wikipedia
About a week or so ago I got Robert Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country which I have been totally digging. The book has been reinforcing an informal education I’ve been getting through my various conversations with Folklorist Gary Stanton and Musician/Artist Kent Ippolito (who gave me the book –thanks Kent!) on early 20th century American music. It’s a series of sporadic discussions, and it has been a lot of fun for me to listen to some music from the various genres (which all seem to share some interesting relations) from the 1920s and 30s –which is the focus of Crumb’s book.
Crumb's Hereoes of Blues, Jazz, and Country
Crumb’s sketches of the artists are wonderful, my favorite is the one below of Sleepy John Estes. And each image is accompanied by a very short (one to two paragraph) discussion of the artist and their particular musical strengths along with how many “sides” they recorded ( a side of a 78 album was anywhere from 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long, which basically meant the length of popular song).
Sleepy John Estes
Anyway, along with the amazing assortment of Crumb’s interpretations of the artists there is a CD that features a sampling of their songs. I hadn’t heard any of them before except one, which was part of the soundtrack from O' Brother Where Art Thou, which was Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” found for your listening pleasure on YouTube here, and embedded below:
Skip James’ career is fascinating, here is a brief excerpt as told by his Wikipedia article:
As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material — blues and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions — frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, “I’m So Glad” was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little entitled “So Tired”, which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title “I’m So Tired of Livin’ All Alone”). James changed the song’s lyrics, transforming it with his virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone. Biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several critics, considered the finished product totally original, “one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music.”
Several of the Grafton recordings, such as “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, “Devil Got My Woman”, “Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader”, and “22-20 Blues” (the basis for Robert Johnson’s better-known “32-20 Blues”), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James’s Paramount 78s have survived.
[[The Great Depression struck just as James’ recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father’s church. Skip James himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was sketchy.
For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the “rediscovery” of both Skip James and of Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the “blues revival” in America. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.
The release of his song about “hard times” coincided precisely with the Great Depression, making the market for his recording evaporate and his musical career that much tougher. Yet the song captures the haunting uncertainty of difficult times, while simultaneously providing a reassuring voice of someone who has not only endured them, but created something great within them.
Two articles with an interesting contrast going on right now -- one on John McCain and a recent speech he gave on Georgia, and the other about a student expelled from Semester at Sea.
First, it appears that a speech given by John McCain on the Russian invasion of Georgia borrows, without attribution, from a Wikipedia article on Georgia (note-- for the Wikipedia article, I am linking to the revision current on the date of this blog post, as wikipedia articles change over time).
I first read about this at the Political Insider.
It appears that a Wikipedia editor pointed out the similarities. The Political Insider provides three example; the first two contain clear overlaps, where common phrases appear verbatim in both texts.
The third example provided on the Political Insider blog, however, is more interesting -- in the quotation, given below, I have highlighted all of the "to be" verbs in the Wikipedia version, and I have italicized two key structural elements:
Begin quoted excerpt
In 2003, Shevardnadze (who won reelection in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that the 2 November parliamentary elections were marred by fraud (1). The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, former members and leaders of Shavarnadze's ruling party. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected as President of Georgia in 2004. Following the Rose Revolution, a series of reforms was launched to strengthen the country's military and economic capabilities (2). (Wikipedia)
vs.
Following fraudulent parliamentary elections (1) in 2003, a peaceful, democratic revolution took place, led by the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. The Rose Revolution changed things dramatically and, following his election, President Saakashvili embarked on a series of wide-ranging and successful reforms (2). (McCain)
End quoted excerpt
A comparison of the two passages shows a reliance, in the Wikipedia quotation, on "to be" verbs. The McCain speech, however, uses none, and the resulting text of the speech is less verbose -- this is a common side effect, and benefit, of using fewer "to be" verbs: quicker, more active phrasing. However, the italicized phrases mark the organizational structure of the excerpt: Fraudulent parliamentary elections sparked the Rose Revolution --> which led to a series of reforms. This structure, along with a few key words, survives intact from the Wikipedia article to the McCain speech, and this is one of the more common forms of unintentional plagiarism that I saw back when I taught writing to high school students. Clearly, this concept is difficult for writers at all levels to master. On its own, this would certainly be a borderline case, and one that would merit a conversation on what constitutes original work, and what deserves citation. Within the context of the first two examples, however, this appears to be an extension of the plagiarism cited earlier.
And, on a related note, a student was recently expelled from the Semester at Sea program for plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Maybe we need to put all the speechwriters on a boat...
A Wikipedia editor notices some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. They appear similar enough that most people would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived from Wikipedia.
Read the rest of the article here...
I just wrote the following in response to David Warlick's blog, Turning the Tables.
The Wikipedia outrage is great theatre, but even unfettered encyclopedic knowledge represents the most superficial aspect of learning.
I've said it a million times, but if the dominant metaphor for using a computer is looking stuff up, then kids will look up in appropriate stuff and adults will behave badly.
Did they distribute crystal balls in Vermont? Why are you engaged in predicting the future when there are things every educator can do today, that have been understood for a century or more, that will make schools better places for children immediately.
Any conference speaker arrogant enough to discuss the future of education should be required to publish their plan for reforming ONE school, complete with supporting arguments and references.
I am indebted to David Warlick for calling my attention to (soon to be?) web sensation, Epic 2015. I could not help but think that the Epic 2015 video is what an L. Ron Hubbard book report would look like if he was a 4th grader with a Macbook.
I suppose that the web video's ominous music and voice of god narration is supposed to scare me about the future in which I will be old and useless. It makes this case by reminding me that Amazon.com sells stuff. Sheesh! I'm unimpressed and pissed that I just wasted several minutes watching this schlock.
OK, let's say that the video's shocking future predictions come true and newspapers disappear. So???
Newspapers disappeared long ago from too many schools. A few years ago, my sensational 7th grade social studies teacher tried desperately to convince 9 of more than 100 colleagues to subscribe to the NY Times in his school 25 miles from NYC. If 10 teachers subscribed, the daily paper would almost free. If more educators read a major newspaper each day they might be less inclined to look for inspiration from speakers who fill their presentations with crappy videos.
These conference presentations are reminiscent of the Andy Kaufman Saturday Night Live routine in which he played a record of the Mighty Mouse Theme and made hand gestures as a form of lazy mime.
Where is the original thought, preparation or practical ideas worthy of an audience's attention?
I'm not a moron and I don't make educational decisions based on random business data. Recommending that school leaders take this nonsense seriously, based on nothing more than production values, will only make schools worse.
Are educators anywhere near reaching their tolerance for hooey? I've just about had it.
I figured it was high time to finish my reading of Ernst Jünger’s The Glass Bees (which was cut short in the original attempt here by a tangent that has receded considerably, dare I say thankfully) so that I can flesh out the Wikipedia article I started and further examine why I think this book is of particular interest to me as of late.
Jünger’s The Glass Bees has an extremely condensed and seemingly simple plot. In fact, the whole book follows Captain Richard, a former cavalryman and unemployed high-tech worker, who is down on his economic luck and desperately in search of a job. The majority of the narrative action is centered around his interview for a job (the details of which are never made clear to him) with the robotics mogul Zapparoni, who Bruce Sterling aptly describes in his introduction as “a hybrid of Bill Gates and Walt Disney” (ix).
One of the things that immediately struck me about the novel’s “hero” is that while caught up in the nostalgia of his cavalier past (more on the key role of nostalgia in the narrative shortly), his desolate financial situation makes him both vulnerable and real—the first five words of the novel are “When we were hard up”—as Sterling notes, “Captain Richard is a rare example of a science fiction hero who knows what it means when people line up for soup” (ix). The very textured quality of uncertain times within a recognizable depression-era future ruled by eccentric personalities, personal police forces, private property, and immensely powerful corporations marks a deep resonance with our current moment. When talking to his friend/job broker Twinnings about his options for employment he characterizes the situation beautifully:
The rest were jobs with a risk attached. They provided a comfortable life, sufficient means, but troubled sleep. Twinnings mentioned a few of these —they resembled police jobs. Who nowadays did not have his own police force? Times were unsafe. Life and property had to be protected, real estate and transportation closely guarded, blackmail and crime counteracted. Presumption increased in proportion to philanthropy. (5)
Jobs in high tech as police jobs, positions to guard information, control its dissemination, and protect investments. More than that, times are unsafe, and such a reality centers around a presumption (a term that can be interpreted many ways, but I will focus on the legal meaning “an inference of the truth of a fact from other facts”) that is formulated in relationship to how much an entity can give, donate, or volunteer to the greater good. Presumption is rigged, the act of giving in this world is premised on the very nodes of corporate power that control the means of capital. The inference of truth in this world is shaped by how much capital one is willing and able to donate to its creation. There is no mediating force between the nodes of capital, power and those who are employed to enforce this reality. Any idea of a social net in this world is entirely missing. And what is so subtly apparent in this novel is the complete evisceration of social welfare for the working poor (another truly resonant element of this novel with our moment).
The dark reality of the world in this novel becomes excruciatingly clear by the end of the first chapter:
I was still one mass of useless and antiquated prejudices. Since everything was now supposed to be based on a contract—which was founded neither on oath nor atonement nor Man—trust and faith no longer existed. Discipline had vanished from the world, it had been replaced by catastrophe. We were living in permanent unrest, and no one could trust anyone else. Was it my responsibility? (15)
I must admit I haven’t been reading as much literature lately as I have in the past, but the passage above captures beautifully the crisis and questions of our moment —”Is it my responsibility? Am I my brother’s keeper? Can I afford to believe in a community?” And the permanent unrest and steady dose of catastrophe keeps us all in order, constantly scared, meek, and ready and willing to capitulate trust and faith in one another for some false sense of security and comfort. The social contract has been made null and void through the constant din of uncertainty, fear, and repression. I, like Captain Richard, remain one mass of seemingly useless and antiquated prejudices.
These “useless and antiquated prejudices” give way to large parts of this narratives peripatetic peregrinations into the mental landscape of nostalgia. Which often accounts for the filling out of an otherwise very straightforward and deceivingly simple plot line. But the way in which the novel is structured around nostalgia is of particular interest to me, for anyone who reads this blog knows I suffer interminably from the nostaglia disease. What I find remarkable about the narrative style is that these nostalgic rivulets that take over the narrative logic are quite similar to the ways I read the internet. I follow links, search for things from my past, use sites like YouTube as a veritable nostalgia machine. The narrative structure of The Glass Bees is so very similar to the way in which I understand the internet for my own uses as to be uncanny. While at first I found the unpredictable links out to other ideas, stories, and anecdotes bothersome and disjointing, I soon realized it is not dissimilar to how I navigate my own story on the internet. Yet, these distractions form the loose threads of an important and meaningful past that has been obfuscated by the immediate financial demands is further compounded by the absence of anything resembling a community. The individual is isolated and alone, almost dehumanized:
Everywhere they [horses] had been replaced by automatons. Corresponding to this change was a change in men: they became more mechanical, more calculable, and often you hardly felt that you were among human beings. Only at rare moments did I still hear a sound from the past—the sound of bugles at sunrise and the neighing of horses which made our hearts tremble. All that was gone. (30-31)
Follow that with this:
Prognoses which have been made contend that our technology will terminate in pure necromancy. If so, everything we now experience would be only a departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer require any crude embodiment. (38)
A horrific thought which beautifully counterbalances the notion our moment is caught up with, a kind of “elated technical optimism”—a phrase Captain Richard uses later on in the novel to describe Zapparoni (90). I think the struggle around the conception of technology and its impact on our understanding of history, community, and our humaneness is at the heart of this naturalistic science fiction novel. For unlike Philip K. Dick’s work, this novel is not fueled by a drug-like paranoia —though Jünger was not stranger to mind-altering drugs— but rather more akin to a futuristic Frank Norris, framing a kind of virtual naturalism that is deeply preoccupied with the systemic logic of capital. I’m thinking specifically here of Norris’ The Octopus, The Pit, and McTeague. That to me is what is so deeply frightening about Jünger, the de-naturalized organics of capital which is seamlessly grafted upon the mad-made nature of the future.
This becomes readily apparent when we actually get to examine the automatons in the novel. They are introduced from the very first chapter, but it isn’t until chapter 12 that we get a precise descriptions of their workings. Sterling frames the paradigm shift Jünger’s automata represent beautifully in the introduction:
Robots as Jünger portrays them have nothing to do with common standards of 1957. These robots don’t clank, beep, or take any orders….on the contrary: these microminiature, computerized, buglike automata are straight out of the MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine circa 1994. Uncannily anticipating the scattered structure of the Internet. (ix)
The idea of these small, subtle robots that worked together in a loose organizational logic to accomplish tasks and reproduce nature makes them far more unnerving than an obedient Robbie the Robot. They work according to a systemic design through which each has a role, featuring a wide range of “diverse models and colonies.” In fact, Captain Richard’s interview with Zapparoni consists of a brief conversation followed by an outing in a garden where he is left alone with a swarm of automata, or glass bees, “about the size of a walnut still encased in its green shell.” Their functions were much the same as natural bees, to take the nectar from the various flowers, yet at the same time the question of whether they could also fertilize the plants was raised. Can these automata reciprocate a natural intercourse?
The relationship between these nut-sized robots and our contemporary realities of exchange and intercourse on the internet becomes increasingly similar to the system Jünger describes:
At first glance, the glass hives were distinguished from the old pattern by a large number of entrances. They resembled less a hive than an automatic telephone exchange…what if what I have been observing was not so much a new medium as a new dimension, opened up by an inventive brain; it was a key which unlocked many rooms. For instance, what if these creatures could be used—as they are used in the world of flowers—as messengers of love between human beings….? (129, 140)
This description of the hives as a loosely joined dimension of exchange that is de-centralized and automatic, yet potentially capable of connecting humans though messengers of love is a fascinating image that frames the imaginative space of Jünger’s novel as remarkably prescient in its subtle elegance. He frames a kind of proto-naturalistic system of exchange premised on nature, yet at the same time unnatural and frightening.
At the same time, the question undergirding the entire experiment with the glass bees is that “such economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake” (139). “Technology is not pursued to accelerate progress but to intensify power” (x), and we must understand our relationship within this equation. Technical versus human perfection is at the heart of this system: are we going to move towards a technical perfection of such a system “that strives towards the calculable”? Or do we push toward human perfection which is incalculable? According to Captain Richard, the two choices are incompatible, and one must choose where their energies rest to do “cleaner work” (155).
Personally, I think the cleaner work rests in the latter, and hence the real focus on the human dimension of what it is I do as a “high-tech worker.” I don;t police or control data, nor am I so concerned about scaling enterprises, or the next generation of Web 2.0 tools as sold by corporations, or systems of technical complexity and control, but making real, localized, and human connections that echo out into some kind of eternity.
Jon Beasley-Murray’s Murder, Madness, and Mayhem course at the University of British Columbia has blown my mind over the last few months. If you are not familiar with this amazing project that brings the full extent of the communal and collaborative power of Wikipedia into the classroom, I strongly recommend you go read Jon’s article on this project here or here.
Now I know I’m given to overstatement, and it is an inherited trait I carry on in honor of my late, great mom (E.L. Doctorow said Houdini was the “the last of the great mother lovers”, but he just wasn’t aware of me). This tendency toward hyperbole necessarily means everything I say should be cut in half and then divided by three to get an approximated sense of the magnitude of any statement I make. Yet, when I see Brian Lamb noting how Jon’s project may very well suggest “the future of higher education”, I can venture my next statement with a certain amount of courage:
Not since Edward Ayers’ “The Valley of the Shadow” project back in the mid 90s have we seen a single example of how the web might be used to re-imagine instructional technologies as Murder Madness Murder has.
There it is, I said it and I meant it! This is the coolest project I have yet to see from any of these open tools. Not only is Jon’s detailed write-up of the project (narrated whilst still unfolding all around him) an amazingly insightful, balanced and intelligent road map for other faculty and EdTech folks to follow, but it documents an open and honest approach to experimenting and innovating in the classroom with one’s students as partners and peers. It is no surprise to me that Jon and his class had such unbelievable success with these articles (3 featured and 8 good articles out of a possible 12), primarily because he was very much part of the experiment and was learning just as much as everyone in the course, and by extension equally as vulnerable. The human element of this experiment is mind blowing, his comfort with making himself so uncomfortable in front of his students is an amazing element of this project that I haven’t seen too many folks mention just yet.
But the question of technology, infrastructure, and resources might be worth a mention here. What did it cost UBC? Hmm, let me think….nothing, zero, zilch. That is so very EDUPUNK! What’s more, not too long after the Murder Madness Mayhem got going the deus ex machina known as the FA Team (Featured Article Team) came out of nowhere to help the class get their articles to the Featured Article status. Just added value of support which is a result of doing this within a passionate, invested community like Wikipedia. How different would this have been if Jon would have done this with WebCT or Bb’s paltry wiki, or some other tool (however closed or open) that wasn’t part of an intensely active and complex community like that of Wikipedia? Jon’s project puts his class truly on the open web, making them interact with various communities while constructing knowledge and providing resources and references that millions of people could potentially see, use, and build upon. Take a look at the article this class built from scratch (the first of their three featured articles), El Señor Presidente, and tell me you wouldn’t be proud of such a masterpiece of collaborative knowledge building. And all of this in less than 15 weeks, have I said amazing yet? Well if not, amazing!
Professor Mara Scanlon in the English, Linguistics, and Speech department here at UMW was trying something similar with her seminar on the Long Poem. Back in January we had a bit of a different approach, we started the article on a local MediaWiki installation and had the class of nine go at it and work on framing a Wikipedia-like article. By the first of April it was to be ready to be set free upon Wikipedia. Mara (who is also very EDUPUNK) and I presented this project at this year’s Faculty Academy, and the future of such endeavors will in many ways take their inspiration from the important work pioneered by Jon and his class. The ideas he lays out so well, like doing the entire project on Wikipedia, being prepared for chaos and mayhem at any point, having specifically defined goals (like Featured Article status), and forcing students to bring an unprecedented amount of library research to the open web are solid pillars of any and all projects that we can muster up here at UMW. And lord knows we are trying. So, I could write more and more, but I have to take Jon’s lead and get ever more familiar with the intricacies of the Wikipedia community, because the future of higher education and educational technology is now about infrastructure, applications, and enterprise, it is about helping faculty and students navigate the cultural specificity of communities like Wikipedia.
I recently came to the realization that my best friend in Fredericksburg is my 12 year-old neighbor. I just can’t avoid the fact that I have never really progressed beyond the sixth grade; I am still so dearly enthralled by the product-inspired wonder of my youth. Whether it be Star Wars (and this encompasses everything from the movies to figurines to stickers to trading cards to comic books to UnderRoos), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Clash of the Titans, Pac-Man, our first family VHS player, or the Atari 2600, culture from the late 70s and early 80s is the wellspring of my strong penchant for nostalgia. My 12 year-old neighbor feels the brunt of my unfortunate condition.
Our relationship began benignly enough talking about Lego Star Wars sets, the associated video games, and the current state of Star Wars culture more generally. When I found out he hadn’t seen the real Star Wars movies (namely episodes IV, V, and VI 1/2) I lent him my DVDs and asked him to think about where our shared myth system began. I haven’t been able to convince him of my opinions on the far superior quality of the original trilogy, but I am working on it.
More recently, we’ve been focusing on video games. He is enjoying [[Battle Front II] at the moment, and the thought occurred to me that he is experiencing modern video games devoid of their beautifully vectorized history. He has no real sense of the Old Gold games, and that’s a crying shame. So while I didn’t walk 5 miles to school in the snow, I did experience the colossal disappointment that was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man first hand, and I thought he might need to understand my pain and experience a bit more intimately. So, how do I go about this? What method should a video game sensei take?
Well, in the age of educational technologies and the beauty of the internets, there is really only one way to emulate the experience…that’s right, you guessed it: to actually play those games and experience their dislocating magic. There are many ways to do this, and luckily I have access to just about all the original consoles and games I am talking about here so I don’t have to worry about all the moral, ethical, and copyright ramifications that bog down those with fewer resources. The fact that we have to agonize over “stealing” the culture” they” (who the hell is ‘they’?) used to shape us with, the very culture we made relevant bac —it’s an outrage! So, in sympathy (or is it solidarity?), I’ll share below some of the resources available for getting your hands on a few select emulators that are freely available online. And, if you use them in the spirit of enlightening your 12 year old neighbor with an impressionistic history of video games, you may even be able to claim educational fair use 
CLASSIC CO-OP ARCADE GAMES:
It all really starts with classic Co-op Arcade gems, games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest, Pole Position, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Asteroids, Gyruss, Ghosts and Goblins, Battlezone, Asteroids, Punch-Out!, Star Wars, Rampage, Q*Bert , Galaxian, Joust and on and on. In fact, two of the first things I did when I first got on the internet in 1994 was search out all resources on the classic 60s show The Prisoner along with any and all information on the history of classic video games. A bit later, my friend and co-worker at UCLA’s Audio Visual Services, John Spellman, discovered MAME, and it has been an on-going love affair ever since.
The stand-up arcade games are a treasure trove of memories. Our local comic shop “The Incredible Pulp” had Galaxian and Joust in the back of the store, and my friends and I would spend hours playing those games in a really amazing setting surrounded by comics, beautifully painted D&D lead figurines, the beautifully illustrated AD&D handbooks and modules, along with countless other artifacts that make up some of the most vibrantly imaginative and obscure objects of my adolescent desire. And there was the Grand Bald Pizzeria that had some pretty good pizza (even by NY standards) and a new series of arcade games constantly streaming in, everything from Track & Field, to Ghosts and Goblins to World Karate Champion to the grand poobah of them all Pac-Man (and still my all-time favorite video game bar none). Finally, their was the Baldwin Pool Hall, a smoke-filled billiards parlor that took a corner of its huge floor plan and put in an arcade, with everything from Make Trax to Pole Position to the Star Wars vector game, Tempest, Battlezone, Defender, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Popeye, Pooyan, and a few more I can’t remember because I didn’t play them.
In fact, these stand-up coin-op games are so intricately linked with the small stores of the community I grew up within. And while I had Atari 2600 when I played most of these games, the experience of going up the block with friends to various stores to play these games was different. It often led to other connections and discoveries in the community, whether making new friends, getting in the occasional fight, or having a space as a ten or twelve-year old that was not entirely dominated and dictated by one’s parents. having these video games in these various stores allowed you to hang out regardless if you had bought anything (well before box stores like Borders made this a “unique experience” and charged you accordingly for it). You were in many ways a part of the world you played in, and I knew the proprietors of each of these stores quite well. I was a kid in the neighbor and that meant something to me, my friends and I were people they knew and the folks behind the counter were people we also knew quite well, joked about, and imagined lives for them beyond their role as shopkeeper.
I wasn’t a god damn number they were ordered to sell a rewards card to; I don’t want your stinking rewards card, I want to talk to a human being! Sorry for that…but arcade games were an integral part of the built environment of my growing years and they framed my person in so many ways beyond the actual game itself. it is complex series of relations that often get discounted when you just look at the game, or isolate that game within one family’s living room.
For some more information on the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games check out this great Wikipedia article.
So, in short , if you are looking for the Classic Coin-Op Arcade games for your computer then MAME (for Windows) and MacMame (for the Mac) are one, precarious way at it. Precarious because when it comes to getting the actual ROMS for each of the games, you’re on your own because they’re still under copyright and it is illegal to distribute them. This doesn’t mean they aren’t easy to obtain. In fact, a quick Google search will do the trick, but you still have to weigh the onus of ownership and how our culture is being imprisoned by draconian copyright laws that are incongruous with the digital flow of information and resources.
ATARI 2600:
Without question the Atari 2600 home game console will forever be a part of some of my most splendid memories of consumer culture. The idea of going to Sears or Playland to buy a video game cartridge remains one of the most vividly expectant moments of possibility in my paltry life. The history of Atari 2600 is in many ways a fundamental history of media in the 80s that is as important as the VHS home recorder or the death of the single-screen movie theater. I didn’t know this at the time, but as of 1981 there was as many as eight million Atari 2600 systems sold, at a $100 some-odd bucks a pop that’s $700 million dollars. Moreover, the Pac-Man cartridge alone sold 7 million copies, making it the best selling 2600 cartridge of all time, not to mention one of the greatest disappointments for any console since. Check out this list of ten Atari 2600 cartridges that sold over a million copies. It seems kind of crazy now, but when you do the math from just the two figures above, Atari in the early 80s was probably a billion dollar company, insane! And seems like the dividends won’t ever stop coming in. Interestingly enough, according the the Pac-Man Atari 2600 Wikipedia article, the video game crash of 1983 is linked to such disappointments like Pac-Man and E.T., in fact despite selling seven million copies of Pac-Man and 1.5 million of E.T., Atari seems to have lost on both:
Although Atari sold seven million units (of Pac-Man), out of a 2600 user base of ten million, twelve million cartridges were manufactured, under the expectation that the game would re-stimulate sales of the console. When this did not happen, Atari had to write off the five million unsold copies, incurring large losses.
The same held true for E.T a year later, four million copes were manufactured, but only 1.5 million sold. The millions of unsold cartridges have become part of an Atari landfill legend that gets mentioned in the E.T. wikipedia article (so fun!):
In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported in a series of articles that between ten and twenty[18] semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. It was Atari’s first dealings with the landfill, which was chosen because no scavenging was allowed and its garbage was crushed and buried nightly. Atari officials and others gave differing reports of what was buried,[19][20][21][22] but it is widely speculated that most of Atari’s millions of unsold copies of E.T. ultimately ended up in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.[23]
So much of this waste had to do with Atari’s move to capitalize on a video game or film’s popularity, which meant entirely disregarding both the design and play of their games. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the few games in this circumstance that most agreed was relatively unique and forward looking with the use of more than one controller for action/adventure narrative game play. Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 still remains one of my personal favorites, along with Popeye (a beautiful adaptation from the original Coin-op), Kaboom!, Pitfall!, Warlords, Asteroids, Chopper Command, Superman, Haunted House, Adventure, Night Driver, Combat, and Space Invaders. For a full list of all Atari 2600 games go here.
And while the Atari 2600 games occupy a large part of my imagination from back-in-the-day, they were just about all inferior to the arcade coin-ops save a select few (Pitfall! being one of them). Nonetheless, the limitations of this gaming systems offers a fascinating space for disorientating a contemporary game fan. I plan on having my neighbor play the 1979 Atari 2600 game Superman, which may be one of the most de-familiarizing and confusing games for a kid who is used to a more seamless and congruous narrative game play. Not only are the sound effects extremely grating, but the game play is terribly disorientating. Try mapping space in this game, it ain’t easy (in many ways these early games are similar to the early 1900s films that film historian Thom Gunning talks about as experimental and alternative spaces that would later be modified and codified into more dominant film narratives, most famously exemplified by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation).
One more thing, I recently discovered a whole series of adult-themed games for the Atari 2600. A whole underground I never knew about
So, all this nonsense to say that there are a number of Atari 2600 emulators (see the list at Atari Age here). I have played with the Z26, which works with both Windows and Linux, and it gets the job done. Stella is an emulator for Windows and the Mac that I haven’t played with, but plan on trying out sometime soon. Same drill with the ROMS for the Atari 2600, they are available, but the questions remain.
COMMODORE 64
I have far less experience or knowledge of Commodore 64, and much of my experience with this system comes from friends who actually had one. I got one second-hand almost a decade after it was popular, and it is quite fun, but I wasn’t really into computers in the 80s as much as I was into video games, and a full-blown computer seemed like a whole lot of overhead for what I wanted to do. That said, I wasn’t oblivious to the classic games like Pirates!, Boulder Dash, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Conan: Hall of Volta, Lode Runner, and Choplifter. I still have a lot to learn about this platform, and the list of games is actually two Wikipedia articles, which suggests just how many there are (it’s kind of overwhelming!).
The emulator available for the C64 is called VICE, and the ROMS once again are plentiful. In fact, the amount of non-copyrighted material for the C64 will probably be far more plentiful than the Atari or classic Coin-Op emulators which are almost entirely proprietary.
OK, that’s it, I’m officially shot. This post is all over the pace and I could still talk about the first Nintendo system and how games like Mario Bros. and Blades of Steel were amazing to me, but I don’t have it in me at this point. Just more fodder for the next nostalgia outburst.
I have been using emulation to give my twelve-year old neighbor the people’s history of classic video games and home consoles (much more on both the emulation and the history shortly). While preparing these rigorous classes, I came across a couple of gems that I can’t believe I hadn’t known about until now—so if this is old news please forgive my enthusiasm. The classic horror movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were made into video games for the Atari 2600 back in 1983 by Wizard Video Games.†
In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game you are Leatherface and are charged with “murdering trespassers while avoiding obstacles such as fences, wheelchairs, and cow skulls. Each victim slain gives the player 1,000 points. The player receives additional fuel at every 5,000 points (5 victims). A life is lost when the player’s chainsaw runs out of gasoline. Gameplay ends when the last tank of gas is consumed.” ¹
In the Halloween video game, you are a babysitter “who must save children from a knife-wielding Michael Myers. The player obtains points in two ways: by rescuing children and bringing them to ’safe rooms’ located at both ends of each floor of the house, and by stabbing Michael with the knife (if it can be located). The player advances a level either by rescuing five children or stabbing Michael twice. The killer gets faster with each level increase, and the game continues until all of the player’s three lives are lost.”²
Seems like the games are remarkable for a few reasons other than the game play, for even by the standards of 25 years ago they were nothing short of terrible in terms of graphics and narrative conception. A fact that may make them candidates for two of the earliest b-video game. The story surrounding their release is interesting in regards to more recent backlashes against violent video games, such as the furor over the Grand Theft Auto franchise. They are considered the first video games in the horror genre, and their adult themes and “graphic” depiction of violence resulted in many retailers refusing to carry the games. And those who did often kept them behind the counter on a request-only basis. Given this controversy, the game sold extremely poorly. Wizard Video Games soon after went out of business, yet these two titles are considered extremely valuable today by collectors given how rare they are as well as the fact that they cross over ito the horror memorabelia manaics, making them a rather valuable commodity.³
Thanks to the beauties of emulation, you can see examples of the game play for each of these gems below. The whole idea of these “ultra-violent” Atari 2600 games is both puzzling and fascinating to me. Most video games for the Atari 2600 frame a certain amount of violence depending how you look at them, Kaboom!, Pitfall!, Space Invaders, Combat, etc., etc. Yet, the idea of Michael Myers severing heads and Leatherface cutting up pixels with a chainsaw, no matter how bad the graphics are, is too much. Not necessarily because they are too gory or difficult to look at—for they are ridiculous in that regard—it’s simply the idea of violence, the idea the developers of this game gambled on exploiting and lost, yet that was only the beginning. The state of video games today offers a totally different level of verisimilitude, yet I still think it is the political valence of an idea that is controversial, not the actual violence regardless of how good or bad the graphics are. I’ll have to re-visit this idea again soon, for it is half-baked but interesting to me.
A clip from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game:
A clip from the Halloween video game:
† Wizard Video also distributed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on VHS, which marks an interesting relationship between home video and home gaming consoles during the early 80s, which may be just as obvious and trite as it reads here, or it may tie into the idea of a new market for all things “b” that I have always believed the VHS made possible, despite the fact that it killed the single-screen movie house (which I love and miss dearly). Oh yeah, and it aliented the moviegoer by keeping him or her in their living room. Oh yeah, and the quality of VHS tapes was terrible…
I was thinking about this after publishing my last post, and without question I use one WordPress plugin far, far more than any other, namely the Wikipedia Link plugin by Andreas Krennmair. I has been a core plugin in my WordPress blogs for a relatively long time —I’d say about three years, or whenever WP 1.5 hit the internets. In all that time it hasn’t gone through any major overhauls because it is so beautifully simple. If you place any word or phrase within your posts or comments within two square brackets [ [Star Wars] ] (without the space between the brackets) it creates a direct link to the specified Wikipedia article. Now this may fail at times if a word or phrase has several articles that need some disambiguation, but it works a majority of the time for me.
We even played with this plugin a little bit at DTLT in order to see if we could have it link to articles (or even create new articles) within a MediaWiki install other than Wikipedia. All we did was change the base domain in the plugin from http://wikipedia.oreg/wiki/ to the domain of the other MediaWiki install, say http://jimgroom.org/bavawiki/ and it worked without a hitch. A very simple and powerful little plugin, one that I use so regularly that it has become such an integral part of my blogging that I don’t even think about it as a plugin, but rather a built in feature of the bava.
I was searching for information about 1980s sitcoms for another post I plan on writing when I came across a pretty phenomenal resource on Wikipedia for anyone interested in the history of U.S. television: a List of United States Network Television Schedules. An article which, by the way, is considered an orphan given the lack of other articles linking to it — what a shame! I imagine the subject has been the premise of several Media Studies/Communications research compendiums/directories that would aid countless scholars in their research (a quick search on Amazon produces at least one). And just think that this information is sitting quietly (even orphaned) on Wikipedia freely available for anyone to use and peruse. That’s open education if I’ve ever seen it!
Here’s an example of the layout (which conveniently links to the Wikipedia article about the TV Show) and a pop (culture) quiz:
Click on image for larger versionNote: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
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