Moulthrop (2005) - After the Last Generation: Rethinking Scholarship in the Days of Serious Play
From Inventiopedia
Moulthrop, Stuart (2005) "After the Last Generation: Rethinking Scholarship in the Days of Serious Play". Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice, proceedings of the Sixth Digital Arts & Culture Conference, Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen.
In this paper, Moulthrop argues for the need to make space in academic production for "practical engagement" alongside theory and criticism. He proposes "[a] new genre of formal academic work [...], called the intervention, a serious work of application intended to contribute to pragmatics as well as abstract understanding" (p. 1).
Moulthrop argues from Espen Aarseth's claim that "Games are both object and process; they can’t be read as texts or listened to as music, they must be played." He further quotes John Cayley, in expanding the notion of literacy further:
Programming is writing, writing recognised as prior and provisional, the detailed announcement of a performance which may soon take place (on the screen, in the mind) an indication of what to read and how. Programming will reconfigure the process of writing and incorporate 'programming' in its technical sense, including the algorithms of text generators, textual movies, all the 'performance-design' publication and production aspects of text-making. (p. 4)
Building on these arguments, Moulthrop concludes that scholars should not only engage with interactive media on the level of interaction (playing), but also on the level of construction/design. " To put this very simply, an alternation of play and reflection is not enough. We must also play on a higher level, which means that we must build." (p.5) He proposes a new scholarly category, the intervention, which must adhere to four criteria:
- It should belong somewhere in the domain of cybertext, constituted as an interface to a database and including a feedback structure and generative logic to accommodate active engagement.
- It should be a work of production crafted with commonly available media and tools.
- It should depart discernibly from previous practice and be informed by some overt critical stance, satirical impulse, or polemical commitment, possibly laid out in an argument or manifesto.
- It should have provocative, pedagogic, or exemplary value, and be freely or widely distributed through some channel that maximizes this value, such as the Creative Commons or open-source licensing. Ideally, the infrastructure of the work should either be available to the receiver or documented in sufficient detail to permit productive imitation. (pp. 5-6)
In a final note of warning, Moulthrop notes that future scholars who whish to adhere to this new standard of scholarship, may find themselves subjects to "a double load of professional expectation", needing to be both designers, critics and theorists at once.
When writing enters the domain of computation, it falls under jurisdiction of Moore's Law [...] Thus our revision of writing implies an ethos of endless improvement and expansion, very similar to the imperatives that drive professional sport, scientific research, business development, and other discourses of high capitalism. It seems no wonder, then, that we find ourselves thinking of evolution, transformation, and double lives -- or that the so-called last generation seems to assume that those who survive the end of our world will live more demanding lives. (p. 7)
Note: Page numbers refer to the paper itself, in the unpaginated version found on Moulthrop's webpage (see link above).
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 02:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
