This article mainly covered two aspects how the intermediality appropriated or adapted during the early era of cinema history. The article is written by Ralf Remshardt. Below is abridged texts from full book.

p.42
In this chapter, I am interested particularly in the moment of transition when the apparatus of the early cinema redefined the “real” of the actor in the process of cinematic remediation of stage performances. The process of remediation, “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms”

“The historical relationship of liveness and mediatization must be seen as a relationship of dependence and imbrication rather than opposition”

p.43
The confrontation with the demands of silent film forced actors, who were accustomed to a dominant subject position on stage to accede their objectification and commodification by an apparatus they understood only incompletely.

For instance, the American actor James O’Neill in The Count Monte Cristo (dir. Edwin Porter, 1912) virtually performs his ambivalence about cinema in every frame. Bernhardt and Duse, as I will describe later, either attempted to force a theatrical logic onto the cinema in a gesture of appropriation, or forced themselves to adapt to film.

p.44
The camera does not define and delineate the performance; it only registers a demonstration of sorts, calculated not to fulfil a desire but to summon it: the live performer’s voice and body beckoning beyond the imperfections of the mute and flickering images.

the simulacrum(for it was scarcely real) of an authentic self.

p.45
he himself must transform into the apparatus, … as a machine to a machine.

but if the camera is not making a note of it, you have not accomplished the task the directors has set for you (Sothern 1998: 30-31)

p.46
“the camera has no mercy o the actor who is thinking of other things or is incapable of imagination”

Elizabeth was a kind of ‘test case’ by Bernhardt of how far she could extend the loyalty of her following into the new medium, and more importantly, how far she could make the medium extend itself to her.

the ‘true’ self and the performative self.

“distinction between the actor’s authenticity and the authentication of the character s/he is playing” (1998:21).

p.48
Perhaps she was aware that close-ups would challenge the supremacy of her physical idiom; to allow a close-up would have given the camera the power to extract emotional moment, rather than authorizing the actress’s to project it.

p.49
This “regally attitudinized death” is entirely in keeping with a film that every turn denies its film-ness.

Thus Bernhardt resists making the performance medially transparent by subordinating herself to film’s naturalistic aesthetic and simply disappearing; in salvaging the theatrical she retains what Bolter and Grusin refer to as the medium’s “hypermediacy” – essentially, the continuing visibility of film as a secondary medium through which theater (as the orginary medium) is mediated. It is only in the hypermediated mode that the performer’s autonomy survives erasure.

Thus she appropriated the film in theatrical way.

A devoted filmgoer, she was convinced also that films were not living up to their artistic potential, and she began to conceive of possible film projects for herself.

I want to do nothing that resembles, even remotely, my work of the past.

p.50
In what she felt was her innovation Duse decided not to have the character speak at all, even though the intertitles render her dialogue. Thus, we never see her opening her mouth, and the lines assigned to her appear as if they were mental projections of her will

p.51
This strategy of indirection was used also by Griffith in scenes of what Tom Gunning has dubbed “hidden emotion.”

Duse found that she could not pull off the feat of reappearance. She called film making a “spiritual problem” and complained that she felt “detached” when she saw herself on screen.

Duse adapted herself for quintessential film-ness.

p.52
we lose the very thing that art was supposedly preserving: our point of contact with the irreplaceable, finite person. (Klawans 2004)

working, making, creating is performing.

see Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 by Robert Rauschenberg

optic; structured to be seen in mind and brain, plane thing. / haptic; given to be seen

hans belting, the end of art history. the importance of the viewer, audiences. the end of beholder, to fulfill the audiences’s taste.

To change the whole scene, then hold tightly one conviction, and broke it. then whole scene will reconstructed.

* Guy Debourd, the society of spectacle.

At last, it’s the last semester in my Ph.d course. Because I am on the unified course for the M.S and Ph. D degree, I spend more than 4 yrs in grad school. And finally last semester, and another marked line for thesis.

Below is the textbook for my Prof., Joonsung Yoon’s class.

Intermediality in Theatre and Performance

:-)

Materials vs Content in Digitally Mediated Performace
by Mark Coniglio

p.81
Instead, theatrical lighting technology has developed to the point where it is most often used to suport the narrative moood of a performance, and its presence as a technology is not questioned a priori.

p.82
Mr Rockwell is quite correct: I have absolutely no faith that the technology (the visuals and interaction) will provide enough meaning to communicate the themes in which we are interested.

Saira Virous; Game Choreography in Multiplayer online performance spaces
by Johannes Birringer

p.43
… thus involving cognitive and sensorimotor processes that are active in any engagement of spaces that can be heard, felt and intuited with our bodily intelligence.

p.45
What emerges here is a new composite form of human-machinic performance as the streaming media is produced by physical action.

p.47
[the title is worth to reconsider, the myth of interactivity]

The world has not become a better, more democratic place, participatory design is rare, and interactive art has not necessarily made the ‘user’ a co-author nor allowed the user-player the kind of active role and freedom of expression that is implied in an interactive exchange involving autonomous development.

the myth of participation

p.51
Many of our discussions at the festival focused on the relationship between games, play, ritual, fun and learning.

p.52
Thus we could almost argue that we ‘wear’ the filmic-projected textures differently, that we touch and sense the video images with our whole body.

p.56
It is crucial to recognise that live performance, unlike synthetic computer-generated environments, brings corporeality as real physical location

Truth-Seeker’s Allowance: Digitising Artaud
by Steve Dixon

[the problematic concept of the truth. what is truth?]

p.21
practicing multimedia truth-theater [this subtitle deal with dualities and the dividual concepts]

As I recall, neither did we the performers; the notion of truth was not fundamental at the time and I must confess it has only now occured to me, several years later.

Our use of the actor on stage and the double on screen, the performers acting with and against themselves at worst offers the actor two bites of the cherry, and at best opens the possibilities of some synergetic alchemy which might approach this notion of flame-licked delirium.

p.23
The use of technology in creating the projection enables each actor (in video recording) to reach a point of acting truth through focussed preparation and multiple takes where they concentrate on only one outcome – a moment of horror – rather than the many and varied ones required in the course of a live performance.

… ‘dramatic illusion is never . . . the illusion of reality; it is always imaginative illusion’ (1936: 166 Allardyce Nicoll, Film and Theater)

Nicoll’s ‘ideas are interesting in contrasting film as ‘truthful’, ‘complex’, and ‘real’ with the falsity, simplicity, and illusion of theater.

p.24
media projections do not enhance the intellectual power or visual spectacle of theatre, rather their technological intrusion is alien; the two forms are aesthetic enemies. [see S. Sontag, 1966]

A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgement and canons of form. (1966: 24 [‘Film and Theater’, TDR; Tulane Drama Review Vol. 2, no. 1: 24-37])

p.25
[screen imagery (inner) - live actor (outer)]
In his ‘theater of the future’ the live actor would thus represent the character’s outer self and the screen imagery the inner world of imagination, subconscious, and dream: ‘the two worlds that together make up the world we live in’.

At the all root of all living is a conscious of our essential duality. … The stage used objectively, the screen used subjectively … [the schizophrenic] The simultaneous expression of the two sides of our nature is an exact parallel to our life process. We are living in two worlds at the same time – an outer world of actually and an inner world of vision.

p.26
Breton positions surrealism ideologically as ‘a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought’, …

p.29
…, the insult was a forceful means ‘to explode the social order . . . We exalted passion, mystification, black humour, the insult and the call to the abyss’

… the truth that may me enshrined in some sublime aesthetic image.

p.30
For Nietzsche, the distinctions between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ expounded by both Platonism and science constituted a false and hardened ‘mythology’ of dualisms (…), whereas in his view there was only one world, the world we find around us. … for a synthesis where the two elements – stage and screen – are not Platonic or scientific dualisms, but make up a new ‘one world’ of conjoined ‘mobile metaphors’ capable of expressing nothing more, and nothing less, than truth.

p.1
Duration is difference, the inevitable force of differentiation and elaboration, which is also another name for becoming.
- Grosz(2000)

p.2
note for Deleuzian logics
1. virtual philosophy, logic of sense is a matter of an ‘immaterial becoming.’
2. logic of becoming is a matter of the production ‘of beings.’
ans these two logics are in the chain of continuity and discontinuity.
for more information about the virtuality in Deleuzian immanence, see Zizek’s Organs without Bodies.
in Zizek’s book, ‘… a virtual spacetime progressively differentiates itself into actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures’ (p.122)

p.3
… A Deleuzian logic of (performance productive) becoming would seem to involve, for an expert practitioner, processes allowing the ‘progressive differentiat[ion]‘ from ‘a continuous virtual spacetime’ (e.g. ‘devising’), on the basis of which ‘actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures’ are arrived at, however temporarily.

… a momentary instantiation (Knorr, 2001), …

p.4
Far from swiftly achieving ‘fit’ (itself a matter measure), that emergent new performance material might well require, of the ‘plane of immanence‘ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) specific to the discipline (e.g. ‘new dance’, and what makes it ‘dance’), that it maintain its disciplinary identity, while expanding to accommodate the new.
[immanence(내재, 편재) <--> transcendence; the guality of being able to go beyond normal limits and boundaries.]

p.6
Now, ‘targeting’, ‘drawing’, and ‘holding’, metaphorical though these terms are here, tend to be a matter of time and timing. There is no visual ‘focus’, in the performance event, which is not time-gorverned. Its measure is bound up in its capacity to capture and to maintain attention over time where a ‘per-formance event’ is concerned.

[subtitle, 'Timely reconfiguration" is concerned on the three factor, the targeting, drawing and holding.]
Performance tends to evoke, rather more than to ‘represent’; on this basis, there is something curious about whatever is identified, in the show, in terms of ‘the body’.

p.7
Certain uses of nouns and verbs have been described as ‘ontologising’, in the sense that they enable wiriters to assert being, while believing that they are merely describing what already exists.

p.10
The term is a carrier. It is historically relational; it signals a semiotic domain, rather than that simpler ‘meaning’ others might be tempted to attribute.

… it is matter and measure of expertise – which spectators readily recognize, but may lack the means to analyse as such. It is matter of signature (the dancer’s name signals a complex measure of expertise, artistry, and the potential for qualitative transformation).

p.12
Memory and perception are thus the two fundamental [time-specific] tendencies underlying our experience (Bergson)

‘experience is [an indivisible]”mixture” of memory and perception’

컴퓨터기반 시각예술작품에 나타나는 들뢰즈의 안면성

컴퓨터 기반의 시각예술작품은 상호작용성을 획득하기 위해 다양한 종류의 입력장치를 가지고 있다. 그리고 이렇게 받아들인 신호를 처리하여 시각적인 결과물을 다양한 종류의 스크린에 투사한다. 관객의 적극적 참여가 필요하다는 점에서 컴퓨터기반시각예술작품은 예술작품에 대한 새로운 시각을 요구한다. 기존의 시각예술에 비해 컴퓨터기반시각예술작품은 매우 동적이다. 프로그래밍을 이용한 상호작용성은 관객의 행동에 다양한 방법을 반응한다. 센서를 통해 입력된 신호는 컴퓨터의 처리를 거쳐 면에 투사된다. 사용자의 반응은 컴퓨터 처리 과정에 개입하여 투사된 결과에 영향을 준다. 이러한 일련의 과정은 얼굴이 반응하는 과정과 동일하다. 얼굴은 타인의 시선, 움직임에 반응하여 표정을 바꾼다. 표정없는 얼굴은 다른 사람을 마주하면 표정을 드러낸다. 이러한 과정은 컴퓨터 기반의 시각예술작품이 기능하는 것과 많은 유사점을 가진다.

A computer-based interactive art as a white wall / black hole system in Deleuzian understanding

For Deleuze, the white wall / black hole system represents the intersection of two axes, signifiance and subjectification.

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies†.

Usually, the audiences in interactive art believe that they are manipulating the artwork by themselves. Every sensing device which is connected to the computer system detects human activity so precisely that the computer system as an artwork functions as programmed by artist. At a glance, this system undoubtedly gives the right to operate the artwork to the audience. Moreover, the fact that the artwork does not function until the audience starts to act gives more probability to that belief. But the odd thing, in the view-point of software engineering, is that the audience is not so much an active subject as an adopted catalyst. As a participant, spectator, operator, whatever, the person who is involved in the interactive art behave as a set of pseudo-class. Basically, modern computer program is executed on the basis of the philosophy of Object Oriented Programming. In this concept, every behavior which is done by the audience is formulated by the programmer. As a result, the boundry of audience’s behavior must be narrowed. During this process, audience’s regulated behavior can be translated as a pseudo class in the whole program. For Deleuze, the problem of expression reveals on the point where the subjectfification and the signifiance intersects. At this point, the white wall / blackhole system start to work as an abstract machine which is called as the face.
Thus, we can restore the matter of expression to the white wall / black hole system. In the computer-based artwork, every sensing device became the black-hole that carries out the process of subjectification. Also, every represented

Before the audience reacts to the artwork, the artwork itself is just an expressionless face. Regardless of the fact wheather the computer-based artwork has its subjectivity or not, through the inclusion of audience to artwork (white wall / black-hole system), the artwork starts to function as a field of subjectification and signifiance. In this state, the artwork has its specific expression (visage) which is differentiated by the audience.

† Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). p.167

Summary

According to the notion of Tomasello, human species has own distinction with the primates. It’s the joint attentional scenes. Through the joint attentional scenes, human kind accomplished the ability to understand one another as an intentional agents and the object of communication. During this process, joint attentional scene diversed into two different types. One is the mimetic games and the other is the narrative thinking. And also the games work as the cultural ratchets throughout the human history. In this way games, narrative and media coevolved.
As a second condition for her argument, Murray borrows Donald’s concept of the coevolution of cognition and culture. According to Donald, the process of cultural development can be categorized into four different steps.

Episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
Mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication
Mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
Theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.

In Murray’s view, we are in theoretical culture. As a result of this coevolution, “we can think about the history cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns.” And “we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, a paradigm of symbolic communication, and a union catalog of expressive symbols of every kind.” Through this we can handle the computation-based media as expressive symbols.

In this article, the origin of games can be dated back when human nature accomplishs her own prominence. If this is true, we can imagine games not the isolated medium but the multi-layered multiplicity which combines manifold medium in itself.

Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture

Janet H. Murray
Georgia Institute of Technology

POPULAR COMMUNICATION, 4(3), 185–202
Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Abstract
Digital games are an expanding popular cultural form and the focus of a new field of scholarship that has been concerned with defining games and establishing boundaries between games and other phenomena. Studies of the coevolution of human cognition and culture can throw light on this discussion by putting gaming into a longer human perspective. Although 2 chief theorists of this field, Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald, have not explicitly focused on games, their work has suggested that games could have played an important role in shaping the human mind and human culture, by expanding and preserving adaptive cultural patterns, furthering symbolic thinking, and expanding and preserving the expressiveness of symbolic media. Digital games can be understood as carrying on the same functions, using the new affordances of the computer.

Quotation

p.185
… “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

p.186
The shape of videogames is, therefore, tied to older cultural forms and the pleasures of videogames seem to be rooted in our age-old attraction to games in general.

p.187.
Games have not been treated as an expressive genre, such as theater, poetry, or folk songs.

Recent attempts to provide a definition of games as the basis for serious study of digital games have produced struggles with a few key outlier cases that make it difficult to see the boundaries between games and non-games.

However, such a solution runs into the even more contested category of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997).

The boundary between videogames and other forms of digital media is also becoming confusing.

p. 188
Michael Tomasello (2000) explained this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition: the ability to understand cospecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself. This foundational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning. Culture is the key element here, because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowledge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children.

[directiveness; not only in a current time-space but also in other time-space, indexical.]

• Point or gesture to outside objects for others.
• Hold objects up to show them to others.
• Bring others to locations so they can observe things there.
• Actively offer objects to other individuals by holding them out.
• Intentionally teach other individuals new behaviors.

p.189
Tomasello further believes that the ability to follow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when he or she is his- or herself the focus of the adult’s attention and
gaze, and this begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the social world. This cognitive leap, which happened for the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250,000 years or so) and for the individual at 9 to 15 months old, forms the basis for the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement. It is the basis of sharing, negotiating, learning, and symbolic communication.
The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint attentional scene.

What are they fun? What is the primary motivation to engage in them?

What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it? What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play?

p.190
Indeed, the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary for gaming:

• Shared limited focus on external objects or behaviors (or both)
• Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the shared
context
• Symbolic communication between participants
[object, share, communication]

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to engage in the activities characteristic of games: to treat abstract representations consistently, behave according to negotiated rules, and limit one’s actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what “counts” in the game by screening out other stimuli and actions.

Joint attention organizes two fo the core activities of games: turn taking and synchronizing behaviors.

• An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agent–objects
• The ability to shift perspective from one’s own point of view to the point of view of others, to imagine what someone else is thinking, and to see oneself from the point of view of the other
• The ability to intentionally teach and learn, which is the foundation of all human cultural development

p. 191
She interpreted their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language.

It says no by saying yes.

Finally they describe their actions as they do them: “I jump” or “big jump!” while jumping off the box.

The pleasure of the game lies as much in the communication as in the actions, and it lies particularly in the matching of language to action, and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction. The pleasure of games reinforces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors.

p.192
Perhaps in these imitative interactions they are experiencing both their similarity to others and their separateness. Perhaps they are learning that we each are intentional agents of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing (Malcom, 2000).

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules. They are intrinsically social and can, in fact, be understood as a celebration of the social—of the very presence of other intentional beings. The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessing and enacting intentional acts forms the framework for mastering complex physical and social skills. Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance, and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship: You do, I do; you do, I do. The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance, for presenting the self as a performer in a socially constructed arena, and for incorporating multiple individuals into flexible but predictable group structures.

… we can think of Ring Round Rosy as the paradigmatic game.

It synchronizes the behavior of the group, which is one of the key requirements for survival in a culture of hunting.

p.193 THE COEVOLUTION OF GAMES, NARRATIVE, AND MEDIA

If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and coevolving with the development of language, leading to the development of more complex social patterns, more complex causal thinking, and more elaborate symbolic culture.

• The understanding of one’s fellow creatures as intentional beings, leading to the exploration of joint attention, which can be understood as the birth of mimetic games
[intentional beings]
• The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes, which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns, which can be understood as the birth of narrative thinking
[mimetic games]

p.194
… the elaboration of symbolic communication, starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language, which can be understood as the birth of media.

[
episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication.
mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.
]

p.196
Human children play rule-governed games by imitation, often without any formalized instruction.

Yet the more on thinks about the elements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem.

The process of cumulative cultural evolution requires not only creative inbention byt also, and just as importantly, faithful social transmission that can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward.

Games seem to be well-suited to role of cultural ratchet, preserving patterns of behavior from one generation to the next through the intrinsic pleasure of shared attention and imitation.

Many patterns that are rigidly enforced in games are also the basis of general social organization, such as turn taking, following the leader, exchanging property, team formation, conflict containment, and collective focusing on common goals. The win-lose pattern of games seems also to be adaptive in motivating repeated practice and competitive effort.

p. 197
As Donald (1991) pointed out, human cognitive advancement is closely linked to the development of media of communication.

Games have been, and continue to be, useful in directing our attention to all of these media, allowing for exploration of new means of expression and preserving outdated media forms for later reuse. Games can be seen as a means of coevolving our minds and our media, of assimilating new technologies of inscription through exploration of their capacity for symbolic representation, and of preserving and expanding symbolic expression by making symbolic systems the explicit focus of activity.

p.200
… the history of human cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns:…

… we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, …

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium we have ever had.

Note & Summary

Collaboration for what? At this point, we should re-think about the purpose of the game. In the view-point of Murray, which is inspired by Tomasello’s, it is presumable that every individual and group activity is directly connected with the survival in the very early stage of the evloution of primate. That is to say, the collaboration between the individuals is strongly led to the competition between the groups in the higher level. In the intantiated game, Lord of the Rings, there is also the non-player character, Sauron who is the clear enemy of this game. In this way, the collaboration becomes the sub-goal for the competition. Even the situation when the visible enemy cannot be found, in game such as Tetris, the rule that interfere the player’s will became the competitor which should be overcame.

Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games

José P. Zagal, Jochen Rick
Georgia Institute of Technology

Idris Hsi
Microsoft Corporation

Abstract

Collaborative mechanisms are starting to become prominent in computer games, like massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs); however, by their nature, these games are difficult to investigate. Game play is often complex and the underlying mechanisms are frequently opaque. In contrast, board games are simple. Their game play is fairly constrained and their core mechanisms are transparent enough to analyze. In this article, the authors seek to understand collaborative games. Because of their simplicity, they focus on board games. The authors present an analysis of collaborative games. In particular, they focus on Reiner Knizia’s LORDOFTHERINGS, considered by many to be the quintessential collaborative board game. Our analysis yields seven observations, four lessons, and three pitfalls, that game designers might consider useful for designing collaborative games. They reflect on the particular opportunities that computers have for the design of collaborative games as well as how some of the issues discussed apply to the case of computer games.

KEYWORDS: board games; collaboration; collaborative games; cooperation; computer games; decisions; game design; individuals; lessons; multiplayer games; LORD OF THE RINGS; payoffs; pitfalls; teams; utility

Quotation

J. P. Zagal, J. Rick, I. Hsi. (2007) ” Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games.” Simulation & Gaming 37:1, 24-40

Summary

25
How can electronic games be designed so that collaboration is a worthwhile, interesting, and attractive option?

27
Players in RPGs frequently seek to create a satisfying storyline for their character, rather than successfully complete the adventure (Fine, 1983). From a game-theory perspective, these players are not playing a game; instead, they are creating a narrative. Consequently, RPGs are often understood in terms of narrative theory, rather than game theory (Heliö, 2004)

29

figure 1. Lord of the Rings gamel Moria Scenario Board

32
If such a moment of self-sacrifice is interesting as a story, it is even more engaging when you are the one to make the decision (in the game).

33
Communication among the players about the available resources for a particular task becomes more efficient than a single player trying to marshal all the resources at one time.

Pitfall 2: For a game to be engaging, players need to care about the outcome and that outcome should have a satisfying result.

This pitfall applies to all games; however, we feel it is particularly important for collaborative games. If players do not care about the outcome, then they are not motivated enough to help each other or improve on their performance.

A good game can be a good story.

34
Unlike completely deterministic games, like Chess, LORD OF THE RINGS cannot be played exactly the same way twice.

So, unlike competitive games, like Chess, collaborative games need to adapt to the players’ abilities to maintain replayability.

35. Implication for computer games
communication flexbility

Many basic cues of identity, personality, and social roles are absent in the online world (Donath, 1998), making it harder for players to understand each other and agree on plans of action.

37
To conclude, we maintain that games have a unique potential to engage people in collaborative activities. On the other hand, collaborative games are rare and extraordinarily difficult to design. This article has hopefully illustrated some of the particular difficulties inherent to the design of these games as well as showing that simply having cooperative elements is generally insufficient for collaborative play. We have noted how many computer games do apply some of the lessons we have identified, though most tend to fail when it comes applying them all.We believe that computer games not only have the potential for addressing many of the issues discussed but also many affordances to solve them.We are hopeful to have provided insight that game designers might be able to use to create more and better collaborative games.

• Lesson 1:To highlight problems of competitiveness, a collaborative game should introduce a tension between perceived individual utility and team utility.
• Lesson 2: To further highlight problems of competitiveness, individual players should be allowed to make decisions and take actions without the consent of the team.
• Lesson 3: Players must be able to trace payoffs back to their decisions.
• Lesson 4: To encourage team members to make selfless decisions, a collaborative game should bestow different abilities or responsibilities upon the players.

Challenge in designing collaborative games

• Pitfall 1: To avoid the game degenerating into one player making the decisions for the team, collaborative games have to provide a sufficient rationale for collaboration.
• Pitfall 2: For a game to be engaging, players need to care about the outcome and that outcome should have a satisfying result.
• Pitfall 3: For a collaborative game to be enjoyable multiple times, the experience needs to be different each time and the presented challenge needs to evolve.

More information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan
http://catanonline.com/default.htm?MSID=f12bf66534774191adb1953ecd48504d&c00=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiner_Knizia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Rings_%28board_game%29
Lord of the Rings Images / BoardGameGeek

presentation and article written for the class, advanced media aesthetics
Referred article, vizster, visualizing online social network, (pdf file link).

Summary

In my personal view-point, this paper concentrate on 2 important concept. The first one is visualization. If so, what is the information visualization? Though it’s hard to make clear definition of visualization, I believe the most important purpose of visualization is to understand something better. Undoubtedly, through the simplification and emphasis, the information visualization help for us to understand and comprehend the object better. Then, in this article, what is the object for understanding?
It is friendster. Friendster.com is a social network service. And this is another main subject in paper. Like cyworld in South Korea, friendster helps people to mange their relationship in internet. The description page of friendster.com will be more helpful.

• Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.
• Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests.

The essential concept is very simple. From now on, we’ll cover how it works in short.
You can make your account through the invitation or sign-up. And the first page shows your current profile. Your bookmarks, groups and your friends, too. But, If you signed up by yourself, you would have no friends at the first time. To make friends, you can use various ways. You can type your offline friends’ e-mail address or their name. Or you can browse the member list by their photos or videos. Also, you can search by keywords in the pre-determined criteria such as hometown, movie, music, books and so on.
That’s vizster. In this paper, the authors said vizster is a visualization system that end-users of social networking services, friendster, could use to facilitate discovery and increased awareness of their online community. And from now on I want to show how the authors accomplish their goal.

See slide # 13. This is the screenshot of vizster. In the left panel you can see the structure of the lines and icons which consists graph. Each icon, the authors call it node, represent the member of friendster. And the line, I mean edge, show the relationship between the members. In the right panel, you can see the individual information about the selected member. Each time you clicked the member icon, the right panel exchange, and will show you the member’s information. But I think the essential function of vizster is to show the connection between the members. Who is who’s friend? That’s the main concern.

First, you can find one member’s friends by the different saturation of member icon with mouse over action. Or, it’s possible to know the connection between two specific members. You can type the desired keyword to the text field by yourself. [See slide #16].
Or you can choose the keyword in the given criteria at the individual information panel on right side. Then, you can see the highlighted member icon which answers with your keyword. In this slide, you can see the members for the keyword, “student”.

See slide #17. Here is the different mode of visualization which is called x-ray mode, to visualize attribute values such as age, number of friends, gender, relation status, or time since last log-in. Now, you can see the gender difference at here. You can happen to know whether someone is male or female among Amanda’s friends. And the distribution of gender, too. Through the clustering close members, you can see the overview of the community structure. And with the dragging the community slider, you can change the state of clustering as you want.

After development of vizster, the authors test their work through the public installation and informal laboratory setting. The public installation was took in San Francisco with the group of party-goers and early-adopters of friendster. The test in lab, the participants were also friendster members. The authors found that both group enjoyed exploring social network and playing with this tool. And during the process of discovering the pattern of the community, the participants re-produce the story about the community. In this way, they tends to give a higher level of sophistication to the community analysis that is shown. As a result, the end-users of vizster use this tool to explore and play with their networks.

Topics

topic 1. the information and its visualization in the sociological context

higher level patterns of community

it can be regarded as the characteristics or meaning of information. Shannon and Wiener also said that the we can get information from the extracting pattern from something in his book, The Human use of Human beings: Cybernetics and Society. the interesting thing is the Wiener and Shannon derive their definition from the theory of the signal processing theory in the communication theory. Though, as I think, the partial concept of the visualization is obtained from the practical situation, the central concept is based on the other related studies, such as sociology, communication theory and cybernetics. For this reason, the coupling of the sociological data-set and the visualization of the technical regeneration is not a strange at all. In other words, the discovery is not a technology-based concept rather it occurs in our everyday life in spite of our unawareness. I want to insist that the discovery of the pattern as a process of producing information exists in the social perspective of our culture as well as in the individual context.

topic 2. virtual subjectivity

The most difficult part for reasoning about subjectivity is the sense of alienation between one’s representational subjectivity to public and his own sense of subjectivity or subject. One’s representational subjectivity in real world is out of subject’s control, or most of us believe that this proposition is true. On the contrary, in the virtual world or the online social networking service, the members assume that they can detach their own subjectivity which is generated during his online social behavior. That is to say, the created subjectivity in the online social networking service, i.e. the virtual world, is the different aspect of subject. Or it is possible to say that the virtual subjectivity has nothing to do with his real world subject. Like we need to have a set of several masks for our social behavior, the online subjectivity is the another set of our masks to live in the virtual society.

topic 3. information visualization and database

As a whole system, the platform for online social networking service imitates the real world. During this imitation, the complex system of real world is simplified by the generalization. And this generalization needs judgment. Because, during generalization, you should judge which factor in given dataset is necessary or not. For there is no photo-realistic method to represent or imitate the snapshot of online social activity, to grap the flash moment of virtual world, or to log the whole data-transfer, we have to judge which part of human activity has to be converted to the data in server. With this judgment, the architect who design online social network service represents the dynamics of the real world. Then, as a framework which represents the human activity, the database is a result of the judgment and representation. This premise can be a start of the asethetic discourse on the database. Further, we can think about the connectivity between the database as a structure of selective data and the information visualization as a reflection of real wolrd.