Unpacking

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I posted about this in October, but now that you’re working on final projects, know that you can schedule time with Nicole, our Student Advisor, and/or our GCDI team to talk through ideas. Here’s Nicole’s self-introduction, with contact info:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

Friends, it’s time to pass Go and collect $200! We’ve reached the end of the Syllabus Proper, and it’s time to flex some direct democratic muscle. I’ve created a Padlet that we’ll use to generate ideas for the final two sessions and vote for them as well:

People’s Choice: topics for the homestretch

Made with Padlet

Feel free to add new ideas or comment on the ones I’ve created. We’ll work on this in class, too. I believe I’ve configured the link properly to allow all to access it, but LMK if you have issues.

I struggle to remember the headspace I inhabited in 2019, when I took this photo. Three years out of AdTech and three years into HealthTech, I likely still believed that mobile phones could contribute to well being, and that marketing driven apps could reveal a key insight about behavior that could be pointed in “the right direction.” I captured this image three years after Pokémon Go launched. I believe we’re seeing an iPhone 6, plus two separate Samsung Galaxy phones in action.

In hindsight, three thoughts seem poignant:

• The exploitation of Axis Infinity for cryptocurrency forms a coherent lineage with behaviors observed previously
• I often underplay the pervasiveness of surveillance capitalism because I’m attuned to the failures in technical execution, rather than the behavior changes in physical space
• The endurance of Pokémon Go lasted way longer than I remember it

I suspect I took this photo because I thought it was exotic. Perhaps I underestimated how consuming this game was?

Currently circling around two main questions:

How does our perception of “play” influence how we value artistic labor?  
AND 
How is labor portrayed through games and play?

“Play” as a term calls to mind the imagination, childhood, and freedom; it carries a certain frivolous quality. Accordingly, play can easily be seen as an inessential and extraneous component of society, one which largely serves to distract our attention from the more pressing functions of the human body within modern society – namely, labor. 
 
Labor permeates our world. And so, when our prevailing view of artistic endeavors is that they are “play” – relegating them to the realm of children – what does that say about how society values art and artistic labor?

Where play does find an “appropriate” place in labor, it’s often where it improves labor efficiency or employee retainage, all to the direct benefit of the employers rather than the workers. Through gamification mechanisms, the structures of games can be readily applied to the workplace as a means of capturing the employee’s attention and engagement and directing it wherever management deems necessary.

And so employee training modules come with corresponding badges and stickers, and reaching certain metrics lets you select from different tiers of gifts in the employee store, and IT will purposefully send phishing emails to test their employees. All of these have taken place in my workplace within the past week, and despite my knowledge of gamification and all its pitfalls, I can’t resist engaging because I want to beat IT at their game, or because I want the cute NYC DEP beanie at a discounted rate. These gentle prods and motivational schemas inherent to game structures certainly carry a more pernicious quality once you’re outside of the magic circle. 
 
How do the fantastical possibilities afforded to game designers by modern technology and computing power, square up to the more mundane renditions of labor within the medium and play’s application to the modern workplace?

Popular early arcade games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missile Command, all attempted to simulate some form of alien invasion or warfare, slotting the user squarely into fantastical simulations of warfare. However, limitations in technology at this stage meant that users could only ever perform a limited set of tasks and functions in a given game ; so although you could face off against different variants of enemies with their own unique movement patterns, the goal was typically singular – you aim to survive as long as possible within a strict rules-based environment. The structures that motivate this type of repetitive work-like behavior inherent to these games find many analogs in the gamification mechanisms employed in workplaces. In this case “survival” takes on a more tangible, economic form.
 
Of course, as opposed to actual labor, the stakes are low with these games – typically a few quarters – and the play is completely voluntary. Nonetheless, the narrow scope of these games already lends them some labor-like qualities, particularly in the clear delineations on user behavior and the repetitiveness of the tasks at hand. This would be more common with early game design philosophy, allowing for – I believe – cleaner, clearer readings and interpretations of this older material as opposed to the more sprawling blockbuster games of today.

But with advancements in technology and in the field of game design, games generally grew more complex, engendering a heightened sense of player agency and decision making. These newer games gradually became less labor-like, and more “fun” – but how did depictions of labor develop alongside the evolution of the medium?

I’ll be referring to Huizinga and Caillois’ definitions of play to introduce a general definiton and framework for understanding games, and will draw contrasts between these definitions and the more colloquial uses employed throughout society. Along the way we’ll discuss the distinction between serious/playful play, alongside heavy references to Flanagan’s Critical Play when discussing the redemptive or more radical potentials in the game medium.

I’d also like to refer to some history of sport and play, specifically to the mesoamerican ball sports of the pre-Columbian era and their place within  indigenous cultures and rituals (thus rendering them non-voluntary and essential parts of society), alongside the development of organized sports out of their more playful and disorganized beginnings  (like soccer in the public schoolyards of 19th century Britain) into an actual world-spanning entertainment industry built on athlete labor.

There’s also room for passing mention to games like Euro Truck Simulator, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and other various “labor” simulators. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that even the most “innocent” of these idle farming simulator games still carry with them the underlying capitalist logic that your cute little farm still has to constantly grow and expand and produce more cash flow. No matter how cute or how friendly the experience may be, it’s predicated on the same market logics that dominate our not-so-innocent real world. Could these games just be sanitizing our world for us, using play specifically to keep the world as it is?

There’s also room to make an example of a “big” game like Skyrim or Fallout (sorry I dont know any similar games from the past 5 years) by exploring NPC behavior and how labor manifests itself within some alogrithmically defined space.

As much as I would love to do a project that is expansive and creative, for this course I am going to try to be creative within the confines of a final paper. I will be writing about play theory as applied to sport, and in particular, as applied to sports betting. This is in keeping with my mission to use the PhD program as a playground in which I can explore how sport might be used as a vehicle for doing political education.

In the paper, I plan to argue that sports betting, as a form of “play,” alienates participants from athletes’ labor. This shifts spectators’ focus from the game and its players, to betting, a game about the game. As someone who wants to do political education through sport, this presents a different entry point into the subject that I believe is increasingly relatable to sports spectators and thus an interesting/exciting space to theorize and explore.

I may focus on world football because of the transnationalism of that sport and the increased potential for the arguments explored in the paper to travel across different global contexts; however, I’m also considering basketball, which also has international appeal and popularity, and whose betting context I am more familiar with.

Either way, I’ll begin with an overview of the historical development of sports betting and its relationship with and treatment of the athlete. At minimum, I’ll be relying on Huizinga and Caillois to establish a play theory foundation that discusses the phenomenon of sports betting and how it fits into the larger regime of play; concurrently, I’ll discuss sport as play, the professionalization of sport and athletes’ labor, and the extent to which sport remains or ceases to be play in a professional sporting environment.

My plan is to then discuss Boluk & Lemieux‘s concept of “metagaming” to further tease out the relationship between sports betting and professional sport in the current moment. I want to do this discussion in conjunction with a discussion regarding the proliferation and evolution of sports betting “metagames” in the past 15-20 years. This would include a discussion of the market-share bidding wars (haha) between major industry players like DraftKings and FanDuel; an exploration of the extent to which publicly placed bets have increased over time, given legalization of sports betting in a growing number of states; the landscape of major sport leagues’ partnerships with sportsbooks; the creation and explosion of daily-fantasy betting; and the extent to which all of the above contemplate and interact with athletes’ labor. It makes sense here to pull in Zuboff and discuss the extent to which any of this creates “guaranteed” behavior on the part of the spectator, which I would argue is another means for alienating consumer and worker.

I also want to discuss gamification and how, as applied to sports betting, it furthers exploitation of both the athlete and the user (it would be nice if all exploited parties reckoned with this together, instead of spectators insisting on/not questioning athletes’ exploitation for the sake of their own entertainment). I’d like to explore Walz & Detterding a bit more to do this discussion, then look to any horizons that have some liberating political potential.

[I need to build out my sources a bit more, but I feel good about these first ones as a starting point]

I was drawn to this class due to the concepts of choice, agency, determinism, and interpretations of self-autonomy. Despite not being an avid gamer, I appreciate the opportunity to complete tasks within a framework of ‘play’ that is devoid of immediate real-world consequences. Games offer a cathartic experience by providing options to pause, restart, replay, quit, and essentially, try repeatedly. They encourage us to learn from our mistakes, creating a safe space for exploration devoid of real-life repercussions.

Exploring our options in the real world often involves considering everyday thoughts and decisions in common settings, such as running errands, cleaning, watching TV, and doing laundry. These are tasks that all individuals usually encounter, unless they have the luxury of hiring help or sharing these responsibilities with a partner or parent.

Instead of the narrative-rich universe typical of first-person games, the user will encounter options on how to perform everyday tasks from the perspective of a person practicing OCD techniques.

An example of a text-based game-play is as follows:

Experiencing intense cleaning compulsions. You decide to

1. Give into compulsion and spend 2 hours deep cleaning the sink, the handles, and the faucet to make sure there are no germs
2. Ruminate on how you cannot trust your anxious thoughts on how dirty the sink is. You write in your journal for 45 minutes about the conflicting choices presented in the name of ‘mental health’. Immediate satisfaction in ‘self-soothing’ activity for a perceived danger that, cognitively, you know isn’t real, must be avoided.
3. Decide he best course of action to distract from the impulse is to go running.

If 1 is picked

Your spend 2 hours of your day deep cleaning instead of writing that project proposal you’ve been ruminating about. You plan how you’re going to write this project proposal while getting into the deep crevices of the sink. Everything is going to work out. You feel in control. You feel like you can accomplish everything you needed to do without compromising your compulsion.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. Take a shower to clean yourself again after sweating from cleaning. You need to feel clean in order to begin writing this paper proposal. Once your thoughts are organized in the shower, and you brainstorm while doing a 7-step skin-care routine, you will surely feel ready to write this project proposal.
      2. Decide against showering, rationalizing that you already gave into your first compulsion to deep clean the sink (which was probably already clean to begin with, considering you deep cleaned it 2 days ago after your night shift from work), and guilt yourself into believing that starting on this project proposal is the ‘responsible’ course of action after you’ve gave into your initial compulsion.
      3. You feel overwhelmed with your decisions and decide to post-pone making one by brewing another cup of coffee. Surely, a caffeinated drink will clear your head and give you the motivation to pick the right decision.

If 2 is picked

You must decide which color of pens to use for journaling. You just got a new journal from MUJI; the sides are clean, the paper is crisp, and you don’t want to ruin your new notebook with the color that ‘feels’ incorrect.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. The navy-blue pen size .5
      2. The navy-blue pen size .38 with ink running out
      3. The gray pen size .5
      4. The dark-green pen in .38 that slides mores smoothly than the other ones; it is your favorite pen.
      5. The black-pen size .70 that is also your favorite pen, although you feel guilty for having 2 separate favorite pens, like they’re almost in competition with each other. You can’t decided which one you like more. You feel guilty for favoring one pen over the other, almost like they’re your children, or like you’re in a love triangle and can’t pick which partner to spend the rest of your life with. The consequences are dire, and the ambivalence you hold towards these two pens morphs in shame. Do you even know who you are? You can’t make a simple decision between two, inanimate objects that are designed to be thrown out and purchased again anyways? They are temporary and say nothing about you as a person. But the fact that you don’t even know your own preferences, your own likes or dislikes, or the fact that you can’t make a decision about two simple pens to write your compulsive thoughts is so embarrassing.
      6. The generic plastic BIC pen you stole from work. You hate the way it slides over the paper in uneven fashion, and how the ink is inconsistent. You know using this pen will bring your great discomfort, but healing is all about putting yourself through discomfort, and so this might be the ‘right’ decision for you to make.

If 3 is picked:

You have to decide which clothes to wear in your closet. You notice your closet is unorganized, as you haven’t sorted out your laundry from ‘worn once (still wearable) from ‘worn 3x but maybe nobody will notice any potential smells’ from ‘absolutely stained and improper to wear in public’ from ‘clean’.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. You decide to quickly sort your clothes into 3 piles just to get more organized for the future, and then finally wear an outfit for running.
      2. Haphazardly find the running pants and shirts that are either in the ‘worn once; still wearable’ category or ‘clean’ category without organizing.
      3. Grab any sort of shorts and t-shirt and endure the dirty feeling of running in somewhat-quetionably-clean clothes in order to alleviate your anxiety about a dirty sink that could potentially harbor COVID-19 viruses. This is the option that will bring you the most discomfort. And healing is all about enduring uncomfortable situations with dignity and strength. You already made the right decision to not deep-clean your sink, and so, this options also seem like the right decision for you to make.

Although, start thinking that you can frame it as a situation where you made the tough decision, and as a reward, you can spend a little extra time picking out the clothes that feel clean to you. I mean, you have to compromise somehow, right? Rewarding yourself for a correct behavior will only reinforce the notion that physical distraction is an effective coping mechanism. It’s kind of like your Pavlov’s dog, but you are the dog and the master at the same time. These are your choices, and your life is defined by the choices you make, whether short-term or long term. You have more control over your life than you think you actually do. It’s time to start monitoring your feelings on the spot and question whether your anxiety-driven obsessions are rooted in rationality or irrationality. It’s hard to decide because they feel so real and so rational. It’s almost an injustice to not feel anxiety in situations like these. But maybe I should reward performing one coping mechanisms by performing a compulsion, because then I’ll associate it with positive feelings.

Right?

1. 1. 4. Get overwhelmed and make your way into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee instead.

The objective of this game is not to ‘successfully’ overcome a compulsion. Instead, it offers a first-person experience of performing everyday tasks while constantly weighing the pros and cons. This game aims to portray the ongoing struggle with OCD, not its defeat. It’s about enduring OCD in a way that minimally disrupts everyday life and managing the associated emotional stress. The ‘final boss’ in the game is not an external entity trying to defeat you. Instead, it’s your internal monologue advocating for your safety in harmless situations. The very voice trying to protect you is also causing harm, masked by intense compulsions driven by irrational fear.

Computation in humanities academic research garners continued support as measured by grant funding. While computational humanities research methods spark detractors levying either claims of neoliberal contagion of universities and digital humanities’ complicity therein (see Allington, Brouillette, Golumbia here), or confirming known biases in literary canons (see Kirsh here), new research using computation continue apace, sometimes with countervailing results (see So and Roland’s Distant Reading and Race). In the past few years, an effort to reconcile the computation-heavy distant reading of the 21st century and the mid-20th century’s predominant mode of close reading appears as expressed with methodological arguments (see Gabi’s Computation as Context) and in practice (So again in Redlining Culture). Practitioners of distant reading and computational methods view skills and tools using information technology as another marker at their disposal when staking a claim. While Gabi believes that distant reading operates as context–like historical background–for close reading, the debate between close and distant techniques obscures a basic question: can computation enhance the practice of close reading?

To explore potential answers to this question, I’m proposing a project called Myoptic Appliances. Whereas Voyant Tools offers scholars a quantitative dump of graphs and tables about an inputted text, this project gives readers a visceral experience of close reading by providing potential alternatives to word choice and sentence sequencing. Mypotic Appliances would employ parts of speech tagging and sentence parsing to rearrange text(s). Perhaps tags and sentences from two texts could be intermingled to demonstrate the differences and similarities between two related texts.  A user of this application can initiate the types of text transformations through a web interface; playing with the text and playing it like a piece of improvisational/aleatoric music.

To control the scope of this end of semester timeline, I will select passages from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a short story in Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportman’s Notebook. At the time of writing, I’m inclined to select the scene from Stowe’s work where Shelby decides to sell Tom and Henry, and the story“The Baliff” from Turgenev. Why select these two texts separated by continents, seas and cultures? Both works were 1852, and were instrumental in changing sentiment about unfree labor in their respective countries. The hope is that the similarity and differences in these texts might make an interesting prototype of how a web application like Myopic Appliances might operate in the future.

This project would generate questions in regards to three of Callios’ types of play. How do the transformations between texts evoke alea, where the parts of speech or sentences to be swapped aren’t completely in the player’s control? To what degree does the player mimic Brion Gysin’s cutup technique for composing sentences and paragraphs by using this application? Is there any sense of Ilinx in mixing and matching texts for the player? This project also builds upon Uncertain Curves and Outrageous Angles, a end of semester project I worked on with Brianna Caszatt for Doing Things with Novels in Fall 2022. I would be remiss if I neglect to acknowledge McGann and Samuel’s deformative criticism. Imaginably more surprising would be the influence of one of the few software engineering niches I’ve inhabited over my profession. Small-data engineering, in opposition to big data, asks how smaller datasets (only hundreds of TB vs. hundreds of PB), simpler datastores (data lakes vs. warehouses) and  one-shot pipelines (e.g. using DuckDB embedded in a script) can lead to effective insights about a company’s data with minimal infrastructure.