> Just posted up the draft of an essay on the, um, dialectical pleasures
> of the 3D videogame, over at <http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/3dfps.html>.
> Needs some work, but comments/critiques/teleport modules are welcome.
>
Some brief comments:
"Observers have noted for some time that the traditional PC market, which was dominated for more than a decade by generally white, male and well-heeled professionals and which therefore tended to favor monopoly producers such as Microsoft ..."
Why the 'therefore'? My colleagues, who are all white, mostly male, and also well-heeled professionals, are strongly against the Wintel monopoly (as a result of equating open source with their creative freedom).
"client-server systems for corporate Intranets (e.g. SAP's R/3) on the one hand"
SAP R/3 is playing in a ballgame which was never particularly well penetrated by Wintel (despite Bill Gates' dreams) - that of mid to high-end business computing. SAP R/3 is more of an attack on mainframes than on Wintel.
"Strictly speaking, the whole point of death-matching is to out-reproduce the opposition, whether through better use of the terrain, superior individual skills, more effective team tactics or some fortuitous combination of these things. "
This is even more so a truth in the world of Real Time Strategy games (such as Command & Conquer and StarCraft) - it is an artefact of current limitations in computer game AI, I think, with interesting results - a RTS game is much more about managing an economy - with its resource inputs, (obedient) labour pools, which all feed into and depend on capturing territory - than it is about the art of simply killing. I am not a player of first person shooters (particularly due to the antiquated nature of my computer), but it sounds like a similar story.
However, the previous sentence...
"The reptilian or submarine metaphor of spawning is hardly an accident, and in fact touches upon one of the central motifs of information culture, namely the convergence of informatic codes with biological models."
Could do with a whole lot more expansion in my book - particularly a bit of unpacking of 'informatic codes'. I understand two related things by this 'convergence': on the one hand the application 'information theory'-esque definition of 'information' (in a sense a synonym for value in the global economy, as opposed to the mere 'noise' of the global proletariat) ala. Shannon, which relates to the question of 'intention' in biology? Secondly there is the concern in biology with 'information conservation', which tends to rely on 'systems theory' and concepts borrowed from cybernetics (the 'science of control' which has shaped society so powerfully from approximately the 1930s onwards).
As for the rest, I couldn't really get into it too much, except that now I want to go out and grab a copy of Half Live... :)
Peter P.S. you make links with the Vietcong, anti-beaurocratic heroes, etc. but I don't see any reference to Cyberpunk, which I would normally consider to be essential in understanding these aesthetics. Particularly, I'm thinking of the description of freelance weapons/cyber experts as 'mutagenic agents' in novels such as Gibson's Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844