FCJManager
FCJ-057 The Case of ‘Mafiaboy’ and the Rhetorical Limits of Hacktivism
Gary Genosko Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada Canada proved to be the home of the most notorious Web hacker to date, “Mafiaboy,” a Montreal teen who intermittently crippled the Web sites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, eBay, and Yahoo! from 7-15 February 2000 by means of a distributed denial of service attack in which Web servers were flooded with so many requests for data that they were effectively clogged. He was charged under subsections 342.1(1) (unauthorized use of computer) and 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) of the Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) and sentenced on 12 September 2001 to eight months detention plus one year probation (R. c. M.C., [2001] J.Q. no. 4318 (C.Q. jeun.) (QL)). Craig McTaggert (2003, at para. 81, note 112) Introductory Remarks On September 12, 2001, Cour du Québec, Chambre de la jeunesse, District de Montréal Judge Gilles L. Ouellet sentenced a 17-year old male…
FCJ-056 Cultural planning and Chaos Theory in Cyberspace: some notes on a Digital Cultural Atlas Project for Western Sydney
Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally University of Western Sydney A perennial issue for digital politics has been the debate between those who claim a liberatory role for digital technologies and those who see them as instruments for a more effective oppression. We prefer to avoid such abstract oppositions and ask more specific questions: what kind of digital technology, used in what way by whom, for what purposes in what contexts, may support the efforts of those who work for a better, more open society? To focus our enquiry we look at the intersection of digital systems and “planning”. “Planning” in a general sense is a fundamental human activity in all societies exercising the “rationality” that has come to define humanity since the ancient Greeks. Yet the dominant form of planning in western societies today employs a specific form of ‘rationality’ which has emerged only recently, labelled ‘Occidental rationalism’ by Weber…
FCJ-055 Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Erin Manning Concordia University, Montréal Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such. One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to work collaboratively with dancers such that ‘the choreographic and computational processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of the constitution of movement.’[1] A similar tendency is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must ‘delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something of the “gestalt” of movement’[2] An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter…
FCJ-054 Digital Bodies and Disembodied Voices: Virtual Idols and the Virtualised Body
Daniel Black Monash University, Australia Introduction The virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a figure representative of a cultural milieu in which arrangements of data seem interchangeable with physical materiality. We are currently in an historical moment when form, information and data are widely understood to be rendering matter, physicality and flesh increasingly redundant. Popular and academic accounts of the body as discourse, behaviour as genetically programmed and digital information systems as rendering spatial relationships and physical interaction irrelevant, for example, are all dominant discourses of the ‘information age’. This mode of understanding is perhaps a prerequisite for the appearance of the virtual idol, a figure animated by digital data, an immaterial substance into which seemingly anything – even the body itself – can be translated. The virtual idol seeks to simulate a particular kind of human body: the celebrity who is already heavily mediated and virtualised through her…
Issue 09 – General Issue
Let us for a moment call the field we work in “new media studies”. Immediately, questions arise. For a start, one of the wonderful things about the field we work in – as thinkers, as practitioners – is that its name is constantly contested. New media, digital media, multimedia, internet studies, computer media, inter-media, simply media, cyberculture, network culture – the renaming of the field is ongoing and never finally resolved. The problem of the name is not as trivial as is sometimes assumed. That none of these names seems adequate suggests that the field itself, perhaps by nature, is constantly shifting, encouraging a series of precise engagements perhaps but eluding homogeneity. At the same time, the problem of the name does suggest a defining feature of the “field” – this is transversality that becomes unavoidable when working with new media technologies. Simply put a transversal is a line that…
FCJ-053 Pervasive Gaming: Formats, Rules and Space
Bo Kampmann Walther University of Southern Denmark Introduction Computer games that move beyond the static screen and into the real, social and tangible world, as well as those that rely on massive networked, virtual spaces are becoming increasingly wide-spread. In Human PacMan the player collects virtual bits of cheese in a real, physical space (see Figure 1). Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix (2005) is a home version of the popular arcade game, in which the players follow dance instructions on the screen with their feet on touch-sensitive tiles. Breakout for Two (Mueller, Agamanolis and Picard, 2002) is a physical interface the size of a large wall that allows two players to play a soccer-like game together, communicating via a body-size videoconference. Both players are kicking a real ball, targeting virtual bricks, similar to the old arcade game Breakout, and aiming to break out to the other side, i.e., to the other…
FCJ-052 Playing at being mobile: Gaming and cute culture in South Korea
Larissa Hjorth RMIT University Globally, South Korea has become a bit of a fetish in the (global) games culture phenomenon. Games are a serious business saturating everyday life and many South Koreans prefer their PCs (with online multiplayer games) to TV (Cho 2005). Seoul is an exemplary model of the ubiquity of gaming culture; highlighting that games and the attendant social spaces and cultural knowledges can be part of everyday lifestyles, rather than a mere leisure activity of a subcultural group. With over 20,000 เว็บพนันออนไลน์ต่างประเทศ game rooms (known as ‘PC bangs’) scattered across Seoul, three TV channels dedicated to gaming, and pro-league players (professionals that can earn over US$2 million annually) treated as celebrity royalty, South Korea’s prolific designing, production and playing of games seems almost a dream come true for anyone remotely interested in gaming culture. Almost. As a place where gaming is an integral part of social spaces…
FCJ-051 Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay! – The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the U.S. Military
David B. Nieborg University of Amsterdam United States (U.S.) Army recruiting did not seem to be a problem after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. However, the ongoing war on terror calls for more soldiers and thus more recruits. Operation Iraqi Freedom in particular has put heavy strains on the available manpower of the Army. A significant part of the U.S. war machine is tied down in the cities of Iraq, requiring a steady flow of fresh manpower and material. The Bush administration has made it clear that it expects the war on terror will be a decade-long battle against a shadowy enemy (Gordon and Trainor, 2006). At the same time, government officials such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointed out that the war on terror is also a war on ideas’. According to him, it is a war to spread freedom and liberty, values appropriated by and associated…
FCJ-050 Cameras, Radios, and Butterflies: the Influence and Importance of Fan Networks for Game Studies
Laurie N. Taylor University of Florida Collecting and Interpreting: Walkthroughs, CliffsNotes, & IMDB As a new medium, video games can be analyzed under some of the similar rubrics of other media. However, because of the fundamental differences between video games and older media, including the requirement of skilled user action, alterations to this categorization prove necessary. The study of games has been approached from many aspects, including the study of narrative in games and the study of game play. Both of these aspects complement each other and additional studies, such as studies of video game audiences, further complement game studies as an emerging field. Because video games require skilled user interaction, studying games requires game play. Game play in turn necessitates that players and students studying video games use additional resources to play particular games, and especially to complete particular games or to explore the games as texts to even…
FCJ-049 Negotiating Intra-Asian Games Networks: On Cultural Proximity, East Asian Games Design, and Chinese Farmers
Dean Chan Edith Cowan University The East Asian online games boom started in South Korea in the late 1990s. Following unqualified domestic success, South Korean games were subsequently exported to other regional markets throughout East and South East Asia. During this time, game development companies specialising in online games for the Asian market also emerged in China and Japan. This essay proposes that one of the key features in this networked gaming context is the relationship between the adaptation of regional East Asian aesthetic and narrative forms in game content, and the parallel growth in more regionally-focused marketing and distribution initiatives. East Asian online games design and marketing play to notions of perceived cultural proximity within the region. By encompassing these considerations, this essay aims to offer a contextual analysis of intra-Asian games networks in terms of production processes and related emergent concerns. How have these online games networks evolved?…
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