Month: May 2007

Learn something new everyday, or at least try to.

A couple of students are going to write research papers on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s).  These are much larger online versions of what once were called RPG’s.  Role Playing Games.  The new, huge, complicated games allow one to construct a character or persona out of an immense array of qualities, as well as magical powers, and of course weapons.

The purpose of these games is to win.  I find on MPogD.com—a clearing house page for a vast variety of games—the following “news flash”: “Round 7 of Worlds of War has now ended, many congratulations to Sean von Utopia (2:2) who made it to the top of the scoreboard.”  Sean von Utopia, probably not the name of the actual person, Won!  Pretty soon Round 8 of Worlds of War is scheduled to start up.

By winning and even if one doesn’t come out on the top, like Sean von Utopia, one scores points.  I believe some of these points may be carried over to the next version of a game, and of course the more points one scores during a game means more power to you in the course of a game.

This points business, as well as the creation of characters that become famous like Sean Von Utopia, has led to a strange practice called “gold mining.”  Youths, apparently located mostly in China, are paid something like 200 dollars a day to mine gold, to contact players, to offer them “real money”—if there is actually such a thing—for virtual points.  The virtual points are then resold (in exchange for “real money”–) to people who want points for the game in progress.

Even more money apparently can be made by the buying and selling of whole characters.  The real person who created Sean von Utophia may be approached by a buyer who wants to be Sean von Utophia and makes the creator of Sean von Utophia an offer he can’t refuse.

My student reports that he met people online who spent as much as a $1000 dollars a month to buy bits and pieces of virtual or imaginary reality for the purposes of game playing.  Most of the buying and trading was done on Ebay which has now however banned the sale of virtual reality on its site.  Too much possibility apparently of fraud when one is selling an object that doesn’t exist.

I find something vaguely and remotely disturbing about this.  I can’t say why exactly.  I think this has something to do with a theory I once had.  That our tools tend to generate conceptions of reality that may or may not be correct.  I believe the computer for example led for some time to a conceptualization of the human brain as computer like.  Decartes for example was in part led to conclude that others might not be people but machines because of clock work like machines made for royalty that mimicked the movements of “people.”  Tools do not simply manipulate a reality; they manifest one.  What is the world of MMOG’s manifesting.

Reading through the last batch of student papers, one student wrote something that made me think they were asserting that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the first or archetypical salesman.  I thought that was clever but looking back later over what I thought to be the paper, I couldn’t find a reference to the Serpent so I must have dreamed it up myself.

 Whether or not I read it or dreamed it up, I decided to check out Genesis to see if the Serpent did indeed qualify as a salesperson or early advertising executive.  Roughly the setup goes:  God says don’t eat this or you will die. But the serpent says, Ye shall not surely die.  For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

 I suppose the Serpent could quality as an advertising executive because he is an outright liar.  But then comes the “pitch.”  A lie won’t really get buyers unless there is a pitch.  It runs:  if you eat this fruit you will become a god yourself.  This is a pretty simple argument; but one cogent to the world of advertising today.  Many advertisements do suggest that if one buys this object one will come to have god like powers.

The early ads for the Ipod, for example, showed simple images of music or representations of music, flowing and flowing into this tiny device, the Ipod.  The suggestion was that this device was somehow magical since it could contain so many songs.  Of course, songs are sounds and not physical objects.  But the representations of the song in the ad were solid and took up space.  So the Ipod was truly a magical object able to contain and hold in place many larger and fluid objects. 

Of course, having a magical device is not quite the same as being a God, but I think the parallel works.

In later ads, the Ipod continued magical but different.  These ads featured the featureless silhouettes, like card board cut outs, of lithe young figures moving rhythmically in an undefined or unparticularized space.  As they moved, they swung their Ipod about and it illuminated, as with a tale of fire, the space of the dancer and eventually the dancer his or her self.  Ultimately, the suggestion was that with an Ipod one illuminate the darkness.  This too has magical overtones.

So the Serpent was onto something.  And maybe his flat out lie too can be read in another way—as appealing to the grandiose self inside of everybody.  He is not just saying, don’t worry you won’t die, IF you eat this.  He is also saying, don’t worry, if you eat this, YOU won’t die.  Admittedly this is a bit slippery, but in sum: just do it, in either case you won’t die.

Of course, there is still the question with advertising, as with the Serpent, does any of this stuff really work?  Do people really respond to it?  In the case of the Serpent, one has to wonder; Eve doesn’t seem to buy into the idea that she will be a God.  The Bible suggests she thinks the fruit would be good eating.  According to Genesis: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.  True, the wise part is there, but first comes, good food and pleasant looking.  That’s a woman for you, of course.

As for Adam, [Eve] gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.  Adam, for his part, resembles those men in the Carl Jr’s ads who can’t cook and try to make guacamole by tossing a whole avocado into a blender.  Idiots, in short.

Continue reading Ipod Me→

So I saw my shrink yesterday.  As I believe I have mentoned, she was born and raised in France and immigrated to the US of A in the mid 50’s from North Africa.  She still has a strong French accent.  She has an excellent command of the English, though American slang is not her forte.

I told her I had written a song about my father kicking my mother when she fell on the floor.  I quoted myself:

The old lady fell flat on her back on the floor
The old man couldn’t pick her up no more
She lay there rolling round in her flab
When he walked by his leg she did grab

OOOO  what I irony is this
60 plus years of wedded bliss

Old man don’t you think probably it ain’t right
To be a kicking at your old fat wife
When she’s Down.

My shrink said, “That sounds sinister.”

This is not the first time she has used “sinister” in this way, and over time we have had some problems communicating when a word in English and in French overlap in sound and spelling but have slightly different inflections meaning wise.

The song might be dark, grim or bleak, as I far as I am concerned, but not sinister.

But in French sinister (sinistre) means: grim, deadly boring.  OK, I can go with grim.

But in English sinister means:

·  Suggesting or threatening evil: a sinister smile.

·  Presaging trouble; ominous: sinister storm clouds.

I don’t think the song suggests or threatens evil.  So in French the song is sinister, but in English it isn’t.

Both the French and the English come directly from the Latin.  In Latin sinister -tra –trum means: wrong, perverse; unfavorable, adverse.

So maybe in Latin the song is sinister too since it’s a little perverse.

Sinister, in Latin, also means “on the left hand.”  So left handed people are sinister or at least maybe that’s where we get the idea that left handed people are a little whacky.

I have noted that there are a heck of a lot of left handed actors, more than the norm in the general population.

Come to think of it, I don’t think the song is sinister at all.  I think it’s funny.   That could make me a bit sinister I suppose.

Brother Dan had company today, so when I stopped by to say hello, I stayed for just a few minutes.  He has to go in for an echocardiogram on the 22^nd of this month.  At that time, the doctors will decide exactly what to do with the good carotid, and then they will do it.

I asked him how he has been, how he has felt over this time.  He says he doesn’t know.  I don’t think this is an evasion or that he is repressing something.  Sometimes when he is trying to express something, he uses his hands in a funny way.  He measures something in the air, in the way a person might do telling a fish story.  This time he made a big measure when he tried to recollect the first month after the stroke.  He said it was like nowhere, this space between his hands.  And I said, did he mean he had forgotten it.  He seemed to indicate no, more like there had just been a blank.

I think what he is experiencing really is beyond his comprehension.

Freud was probably wrong about infantile amnesia representing the repression of polymorphous perversity and all sorts of other nasty sexual stuff.  Well, he was not wrong either, but repression is not the whole story.  Representation is.  And thinking about Dan and infantile amnesia I have to wonder how much language is necessary to have a sense of having any kind of experience at all.  Dan’s language powers were affected by the stroke.  He did not have the words for it and I do not mean this in the sense that he lacked the philosophic depth to experience what he felt. Or that he had bumped up against some profound existential emptiness.  Rather he lacked words like “needle,” “bed,” “red light.”

Without being conscious of it, or needing to be conscious of it, we are always moving among named things.  Like cars, or trees, or bushes or under sky.  And as we do move among these named things a potential at least for an experience is present.  We don’t always have to have an experience; maybe nothing really happens.  But if something did, we would have in retrospect the materials (those named things) for the construction of a narrative or the sketchy outlines of an experience.

Car.  Red light.  Freeway on Ramp.  Freeway.  Stop

You could make a narrative out of that.  In fact I did just that after speaking with Brother
Dan and thinking about aphasia. I stopped at a red light located directly in front of the on ramp leading to the freeway on which I could see many cars passing by.

But this little narrative would not be available to me without the words to weave the experience together.  But what if, like an infant, one had no words.  Or no causal connections like: red light means stop.  I doubt one would remember much of anything…since the potential for memory would not exist.

Indeed some aphasia victims forget (actually that is not the right word) rather cease to grasp the connection between red light and stop.