BusyBusyBusy…

So, yeah…again…

As you can see, I’m not exactly an inveterate blogger.  The last post is dated 14 October.  Since then, I have played Little Big Planet (though I have not finished the story mode, and I haven’t messed with the world editor at all); I also have Lego Batman (loads of fun for a Batman fan like me); and I have just started playing Far Cry 2.

My absence has been predicated largely upon my coursework for Old Dominion.  I wrote about 80 pages of prose, all told.  I also spent most of my time in the game world engaged in an empirical pilot study focusing on the interface systems in Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat.  The concept of the semiotic index has gripped my fascination, though finding much secondary source material has been difficult.  For that matter, finding copies of Charles Sanders Peirce’s original theories of semiotics from his work on logic proved difficult enough — seems no one really pays that much attention to him, at least not compared to Baudrillard and Saussure.  I’ve come to the conclusion, based on this project and the extended article I generated out of the Meaningful Play presentation, that the player is positioned as a part of a game’s processual expression, making her the indexical structure within that process.  I have the article out to Games and Culture, so we’ll see what happens with it.

I have another presentation slated for February at the University of Louisville’s Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900.  I’m pursuing this indexical theory in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.  DeLillo’s fiction since Underworld has been criticized extensively as largely paling in comparison to that work.  His trenchant explorations into the intersections between media culture and problems with the human condition in the late 80s and through the 90s built one oeuvre for him.  Since Underworld, he’s taken a turn towards smaller, more personal portrayals that do not sprawl quite as aggressively as, say, Mao II or Libra.  But it seems that something has been missed in his work, especially in The Body Artist and Falling Man.  I think DeLillo is exploring the human body has a way of mediating the expanse of history into a recoverable memory, as a way of “tak[ing] the shock and horror as it is”, passing it through “the counter-narrative” of “hands and spirits joining” to account for the “howling space” left in the gap of American experience after 9/11 (“In the Ruins of the Future” 39).  This imagery, from DeLillo’s famous December 2001 essay in Harper’s, provides some insight into the constant drift of language in Falling Man, its focus on the body and the shocking lack of media presence.

CEA 2008 Presentation

This is my CEA 2008 Presentation concerning narrative in videogames.  I was only permitted about 15 minutes, and I showed a clip from Call of Duty 3 over one section discussing World War II based first-person shooters.  You can follow the link above for the Word document, or you can check out the cut/pasted version below.

Overall, the conference went well.  I sat through several presentations concerning contemporary fiction, particularly Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and White Noise.  I sometimes find it amazing that the latter novel (now 23 years old) still receives as much critical attention as it does, especially in the wake of 1998’s Underworld.  But, I also attended some panel discussions about modern technology in the classroom, and was a wee bit disappointed.  The presenters’ grand revelation was that students spend quite a bit of time using Facebook as a communication and networking application.  Uh-huh…