaptation, no commercial — but then it would be Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, and definitely not a free culture license. I’m considering a cascade of materials, such as a shorter form that is fully open, a slightly more detailed version that is less open, and then the full version at this level.

As an added wrinkle, my employer also has a small say in the outcome. As an employee of the government, there are ethical obligations too, and the need to avoid a conflict of interest. Which means, in practical terms, I need to have them review it before I publish to ensure there are no conflicts with my day job, even though I’m publishing in my own personal life. And part of their considerations for “allowing” me to publish it (although technically it is more they identify if there are any potential conflicts, in the end it is still my decision) includes a lot of the same issues…will it be open access, will people have to pay, is it more factual in nature or is it a creative work, etc.? The more it looks like an open, free, factual document, the less conflict; the more it looks like a commercial, private, creative document, the more potential conflict (almost like I was charging people to know how to apply for jobs that are free to apply for by anyone, and even greater potential for appearance of conflict if I was running a competition while selling the book).

I might be too harsh on the week’s materials. I did learn some new stuff, and it got me working through the CCL options for the future, so maybe that’s all I can ask of the MOOC.


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Metaliteracy – Week 2 – Creating and sharing a social identity

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Week 2 of the Metaliteracy course is entitled “Creating and Sharing a Social Identity” and after the enjoyable first week’s materials, I was looking forward to seeing what nuances would crop up this week. The video for the week was a short animated feature showing a young woman interviewing for a job, and while the interview went well, the hiring manager googled her after the interview to see what her online presence looked like. The hiring manager found no LinkedIn account, found a recent tweet she posted saying she “nailed the interview”, and some old tweets complaining about her job, and about hating people and her boss. So the hiring manager moved on. The “lesson learned”, as intended, is that people should think about the persona they project online and the impact it can have on your professional life.

And as I went through the week’s readings, and other materials, I seriously hoped that there was going to be more to the week’s offerings than a 1970s-style guidance counselor advising young girls to watch their image (don’t worry, there is more than that!). A hiring manager who was more up to date in their thinking could just have easily seen her lack of a LinkedIn profile as innovative (not doing the same as everyone else, particularly if she’s active on another platform) and there are those who view LinkedIn as old and stodgy. Equally, the tweet saying “Nailed It” could just as easily be seen as a positive sign, projecting confidence and a strong desire to work there. And finally, the tweets about the old place she worked? Not ideal necessarily, but it explains why she’s looking for a new job that is better suited to what she wants to do. I might tend to agree that posting negative things about your work or boss aren’t the best idea on Twitter, but I wouldn’t feel the same about sharing thoughts on Facebook with a smaller circle of friends and coworkers with strong privacy settings. The whole video completely seemed too simplistic and one-dimensional. More like an “after school special” designed by my grandmother.

In the readings, one of the first ones starts with seeing what you can find out about yourself online i.e. Go Google Yourself! The article is public, https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-google-yourself-effectivelywhat-to-do-about-it/23035, and quite interesting, albeit eight years old. I share the same name as an US politician, so almost all of Google is dominated by his stuff. If you append my city after my name, my twitter feed comes up as the first link. A couple of comments on FB pages and an old comment on a newspaper site show up too. But you are almost to the end of the first page before you see a link to this website, and even then it is just because I have a subarea devoted to an old HR conference that I helped host, and the pages include all the organizers’ names, including mine. My website domain is obviously NOT my personal name, just the PolyWogg nickname and I don’t list my name on it too widely, for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, it’s not really needed. I don’t hide it, but I don’t see any reason to shout out my full name either and attract spam. Second, I had a bad experience once where someone disagreed with something I said in a discussion forum online about the public service, and her way of trying to “shut me down” was to post my home phone number and address in the forum, along with my work info. It didn’t stop me from pointing out the fallacies in her approach and people laughing her out of the room so to speak, but I also don’t need crackpots looking me up in the phonebook either.

Third, sometimes when I’m blogging, I talk about thing related to being a public servant, and while I don’t think anything I say gets me in any dangerous areas for my duty of loyalty to the government (in fact, I’m more often defending something by explaining it, not attacking), some parts of the legal test are how identifiable the link is between you personally and your position within the government. Since I don’t actively advertise my name, just my PolyWogg nickname, it’s a partial link that is broken. Of course, anyone with a WHOIS capability can look up who the domain is registered to, so I’m not trying to be anonymous. But I’m not actively advertising either.

I found the second article (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/19/online-identity-authenticity-anonymity) debating anonymity and authenticity both off-base six years after it was written and eerily prescient in some of the quotes about the tension between those who want to stamp out anonymity to kill the trolls vs those who deny authenticity is even possible (i.e., that FB and Instagram feeds are NOT real life but rather a cross between a censored version that is usually more positive than reality or a wishful thinking world of what you want your life to be like now).

The third article from 2013 (https://gizmodo.com/how-to-erase-yourself-from-the-internet-1456270634) talks about killing your Google+, FB, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to get rid of a large part of your online presence, but as I said, I have three of those, and my search didn’t even turn those ones up, other than Twitter. And the site that knows the most about me right now? Amazon, hands down.

The second half of the week is focused more on privacy and protecting one’s data, and the readings aren’t bad (a bit paranoid in some places, but not bad). https://www.privacyrights.org/consumer-guides/online-privacy-using-internet-safely has some online guides written for newbies.

For the assignment / discussion for the week, the focus was on:

Overall, not a bad week. But I don’t know that I feel any more “empowered” in my metaliteracy for considering whether your online persona is really, well, you?


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Metaliteracy – Week 1 – Introduction to the course

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I finished taking my first MOOC on Understanding Video Games (#50by50 #32 – Complete a MOOC – Understanding Video Games) and next on my list was one related to Metaliteracy – Empowering Yourself in a Connected World. The description was pretty good, talking about being a bit more reflective about our online work, and it was offered through Coursera. The downside to that is that I’m really only interested in “passive learning”, watching the videos, etc., not actively engaging online with fellow students. That might seem like a cop-out of sorts, but I like the idea of a curated course that pulls together interesting material in a professional manner. It would be nice to be able to afford all The Great Courses library and work my way through those, and I have managed to snag a photography course through them (still in progress) plus two new astronomy titles (they were having a sale!).

But, as I said, the Metaliteracy course looked interesting as a stepping stone, just as the video game was…I used the video game MOOC to get my feet wet in the world of gamification, and despite the fact that I timeshifted it over the course of a couple of years, I got a lot out of it and gained a foundation to understand gamification in a very different way than if I’d just started with gamification. For online engagement, I wanted to step back a bit and look at the online world through a more objective lens. The Metaliteracy course might do that, although I hate the term literacy being used that way. The course is offered as a collaboration between SUNY Empire State College and the SUNY University of Albany.

The Introduction for Week 1 started off bad for me…the hosts/leaders are a librarian and a vice-provost for academic programs. My fear is that often these types of approaches are about trying to do something “different” i.e. “we want to do a MOOC, what should it be about” as opposed to having a vision for a course and delivering it as a MOOC. Time will tell, right? And my initial reaction is part of the course itself — how I am evaluating the info without full context.

The course will involve this week’s intro, plus three sessions on digital citizenry (identity, IP, ethics), modes and formats of info sharing, creating info, participation in global community, curating and metacognitive awareness. And the end will focus on how students move on to being teachers. Okay, it’s got a decent structure.

One thing I liked in the intro was the idea of a metaliterate learner (meh) having different roles all woven together…communicator, translator, author, teacher, collaborator, producer, publisher, researcher, participant, etc. I would probably add curator in there too as a separate heading, but this week probably isn’t the week to quibble too much. As an active blogger, I experience all of those roles, so I’m curious to see where the course goes from here.

EDIT: Originally, I thought I was going to hold myself to just the videos, having downloaded them so I could timeshift more easily when I didn’t have a live internet connection. Instead, I realized that the readings are still available to me as I did “enrol” in the course, and thus still “live”. I went in to check something, saw the readings, and have now gone through the readings for the first week. The excellent chart mentioned above was included (i.e., not just in the video), and more importantly, they have a great article about what metaliteracy is compared to digital literacy, etc. Here is an excerpt from their paper:

Several competing concepts of literacy have emerged including digital literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, and information technology fluency, but there is a need for a comprehensive framework based on essential information proficiencies and knowledge. New media literacy and transliteracy have also responded to the rapid and ongoing changes in technology. As part of a metaliteracy reframing, we argue that producing and sharing information are critical activities in participatory Web 2.0 environments. Information literacy is central to this redefinition because information takes many forms online and is produced and communicated through multiple modalities. Information literacy is more significant now than it ever was, but it must be connected to related literacy types that address ongoing shifts in technology.

(Source: Mackey, T.P. & Jacobson, T.E. (2011). Reframing information literacy as a metaliteracy. College and Research Libraries, 72 (1), 62-78. doi: 10.5860/crl-76r1))

Over the course of the article, they compare it to information literacy (too research-y), media literacy (too narrowly focused on media writ large, not the digital and technological world), digital literacy (a little bit too narrowly within digital environments), visual literacy (heavy focus on visual design), cyberliteracy (participatory aspects only), and information fluency (like info literacy, but with extra techno bent). Metaliteracy, the topic of the course, tries to bring the best of all the perspectives together…participatory, collaborative, critical, more than info as a commodity, beyond skills-based definitions, engagement with the technology, transliterate (“the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media”, Thomas et al cited in the paper), blurring of information / entertainment / economics, and incorporating IP and privacy issues. A rather daunting list.

And yet, having read it, I’m left with two large questions. First, while they talk about the practical issues around doing research in a webbed-world, and how to deal with defining your search environment — are Amazon reviews in-scope? Youtube videos? music lyrics? — I don’t see anything about the time factor inherent in all of it. The more you engage with an everchanging “techno” world as your environment, the more your research is defined by a smaller and smaller snapshot in time. The minute you blink and take your “readings” for your research, not only does that act influence the subject but also the next minute it is gone, changed again by the new info available on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Second, while they talk about the “framework” as being less about “skills” and more about cognitive frameworks, as soon as they apply it to the practical worlds, it quickly becomes very skills-focused, as all applications do. If so, is a “skills-reduced” framework the way to go?

I don’t know the answers, but I like the questions. Let’s call it a promising intro.


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Henry’s Photo 101 course – Week 1 – Camera Fundamentals

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I mentioned in one of my #50by50 posts (#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course) that I was taking the Photo 101 course that Henry’s offers, and that I wanted to blog about the actual classes each week. Unfortunately, life intervened and I didn’t get to blogging each week, and the company has also altered their offerings to put more of it online or have one-day workshops than to offer in-person classes over several weeks. Nevertheless, I wanted to blog about it, so here I go.

Week 1 was about camera fundamentals, and if I called it “meet your camera week”, it would be a bit more direct. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands-on instruction to walk various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with in the class. Overall for the week, there were six basic areas to cover.

A. DIAL MODES

One of the first things we talked about was that the goal of the course was to give people a lot more confidence to get off of automatic mode and into more manual settings. As such, we started with the obvious — how do you get out of automatic mode?

For different cameras, the dial has slightly different words and letters, but generally you switch the dial from automatic mode (a green A usually) to one of four main manual modes — Program Mode (you change a couple of things, the rest is automatic), S or Tv is shutter priority mode (you set the shutter speed and it figures the rest out), A or Av is aperture priority mode (you set aperture, it figures the rest out) or M for manual mode where you set and control everything.

Nothing particularly surprising in there, but I have the Canon model so it has the Tv and Av labels. Why? Av stands for “aperture value”, which seems understandable. And so Tv is shutter priority…wait, what? The abbreviation is for “time value”, i.e. how long a shutter time you are using. I think Nikon uses A and S, but no biggie, we all adjusted. I was surprised no one asked why it was called Tv, but I figured I was the only one who didn’t know, so I didn’t ask either. I should mention in passing that I was in a group of 10 people as it becomes a bit relevant for week 3 and 4.

B. DISABLE LIGHT STABILIZATION

One thing we did change early on to get everyone to the same spot was to turn off the auto light stabilizer — this stops the camera from overriding your settings and guessing how much light you want in your pics. After all, the whole point of going to manual modes was to have a lot more control. So we turned it off by going to Program Mode (P), pressing Menu, choosing CAMERA 2 as the tab, and turning off AUTO LIGHT STABILIZER.

C. HEY, LOOK, A VIEWFINDER!

Next on the list of things to learn more about was the viewfinder on the camera. Sure, lots of us have smartphones and we want to default to using the little digital display to line things up, but the viewfinder gives you a much better understanding of compositional elements (week 4), and it’s good to get into the habit of using it now. And if you can turn off the screen, your battery will last longer anyway. Just saying.

Anyway, there were two aspects of the viewfinder that were emphasized, and I confess I didn’t know either one. First, while I knew there were little numbers showing up in the viewfinder display, I didn’t know what they were. Across the bottom is usually exposure compensation (week 2) in the middle, key settings for aperture or shutter (bottom left), plus a few other handy things to know. Quite small print, but they’re there. If you press the shutter button down half-way, they appear.

The second thing is that while the camera does the autofocus thing for the actual image in the lens, you can also adjust the viewfinder for YOUR eyes. There is a small dial next to the viewfinder that is a diopter that allows you to adjust the viewfinder focus (not the camera lens, just the viewfinder) to your vision. Some people take their glasses off and adjust it to their prescription; others tweak it slightly to their viewing eye.

D. ISO SETTINGS

I’d love to tell you that it stands for something like “image sensitivity ordering” as that would seem to make some kind of sense, but it really goes back to the International Standards Organization. Yep, it has nothing to do with photography. It was the international way to measure and compare the light sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. In old film cameras, it often was referred to as film speed or the ASA rating. Generally, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the camera is to light. Why does it matter?

In photography, imaging, even just plain seeing, you only get a picture or see things by light reflecting off objects and coming into your eye or camera. In order for the camera to “capture” the image, it has to be able to see gradations of light and distinguish between light and dark. People often refer to it as “capturing the light”.

When you’re using your camera, you can tell it how much light you want to capture. If you set it to AUTO ISO, it is a general, all-purpose setting where the camera will figure out how much light that it is seeing coming in, and it will adjust higher if it isn’t getting that much light. In other words, if you have a lot of light, it will set it for ISO 100. If you have only a little light, it will make itself “more” sensitive to the little light there is by adjusting to ISO 6400, for example.

Outside in the daytime or even bright artificial light, and if you’re out of AUTO ISO mode, you will likely set it somewhere between 100-400 ISO. This works well if you’re just using your camera in hand-held mode, or if slightly lower light, with a tripod. But here’s the catch…the more sensitive your setting, the more sensitive the camera is to any change in light, including IF YOU MOVE THE CAMERA. So, generally, the more you up the ISO setting, the more you want to increase stabilization and use a tripod.

If you are in a low-light situation, you might want to go for 800-3200.

If you are in a REALLY low-light situation, you could go to 6400 (the limit on my camera) or more (some go up to 20K+).

Now you might think, “okay, you adjust it just for level of light”. And that’s a good rule of thumb. But that is too simplistic. Cameras always work at capturing light as a trade-off between three things — light sensitivity, how long your shutter is open, and how wide the opening is aka aperture. If you boost light sensitivity, you get more light; if you leave your shutter open longer, you get more light; if you have a really big opening (wide aperture), you get more light. If you do all three, you get a white image with no details.

So, suppose you are outside, it’s a bright sunny day, and you want to take a picture of your cousin out waterskiing. Now, because you know that it’s an object in motion, you need a really fast shutter speed — take a quick pic, freeze the motion, and move on. But the faster the shutter speed, the LESS light the camera is letting in. And if you open the aperture really wide, it’s going to take longer to snap the pic, likely resulting in blurring. So, to compensate for the fast shutter speed, the wise photographer can boost the light sensitivity. Basically saying, “Okay, I need a super fast shutter to open just wide enough to get the shot, and then close really quickly, which will allow me to ‘freeze’ motion, and since that won’t give me much light in that short of time, I’m going to boost the image sensitivity way up.”

I took the following photo a few years ago in a preset scene mode for sports, which at the time, I didn’t really know what the camera was doing, but now I can go back and figure out what it did (actually, this is one of the learning methods in the class — find a photo that we like that we took previously in auto mode, and go back to figure out what the settings were that worked and why). The camera had given me a fast shutter speed of 1/1600th of a second. It kept my aperture fairly open at F5.6, partly as I was zoomed in, and it changed my default bright day setting of about ISO 100 to ISO 400.

Now I was also taking high-res images, maximum pixels, and if it had been a cloudy day, the camera might have bumped me up to ISO 800 or more. Indoors, fast action sports like basketball, the camera would likely go up to ISO 1600 or maybe even 6400. But because the camera was adjusting on the fly to my “fast” settings, and greater light sensitivity, I was able to get this one.

Other reasons to increase light sensitivity is if you MUST get a particular shot, i.e. if you miss it, it’s gone, as it increases likelihood of capturing something. Sports shots are often like that, get it now or it’s gone, but there are other times too.

E. AUTO-FOCUS

My Canon Rebel T5i / 700D was considered to be, at the time that I bought it, a high-value entry-level DSLR, and many newbies love it out of the box as the stock lenses all come with powered auto-focus. In fact, most users may never ever take the lens off auto-focus mode. However, we learned that auto-focus needs three factors to be at play:

  1. AT LEAST MINIMUM DISTANCE: Lenses all have different minimum focus distances. Macro lenses will let you get up close and personal with a flower or bug, but most lenses won’t. A standard lens wants to be back a few feet from your subject. So if you’re closer than that, it can’t auto-focus. You may struggle to get it to focus even manually, but that’s a somewhat separate issue.
  2. CONTRAST: If you are wearing light colours, like white, against a flat white wall, the camera is going to have trouble figuring out distances. There’s no contrast between you and the wall to tell it that you’re closer and to focus on you. The easiest contrast, most often, is that something is overlapping something else. Your eyes do the same thing. You see a telephone pole off in the distance and a car over to the side. You may not be able to visually tell which one is closer immediately but if you can see wires leading up to the pole, and roadway leading up to the car, you can intellectually guess which one is closer. However, if the car passes in front of the pole, you can immediately tell which is closer, both intellectually and visually. Cameras have limited reasoning ability…they want to see something darker/brighter in front of something lighter (and thus farther away), and if there is a strong contrast between the two, the sensors can pick up the difference almost “visually” rather than “computationally”. If it can’t, it’s going to struggle with any sort of auto-focus. You may even see it struggle as it focuses in and then out, in and then out.
  3. STILL OR SLOW-MOVING. If the object goes by like the Roadrunner, your camera is going to say, “Umm, what was that?” Because it was moving too fast to focus on it. It couldn’t keep up with focusing, kind of like where it is now, getting ready to take the shot, boom, it’s moved and the focus is off now, refocus, ready to snap, dammit, where did that roadrunner go?

However, while auto-focus is good generally, there is also a propensity to have multi-points of focus and semi-continuous auto-focus. If you instead set it to a single point of focus (a red dot in the middle, for example), you can focus on whatever you want at any distance with a half-press of the shutter and “lock in” that distance. Then, you can move your camera to wherever you want to centre it.

Why would this be useful? The example in the book is looking through some trees at someone who is on a dock to the left. If you focus in the centre, it will focus on the trees and leaves which are about half the distance to the person. Auto-focus will lock there by default, and the person will be blurred. Instead, if you turn your camera and point it at the person, get it in focus for them, pressing half-way down to “lock that distance”, you can then rotate the camera so the trees and leaves are back in the centre, and take the shot. The camera is still focusing on the person (locked to that distance) but the composition will be the trees in the foreground slightly out of focus and the person sharp. You often see this in wedding photos where people are walking through the woods and they are razor sharp at a medium distance but not necessarily centred in the shot. A much easier example to understand is using it focus on something in the distance if you’re at a zoo to “lock the distance” and then turning so you’re shooting through the fence. If you auto-focus normally, it will focus on the fence; if you focus on the distance, the fence more or less fades away.

F. MANUAL PICTURE BRIGHTNESS

But we learned that sometimes you don’t want to adjust ISO because it will mess up other things. How do you brighten a shot without a flash? There is something called manual picture brightness or EV for exposure value. It’s an extra setting that allows you to do +/- increments from 0.0 being neutral. Mine lets me go up and down in 0.3 increments, up to +5 and down to -5. My smartphone does +/- 2 in .5 increments, although most people using their apps have NO idea what the EV does. If you increase EV, your pic is brighter; decrease EV, it goes darker. It just gives you a little more control without messing with the other settings. It is apparently particularly good for difficult lighting like snow (DSLRs often dull it so boost an extra EV nudge) or in low light generally (DSLRs often over-brighten it so reduce it an extra EV nudge or two).

And that was the end of the first week’s class. If I had to say what I got out of the class, I would say:

  1. More comfort with manual and the dial modes;
  2. How to control the viewfinder, and even that there was a diopter control;
  3. The link between ISO and shutter speed for sports shots i.e. how I got the shot I did of the cousin water-skiing;
  4. How to “lock” focus at one distance and then compose; and,
  5. How to adjust picture brightness with the exposure value.

In class, we took some pics to practice, mostly playing with things at different distances to get things in focus and then with manually enhancing and reducing exposure values (or over-adjusting in these cases).

Close focus on teacher:

Farther focus on TV:

Boosted the EV:

Decreased the EV:

A good first week…and then we had homework. Yes, homework! Mostly just to replicate some of the practice in the classroom.

A relatively “normal setting” photo:

EV reduced:

EV enhanced:

Close focus, far object blurred:

Far focus, close subject:


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#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Back in 2016, I decided to “up my game” for photography, and I thought I would start with a class or two. Henry’s courses are popular, but there are also courses through the city’s annual learning catalog, and even through Algonquin College if I want to get really serious. But I wanted to keep it simple, so I started watching The Great Course’s “Fundamentals of Photography” series (Fundamentals of Photography – Class 01 – Making Great Pictures).

Recently, as part of my lingering 50by50 commitments, I wanted to get back into photography learning, but even in the last two years, my approach has changed. I have a decent camera — a Canon Rebel T5i aka the 700D — and it works well for me. It is considered a high-value entry level DSLR, but my needs are relatively modest, with just a couple of quirks.

My primary need is outdoors photography … waterfalls, landscapes, flora and fauna, hiking through nature, and friends and family doing both active and passive activities.

My secondary need, like most people, is indoor photography … birthdays, parties, events, holidays.

My quirky needs are both related to astrophotography — first, attached to the scope (body only) or second, straight Milky Way sky shots (with and without zooms).

The T5i came in a couple of configured bundles, and I went with the one that included two lenses — 18-55mm, and 55-250mm. It also has a whack of pre-set modes:

  • Portrait (blurred backgrounds);
  • Landscape (wide depth of field so both foreground and background are in focus);
  • Close-up (aka a software macro option for flowers and things);
  • Sports (continuous shooting, high speed capture, rapid focus);
  • Scene mode (several sub-options);
  • Creative auto (simple mode for quick setting of common features);
  • Flash off (can’t fire, no matter what the camera thinks is right or not); and,
  • Scene-intelligent auto (the computer takes its best guess on all the settings, useful if you keep changing setting)

It then has four semi-manual modes:

  • Program mode (P) — This is a bit misleading, as it is semi-auto (aperture and shutter speed) but you control the rest;
  • Shutter priority mode (Tv) — You control how fast the shutter is, the computer does the rest;
  • Aperture priority mode (Av) — You control how wide the aperture is, the computer does the rest;
  • Manual mode (M) — The full power of the camera is at your fingertips.

For me, I spend almost all my time in pre-set modes, and truth be told, I don’t even do that well.

I have managed to get what I think are some great shots — birds in flight, cousins doing various water sports, flora around various hiking trails in Ottawa. But while I pointed the camera, chose the mode (sports, for example) and captured the shot (cousin waterskiing and spraying up water), I didn’t really know what the camera was doing. I wanted to know how and why it worked, not just the what of the shot or settings. Part of my reasoning is that if I can understand the basics for my primary needs (basic outdoors and indoors), I have a better shot at understanding how to approach astrophotography.

So I signed up in September for a course with Henry’s, the local photography store. I wanted a bit of hands-on experience to get me out of pre-set modes and into manual, but I also wanted to know what the camera was doing. Part of that experience is going back to look at previous photos that turned out well and figuring out, “OH! So THAT’S how I / my camera did that…”. There were a few options available including both “learn about your Canon camera” as well as “photography 101”. With timing and location, I opted for the photography basics course in Kanata.

The course was divided into four classroom sessions, plus one practical session, with each session designed to dive into the key aspects of what you control in photography. I’m going to write separate blog posts about each week, but the overview is show below, although the titles/descriptions are mine, not the official ones:

  1. Camera fundamentals — I hesitate to call this “meet your camera” but it pretty much is what it was about. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands on walking various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with.
  2. Understanding aperture — Looking at depth of field, aperture and f/stops, and fast lenses.
  3. Understanding shutter speed — Looking at motion for capture, blurring, and panning techniques;
  4. Planning the photo — Looking at a combination of different lenses, perspectives, sensors, and then the creative side (composition, tips).

It was an interesting experience. For week 1 and 2, I went to the Kanata course on Wednesday nights, and there were about 10 of us in the class. A wide range of interest — older for hobby, younger with dreams of entrepreneurship, a few unique interests. However, the instructor noted he was also teaching on Friday nights nearer my house (earlier time, and on a Friday?), and if we missed Wed, we could catch Friday at the other site. Week 3 & 4, I did just that, because there was only 1 person over there, meaning it was almost like a hands-on class. We asked questions constantly, at least I did, and stopped him regularly when something wasn’t clear. Way more “aha” moments than if we had been in a larger group because it was the follow-up questions that really crystallized things for me. When I do the four blogs for the weeks, I really want to see if I can re-create some of the examples.

I have the practical session tonight, but it isn’t as “practical” as it sounds — we’ll be over by a park in the relative dark. The Friday night class would be great for me, but it’s at a bad time for me this week. so not sure what I’m doing yet.

Am I ready to go full manual now? No, but I achieved my true goal — learning and feeling much more comfortable with making my camera do more of what I want it to and less of what I don’t. Part of a multi-year plan to get me fully conversant before retirement. And a welcome addition to my list of 50 things.

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#50by50 #32 – Complete a MOOC – Understanding Video Games

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

About three and a half years ago, I got excited by the idea of MOOCs — massive online open courses. I went through multiple sites like edX and Coursera, reviewed some online offerings from Canadian universities, and tore through the Great Courses catalog to try and identify “which courses should I do?”. The resulting list of courses I was interested in was massive, no pun intended. Literally hundreds of courses available to me, and since I wasn’t interested in certification or a degree (I already have those), these would be just done for interest. The true embodiment of lifelong learning, with a strong focus on flexible learning. I could download stuff to my MP3 player, I could read on my tablet, I could blast through printed materials. It would be awesome.

Yet I also knew I wasn’t looking for a dry boring course, it would need to balance the education and entertainment components, even if I didn’t exactly call it that at the time. I wanted a “quick win”, something that would hold my interest, not get bogged down too far in esoteric academic theory yet still have the rigour of recognized academia doing the curation. A course taught by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas at the University of Alberta through the Coursera platform seemed like a great match. It was entitled “Understanding Video Games”, and it would let me scratch a particular learning itch — having a better foundation to understand the elements of “games” before tackling the morphous and relative wild west frontier of “gamification” where everyone talks about it and throws elements up, seemingly without any real framework to know how the pieces fit together into a coherent picture.

I started the course in January of 2015, and my hope was I would finish three in the year — Understanding Video Games would be followed by a course on MetaLiteracy and then likely an intro to psychology course at Carleton. Not exactly what happened. First and foremost, I got sidetracked and distracted with other more pressing pursuits. Second, with no accreditation tied to it, and thus no extrinsic motivation other than interest, there was no immediacy or urgency to my learning. Three and a half years later, and I’m finally finished 11 “weeks” of videos that I could have finished in two short weeks with a set of videos each night.

But did I achieve my objective of learning? In short, I did.

Blog

What I learned

Rating for the week
Week 1. Introduction

This opening week introduced some ideas that I found limiting in their initial approach, and I was happy to see them expanded upon in later weeks (the evolution, for example, from linear storylines to more multi-modal storylines (tying in nicely to emergent gameplay). Equally, I liked the final elements of the course on how certain games have boosted gamification to encourage repeated game play by modifying the game mechanics, which explained in part why certain games that held zero interest for me seemed incredibly popular and addictive to others.

The rest of the course would be devoted to:

  1. Basic terminology and concepts;
  2. Academic theories about game frameworks;
  3. Applying the theories to cultural topics

(Completed January 2015)

 4 / 5
Week 2. Play and games

IMO, this was the best lecture of the series, partly as it provided the foundation I was seeking in order to have further discussions later about gamification. It starts with the question, “What is a game?” and what initially would seem almost pedestrian veers into deeper philosophy almost to distinguish a “game” from mere “play”. In the end, I was most attracted to the idea that a game may have a common set of elements such as:

  1. Usually close-ended with formal system of rules and a desired end-state to reach;
  2. Consequences for cheating or violating the rules;
  3. An ending or conclusion;
  4. Quantifiable outcomes;
  5. Balance between risk and reward;
  6. Effort on behalf of the players; and/or,
  7. Fun or whimsical elements.

For me though, I think that second half of the list is more about the enjoyability of the game, as many other games could have those elements or not and still be games.

(Completed June 2015)

 5 / 5
Week 3 – Emergent and progressive gameplay

This would be my second favorite lecture of the series as I think it starts to expand upon the basic definitions of a game tied to physical medium games like board games and takes you deeper into the world of interactive video games.  With the idea introduced that progressive gameplay means you progress linearly through the game, and the idea that emergent gameplay allows for some self-identification of goals and / or methods to achieve them, I was struck though that there was something missing — the difference between single player games and the limited opportunities for emergence vs. the natural emergence, even in more linear games, if the game allowed for multiple players to interact. The one element that I feel is underdeveloped is the significance of griefing. I don’t think griefing really qualifies as emergent gameplay, just more that the computers now have help (an extra opposing side, for instance).

(Completed June 2015)

 5 / 5

Understanding Video Games – Week 4 – Game Mechanics

I love the framework of game rules (obvious), agents (players), game mechanics (what the agents can do to interact with the game i.e. actions, behaviours and control mechanisms), dynamics, and aesthetics (emotional level).

(Completed June 2016)

 4 / 5
Week 5 – Story and Games

The week’s material covers RPGs, and I found myself more interested in the story elements (narratology) over the game mechanics (ludology). An interview with a game designer and programmer was fascinating about how built in personalization / differentiation gives an illusion of total openness in a scene, in contrast to the reality that it is actually a tightly controlled narrative / dialogue. However, overall, I think the biggest addition for the week was Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey (departure, initiation, return). While I understand the limitations (default male-orientation, kitchen sink ethos to include “everything” and its misuse as prescriptive storytelling), it’s a decent framework for the frequent “hero’s journey”.

(Completed June 2016)

 4 / 5
Week 6 – How to Interpret Games

The week walks through the beginnings of MMOs with multi-user dungeon games (MUDs), and how MMOs added to it with advanced GUI and recognizable visual settings. In particular, they work their way through Ultima (which added both positive social interactions and negative ones such as griefing), Everquest (innovation through adding 3D interfaces, but also led to selling characters in the real world and early references to online addictions), Second Life (showing that it wasn’t all about weird fantasy worlds), and the true powerhouse, World of Warcraft.

This week stepped back a bit and pulled from literary theory to talk about a structural way of analysing games and the interrelationships between the parts such as the hardware and program code, functionality, gameplay, meaning of a game (relying on semiotics, signs and symbols), referentiality (how it represents a genre or crosslinks to other games and gametypes), and socio-culture (how it fits within the outside world or what is brought to the game by players).

In the end, though, it basically argues what the game says or doesn’t say, does or doesn’t do, includes or doesn’t include, all represent choices that then can tell you something about how the game views the “real world” as it abstracts from our reality into the reality of the game. I hesitate to go so far as to say the medium is the message, but at the least, it is a medium that is saying something and that “something” is open to analysis and interpretation.

However, this is the point in the course where I started to have niggling concerns about the level of complexity or simplification shown by the various types of included analysis.

(Completed June 2016)

 3 / 5
Week 7 – The culture of video games

I had a jump in the course at this point as it disappeared from Coursera. I had already downloaded all the materials though so that I could work offline, so I could continue, which was good for me. Not that surprising, really…after all, I was almost three years from having first started the course!

The week was about a cultural studies approach to gaming, and for me, there is a constant struggle in CS to studying any culture. If you are part of the culture, it is hard to step back to study it, thus challenging objectivity; if you are not part of the culture, you’re often interpreting that culture from an outside perspective, thus challenging bias and perspective. Yet, to the extent that CS ever allows you to wrestle those two competing challenges to the ground, I accept that gaming culture would include the members, their specialized language, a sense of community, identity representation of self and others, questions of membership (in/out), and how members interrelate.

However, I found myself wanting more depth in the analysis. For example, with modders, I wanted some indication of scope or magnitude, their motivations and desires…it seemed simply descriptive, not truly analytical. Equally, I felt there was room for a deeper dive on the change in commercial distribution channels and Indies, with perhaps some comparative analysis with the music industry, Kickstarter campaigns for inventions, or self-publication of books through Amazon.

Finally, I think COS players warrant some additional consideration. If you want to understand a culture, one of the most basic tools of cultural studies is to look at ways in which they express themselves for both artistry and identity. And the physical embodiment of a video game character would seem to be the ultimate form of that expression. For some, it may simply be a creative challenge — can they make a costume or do the makeup? For others, it could be an opportunity for role play and to experience the game in a different way, not by actually immersing oneself into the game’s reality, but by bringing that reality into the broader world. And for some, it is simply Hallowe’en costume play. Yet there are people who can do it for a living — they’re booked and paid to attend in various costumes at ComicCons, they pose as models for photographers, they travel around the world doing it. It’s a area ripe for potential misinterpretation, but still, I would have liked to see more on it.

(Completed December 2017)

 3 / 5
Week 8 – Violence and video games

The week’s videos have a great history of “fighting” / “violence” in video games from old platform games to cinematic online games. I have more niggling concerns when they get into treating blood and gore as a mere aesthetic, similar to horror movies, partly because of the interactive nature. In the movies, you’re watching and observing; in video games, you’re interacting and causing the mayhem. I see the similarities in questions, but with a key extra component, similar to Roger Ebert’s concerns … does the gameplay take you out of “art” into something more participatory?

As the week progresses, I like their framework for understanding games i.e. risks and rewards, impacts of attacking non-playable characters, or forced moral choices (actual choices or where they are made for you in order to advance the game i.e. often no pacifist solutions).

Overall for the week’s videos, I expected more direct reference to situations like Columbine in the U.S. as one of the “hot button” examples that media pundits like to reference. I was also disappointed that they didn’t explore a bit more of the argument by some psychologists that video game play is not causal of aggression but more likely symptomatic of aggressive tendencies. In other words, aggressive people were likely to play violent games and commit violent acts, not as cause and effect, but as a series of symptoms of their aggression.

(Completed May 2018)

 3 / 5
Week 9 – Sexuality

The videos range a bit in their content from the history of sex in gaming, ways to imagine sex in gaming (sex as an abstraction, sex as a game goal, sex/gender as a mechanic, sex as an aestethic (including what is “normal), and sex as emergent gameplay), and the role of women in the industry, ranging from marketers using sex to “sell” gaming; designers including sexual content; exploration of gender through cyber-sex roles; and creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

The one area that they lightly touched on in other wording was the question of agency and empowerment, through role models. I was disappointed for example that the summary of Tomb Raider was simply her form and outfits, while totally ignoring that many women liked the fact that they finally had a kick-ass heroine to anchor a highly-playable, highly-successful franchise.

It’s also disappointing that their discussions of women in the industry happened before #GamerGate. It would be interesting to see any updates on those areas in the future.

(Completed May 2018)

 4 / 5
Week 10 – Race

I’m not sure about the content for the week. At times, I feel they are reaching too far…the idea that a blue army against a red army is an indication of race is no more valid than assuming that someone being a thimble or a racecar in Monopoly tells you about their personal views of objects.

And, yet, I do agree that there can easily be inherent and inherited biases in game design (black dwarves being more evil than light), that racial conflict can serve as a proxy for a larger narrative arc, and that fighting games often include game mechanics framed through a racial lens to control player attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.). I just don’t know if it gets us anywhere.

(Completed May 2018)

 2 / 5
Week 11 – Serious games

For the last week, they note that there are lots of types of games that are supposedly “serious” i.e. aimed at serious purposes. In history, the longest running example are wargames, but there are also “tycoon” games about business simulations and broader education games, such as the Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego. Games often have to walk a fine line between learning and fun/engagement, but while constructionist tools are often more “fun”, they are also ripe to be subverted by emergent play.

The part I really liked was the ending summary of gamification, namely those tools that some online apps use to gamify their products to keep people playing:

  • Decay (daily obligations and no way to pause);
  • Sweetening/achievements (the achievements are shared publicly to encourage competition);
  • Object rarity (often with luck and duration-of-play time); and,
  • Social obligation/activation (gift-giving and reciprocity).

If you access gamification as the use of game mechanics in non-game situations, and that it is a whole other field of study (i.e. suitable for another course), it’s not a bad place to end.

(Completed June 2018)

3 / 5

I feel like the platform / style of a MOOC is right for me as a learner…yet I didn’t “stick to it” to do it more quickly. The two professors suggest perhaps if they redid it, they would gamify the course itself to see how it impacted participation. Not sure that would work for those not in the “enrolled for accreditation” portion. Yet, I completed Duo Lingo and liked getting the little badges as I went. Not enough to “share” them on Facebook however. 🙂 I’m into gamified solutions, I’m not a sheep!

As I said, I met my learning objective, and completed another #50by50 item on my list.

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Understanding Video Games – Week 11 – Serious Games

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

For the last week, they note that there are lots of types of games that are supposedly “serious” i.e. aimed at serious purposes. In the history, the longest running example are wargames, but there are also “tycoon” games that are about business simulations. However, the largest sub-genre are education games, such as the Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego. Over time, the educational starter series have moved into mobile apps, virtual environment, and training simulations.

Stepping back from the genre, I can see how they are dividing things. For example, there are:

– games used in instruction, where the game is an added medium (for processes or procedures); or,

– other games are used as a construction tool, and thus the game empowers the learning style of the individual student (explore and discover).

Games often have to walk a fine line between learning and fun/engagement, but while constructionist tools are often more “fun”, they are also ripe to be subverted by emergent play.

In order to keep players playing, games frequently use:

  • Decay (daily obligations and no way to pause);
  • Sweetening/achievements (the achievements are shared publicly to encourage competition);
  • Object rarity (often with luck and play time); and,
  • Social obligation/activation (gift-giving and reciprocity).

The last video is probably the launching point for future learning that interested me the most from the start — gamification. Namely, the idea of using ideas such as game mechanics in non-game situations. The course concludes with Qs about how to gamify the course — such as course badges, increase use of avatar creator, etc. but I had hoped for a bit more.

And with that, the MOOC finished.

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Understanding Video Games – Week 10 – Race

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The first video for the week notes that “colour” is frequently used as a way of showing race, even when it is two armies — one red, one blue. As you go through the next four videos, it is expanded to show how race is used to indicate “the other” — an opponent, for example. Some examples for the week include:

  • Choices may often reflect external racism i.e. “black dwarves” are more evil than light dwarves, often as proxies for more complex situations;
  • Race serves as the basis for conflict, and conflict can serve as the basis for a narrative arc;
  • What is present is as important as what is absent;
  • Default characteristics can serve as “indicator” of what a “normal” character should be;
  • Character race representations look at cultures and roles within games, including options around protagonist or antagonist roles;
  • Fighting games often include game mechanics framed through a racial lens to control player attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.);

It was an interesting summary, and I can see in many cases the detailed internal mechanics and choices that are presented as a basis for racial conversation. However, the initial premise — red vs. blue, or even white vs. black in chess — is a bit too stretched.

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Understanding Video Games – Week 9 – Sexuality

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Week 9 of the MOOC introduces the theme of sexuality and how it is explored in video games.

In video 1, they focus on the first games that introduced sexuality — adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Or how most of the text adventure games were relatively straightforward, yet Japan started introducing some sexual role-playing content with Night Life while America was still playing Kings Quest by Sierra. But mostly the video is about the development history of text games from basic parsers to added parsing, added exploration, added audio, added graphics, and expanded narrative arcs. It’s an okay start, but mostly it is just to give you the background so they can then talk about:

  1. The history of sex in gaming
  2. Five ways to imagine sex in gaming
  3. Role of women in the industry

The second video talks about the examples of how it is introduced:

  • marketers using sex to “sell” to generally single heterosexual males;
  • designers including sex content (Sierra’s Soft Porn Adventure and eventually Leisure Suit Larry);
  • exploration of gender through cyber-sex roles; and,
  • creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) as reactions to games with sex and/or violence.

Interestingly, while some of the big FPS games like Doom do have strong male markets, other games with bigger audiences — Myst, Sims, Farmvilles — have much bigger female markets. But those markets are often dismissed as not “real video games”.

The third, fourth and fifth videos introduce five ways sex and sexuality can appear in games:

a. Sex as an abstraction — namely as a simplified representation, to reduce explicitness, and to add rationality and linear logic for game play, with similar approaches to how it is done in film, literature and advertising;

b. Sex as a game goal — using lust as a motivation (such as an early strip poker game), and with little diversity in the target market (where the gamer objectifies and identifies with sexualized game characters, namely white men pursuing women);

c. Sex as a mechanic (part of design) — some games make the character’s sex irrelevant while others make it explicit, but not necessarily obviously (such as Super Mario Brothers 2 where the male characters are stronger and faster than Princess Peach who can float), but there are some other still who use sex and gender to create a sense of agency;

d. Sex as an aesthetic (part of gamer experience) — some games are heteronormative (with assumptions of inherent differences matching societal perceptions) in their gamer experience, and while important, there’s also the risk of objectification, such as is argued by Lara Croft’s outfits and proportion in the Tomb Raider series; and,

e. Sex as emergent gameplay — some players have imported outside constructions like online weddings into an MMO game, but this pales in comparison to Second Life (with sold services, toys and club memberships).

For the role of women in the industry, they note that women not only play games, they also critique and make games. And while 45% of gamers are female (although that stat includes a bunch of games that some gamers don’t really consider games at all), only 11% of production crew are women, which goes even lower when you exclude HR, admin, etc. and focus on engineering or designers.

Overall, it was a solid week, just not with much depth. In most places, it just lightly touches on the concepts. Which was disappointing. For example, I expected them to talk about Tomb Raider, and they did; however, they could use TR as an entire study in and of itself, with some pretty complex elements. They don’t even mention the agency aspect that you have a strong female character as the protagonist, smart, attractive, strong…a bad ass who makes Indiana Jones look wimpy. They only cover the superficial controversy, without much attention paid to the counter-argument (although they do mention the puzzle-solving aspects). Grumble, grumble.

I’m also disappointed with the timing of the original recording. But they recorded all their stuff (I think) before #GamerGate started (2014), and so there is no mention of it at all. They mention in passing that there are those who face some harassment online, but it is a throwaway line at most. Obviously if they were doing the same pieces now, GamerGate would likely figure prominently in a discussion of women in the industry.

In the meantime, two more weeks to go…

 

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Understanding Video Games – Week 8 – Violence and video games

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I’m still plugging away on this MOOC. Week 8 of  “Understanding Video Games” (hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera) starts off talking about violence in early games, and begins with the old platform games (i.e. jumping to or swinging from platforms), ranging from Donkey Kong (static screens) through to Super Mario Brothers (scrolling), and on further into cinematic platform games. Even the cartoonish games attracted concerns of parental groups who wanted to limit ages or locations for arcades.

In the second video, the pair talk about blood and gore, and it’s long artistic roots in art as an aesthetic. They then move on to flagging the different interpretations — gory violence as nothing more than a video game “horror movie” experience; gory violence as a murder simulator; or merely a source of catharsis. Yet it is the same questions that have been posed of art, comic books and television too. In the end, violence can be seen as either gratuitous or as an ingredient to drive a narrative story arc (such as the need to resolve conflict or overcome strategic or tactical challenges).

The third and fourth videos focus on consequences and morality. As a starting point, they assume that there is feedback to all actions in a game, including violent ones, and then look at the cost or reward for committing violence acts, including:

  1. Punishment for attacking “non-player characters” (NPCs) such as Ultima III;
  2. Rewards for attacking NPCs (Crusaders);
  3. Mixed punishments and rewards with competing mechanics (Grand Theft Auto 3);
  4. Mixed mechanics where emergent play (setting your own goals) decides the reward or punishments; or,
  5. Complex mechanics of moral choices (such as avoid, talk their way out, bribe the NPCs, or fight) with differing narrative outcomes, or rewards (the “clean hands” achievement for finding a non-violent solution).

However, some games use “gating” techniques — i.e. you can’t get to the next area until you satisfy the previous area’s requirements in a specific way. In many of these games, there are no “pacifist” solutions. Usually this is the default option for any game that has a boss.

Watching the video, I was reminded of my first time playing Syphon Filter…there are two levels that are “gated”. In one, you have to kill terrorists to rescue hostages. And no matter what you try to do to stop the one bad guy, he would always end up killing the hostage and the level would reset. Unless you did one very specific thing — killed him with a sniper rifle shot to the head. No head shot, no advancement. A short while later in the game, another level required you to go through the whole level without setting off any alarms. But there were so many guards, the only way to get close to your objective was to repeatedly use head shots to eliminate bad guys. No head shots, no advancement.

The fifth video delves into the idea of the degree of photo-realism to the violence. I found it interesting the example of Mortal Kombat 2 — it was initially viewed as gratuitous violence, yet is now viewed as relatively over-the-top cartoonish violence. However, with increasingly realistic physics mechanics (destructible buildings, bullet trajectories, etc.), the immersive experience increases.

Which leads to the final video for the week, dealing with how academia has studied video game violence. It identifies three common threads in the discussion:

  1. Playing video games can cause desensitization to real violence;
  2. Playing causes players to act aggressively;
  3. The more graphic, the more likely they are to be aggressive.

The focus though is on two research questions — does it increase the likelihood of violence and/or decrease empathetic behaviour? The main approach in academia is to rely on social learning theory aka mimicry. The humanities may also look at political, moral, and cultural aspects of violence and video games. However, some academics identify multiple methodological problems with the research, such as:

  1. Ethical design issues;
  2. Choice of undergraduates as the sample guinea pig;
  3. Lax and flexible definitions of what actually constitutes violent and non-violent mechanics, and how to separate / isolate the violent parameter;
  4. Impossibility to test for real-life violent behaviour in an experiment; and,
  5. Journals have systemic biases towards publishing negative results.

Overall for the week’s videos, I expected more direct reference to situations like Columbine in the U.S. as one of the “hot button” examples that media pundits like to reference. I was also disappointed that they didn’t explore a bit more of the argument by some psychologists that video game play was not causal of aggression but more likely symptomatic of aggressive tendencies. In other words, aggressive people were likely to play violent games and commit violent acts, not as cause and effect but as a series of symptoms of their aggression.

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