There are a total of two tasks here,

1 Please consider this transcript by Paolo from 2017

SimCities and SimCriseLinks to an external site.

Paolo Pedercini. (2017). SimCities and SimCrises. International City Gaming Conference, Keynote Transcript. Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In NMC 101 you were asked to play SimCity. In this class, please play two of the following titles:

It will likely take you at least an hour to play each game (if not more) so you will want to be sure to have budgeted enough time to think, reflect, and write.

Question Prompts

Virtual Worlds
NMC 260 New Media Futures Oregon State
Virtual worlds
three approaches
As a technology
• A display attached to the
head with secondary sensors
• Gyroscope attached to the
head
As culture
• A world of symbols and
feelings
• Intertextuality and Articulation
• Back-bending graph of
signification
• Some research suggests that
affect is beyond signification,
this is an extremely
controversial claim
As enfolding
• The relationship between
your embodied existence,
devices, and cultural
potentialities.
• Your body and all the ways
that it feels are real and
important
• Yeah, that is hard.
Brookes 2011
Cheung 2014
Virtual Worlds.
• Offers a way of dealing with the scientific and humanistic ways
of understanding the media of the future
• And the media of the past…
• By including a third conception of the virtual as the complex
relationship you have to technology and culture, virtual worlds
come to engage more questions than outfitting someone with a
harness.
Last idea yesterday – what is the virtual
• Enfolding
• Your feeling about stimuli are
very real and interpret what
you see/feel/hear
• We simulate experiences of
the world to produce an
impact
Simulation
• Mediation is a simulation
• Memory and sense are coproductive
• What is real?
Is this a computer simulation?
Bostrom
Problems
• Computation isn’t emergent
• Kurzweil is on a short clock…
• Rhetorical games, described in 101
• Bad neuroscience
• Bad view of physics
• Material hypothesis
• Bostrom doesn’t support the probability assessments you see
• Bad philosophy
• Dualism is a historically bad view of being
• Bad Infinity
• Bad Communication
• Phenomenology
No, you are not in a computer
simulation. But you are in
virtual reality.
How to Make Predictions
NMC 260 New Media Futures
Oregon State University
Last Time
• Framed a debate between futurism and acceleration versus
romanticism and stillness
• Reviewed a number of fun predictions and the reasons why a
lot of them didn’t work and some that are scarily accurate
• Introduction to the problem of public futurism
• Note on other times
The Probability Cone
• Desirable, Probable,
Plausible, and Possible
Worlds. Dunne and Raby
have a wonderful chart.
• The normative is always
included and noted for what it
is.
How Should We Speculate?
• Fictional worlds – literary and artistic contributions can challenge the stability of signs and
promote new combinations
• Utopia/Dystopia – work through the ideas to either of the two extreme conclusions: the
juxtapositions are productive
• Extrapolation – follow the dreams that lead to existing designs, let the dreams playout all
the way to their conclusions
• Idea Stories – writing concepts as narratives; they use the example of red plenty (a new
technological planned Soviet economy); use the narrative and look for resonances
• Thought Experiments – collide ideas in a non-narrative form, work with the abstraction of
the formula
• Reduction to the Absurd – take the idea to the point that it fails and literalize it
• Counter-factuals – flip one of the actually flippable switches at a moment in history and
suppose how that specific change would have affected the present
• What-ifs – flip one of the switches for the conditions of the present and work forward
How well do we do at picking
the future?
Tetlock’s Gauntlet
• Is the playing field for prediction level?
• Do the ”hits” have many costly “false alarms?”
• Unequal weighting of hits and false alarms
• Challenges in interpreting forecast ranges
• Challenging Reality
Cognitive Style is the key to prediction.
• Folks who are less extreme
and more integrative make
better predictions
• Note: these folks are still
experts, not random folks who
just sort of googled and
youtubed until they figured it
out
Take stock of…
• What can change
• What is changing
• What won’t change
• How reality is a result of the conditions of possibility?
• And keep in mind, there may be some folks who aren’t
predicting to predict
• But also we may intentionally not predict so that we may design…
America is all about
speed.
NMC 260 New Media Futures
Oregon State University
An Opening Quote
• Speed, having as its essence the intuitive synthesis of every
force in movement is naturally pure. Slowness, having as its
essence the rational analysis of every exhaustion in repose is
naturally unclean. After the destruction of the antique good and
antique evil, we create a new good, speed, and a new evil,
slowness. – FT Martinetti
There are no Professors of Foresight as yet, but I am by way of being an
amateur. Let me draw a plain conclusion from tonight’s audition. Either
we must make peace throughout the world, make one world state, one
world-pax, with one money, one police, one speech and one
brotherhood, however hard that task may seem, or we must prepare to
live with the voice of the stranger in our ears, with the eyes of the
stranger in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our
throats, in fear and in danger of death, enemy-neighbours with the rest
of our species. Distance was protection, was safety, though it meant also
ignorance and indifference and a narrow, unstimulated life. For good or
evil, distance has been done away with. This problem of
communications rushes upon us today – it rushes upon us like Jehu the
son of Nimshi. It drives furiously. And it evokes the same question: is it
peace?
Because if it is not to be peace foreseen and planned and established,
then it will be disaster and death. Will there be no Foresight until those
bombs begin to rain upon us?
HG Wells
A helpful Over-simplification
Maximize creative destruction versus peaceful stillness
Wells Predictions…
• Energy weapons – yes
• Antigravs – no
• Hand-held communicators – yes
• Biological Warfare – yes
• Motorized sidewalks – to an
extent
• Genetic engineering – to an
extent
• Automatic doors – yes
• Cloaking – not really
From a nineteenth century German
Chocolate Company
• Police surveillance technology – yes
• Flying machines – yes
• Movable housing – yes
• Blimps– yes
• Submarines– yes
• Polar exploration – yes
• Water walking technology – not really
• Rail systems for sea travel – no
• City wide arcades – sort of, see the
Skyway
• Television – yes
• Moving sidewalks – to an extent
• Weather Machine – no
Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s
Predictions
• Elimination of bacterial and viral
infection – no, but why not?
• Genetic modification to resolve
birth anomalies – no
• Protein synthesis and oceanic
farming – sort of
• Weather modification – no
(cloud seeding is a thing)
• Mars colony – no
• AI – to an extent
His Predictions for 1987
• Desalination – no
• Artificial organs – a little
• Psychotropic drugs – yes
• Teaching machines – yes
• Mechanical translation – ok
• Automated factory work – yes
• Moon base – no
Keynes Future
• The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his
morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth and
reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he
could at the same moment and by the same means adventure
his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any
quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even
trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.
Bush -1945
• Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a
mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped
into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the
associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of
the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on
call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of
his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions,
strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and
runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references
to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist,
struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the
chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following
the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and
chemical behavior.
Futurology has a bad track-record
• Luck, guessing, expertise
• It is a professional media role
• Probability?
• Clarke: Never predict anything – especially the future.
• Some predictions seem better than others. Especially the
predictions that emphasize the conditions of possibility for the
status quo.
• Taking account of what ACTUALLY can be changed
• Normative, Descriptive confusions
Toward Speculative Design
• Clarke: The future isn’t what it used to be.
• Tom Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers.
• Margolis conclusion:
• One thing is certain for the future. Just as we fervently believe we are
living in a special time, and are a special generation witnessing a huge
turning point in human affairs – so will our grandchildren and their
grandchildren. Every generation thinks the same, and they’re always
just a little bit wrong.
This is a very narrow view of
time. We will expand it
through the quarter.
We opened with the sort of future that you see on Silicon Valley for a reason.
Futurism itself relies on an exclusionary vision of the future.
Qualitative Research
NMC 260 – Oregon State
University
Bogost: video games are better when they map complex
systems.
WHAT IS THE FULCRUM?
Sim City 2000
An agenda for game studies…
No measure of positive identification can save us
from the fate of precarity, of automation, of
privatization, of consolidation, of attention capture, of
surveillance, of any of the other “disruptions” that
cultivate our culture like bulldozers click through sim
cities. To pursue an alternate future, we’d have to
change how the machine works, not just the faces of
its operators. But to change how the machine works,
we’d have to admit that it is bigger than us, and that
no measure of comfort in our own skin can protect
that flesh from its honed gears and its obdurate
treads. Being ourselves, it would seem, is the danger
video games might have helped us overcome.
More technically:
A WORLD IS A DISCOURSE,
SYSTEM, ECOLOGY, OR
ECONOMY
Why should we care?
• Communication is inevitable.
• These are matters of life and death
• Also, entertainment
• There are no guarantees
– If we have learned anything in the last few
months it is to take nothing for granted
• Futures perspective: how do we want it to
be, what are the conditions of possibility
for that future, which conditions might be
changed, how might they be changed.
They maintain political categories in society about what is
valuable.
YES, ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES
ARE TOTALLY ARTIFICIAL.
How do we research this…
• Diachronic vs Synchronic
• Idiographic vs Nomothetic
• Qualitative vs Quantitative
Idiographic
Nomothetic
Qualitative
Interview,
Biography
Deep historical
work
Quantitative
Brain Scan, Medical Unemployment
Records
report, structural
equations related
to unemployment
Mixed Methods
• No single method
can provide an
answer
• No unified field
theory of humanity
• Meta-approaches
like argumentation
and design are on
the rise
Translational
• This is engineering.
• It translates basic
science, expert
clinical practice, and
community needs
into a single
solution system.
• Medicine, business,
graphic design,
communication
share this concept.
This annoys me at times about designers.
THERE ARE SO MANY
”PROBLEMS” YOU CAN’T
“SOLVE”
Pick some.
• Economic growth
• Full Employment
• Efficiency
• Price Stability
• Economic Freedom
• Equality of Income
• Security
• Balance of Trade
THIS OLD HOUSE OF
RESEARCH
Ethnography
• How does your
system of meaning
actually function?
• How do we study
these youths?
• How is academic
authority produced
in this world?
Intermediate documents. Structural abstractions.
FIELD NOTES.
Thick Description
• Descriptive practice that adds context
• Avoids universalizing
• Embedded and grounded
• Enables a different, richer
communication of research
• Why should you be able to
communicate a lived experience in a
single formula?
Hermenutics
• Rigorous analysis of
the text
• Start with a few big
questions:
– Who, what, when,
where, why, how
• This was the
purpose of week 4.
It becomes a game in itself to get “deeper.”
DON’T THINK TOO HARD.
THIS WEEK IS ABOUT THE
QUALITIES OF OUR INFERENCE…
Designing Institutions
NMC 260 Oregon State
University
Large Designs
• Buildings
• Institutions
• Systems of Thought
– Technology as systems of organization for
human effort
• Alignments between social, cultural,
aesthetic, physical, technical systems
Design Is Temporal
• Past
• Present
• Future
This expectation structures your
interaction with every system.
WE HAVE ABSTRACTIONS IN OUR
MINDS OF LARGER SYSTEMS
LIKE NATIONS, STATES,
CHURCHES, FANDOMS.
What is a Good Line?
• A line where the interpretation of the
structure can be achieved by most
people relatively quickly
• It looks good (expansive)
• It is ‘fair’ given local cultural conditions
• Adequate line technology has been
deployed
• Meta-awareness of the line is possible
THE DESIGN PROBLEM:
WHERE DO PEOPLE LIVE?
HOW DO WE GET YOU TO
LIVE A BETTER LIFE?
Do you make good choices?
ECONS VERSUS HUMANS
Ponder this: What is worse – asking you to spend your
precious time/thought on an infinite variety of mundane
questions or implementing a good default?
THE TYRANNY OF CHOICE
Strategies
• Force functions – guides to choice
• Automate – it does the work
• Nudge – push toward a better choice
• Default – pre-select
• Teach – educate
Lots of problems
• Incentive conflicts
• Incomplete information
• Attention limits
• Cultural break
• Bad Defaults
Sunstein.
LIBERTARIAN PATERNALISM
The Problem Isn’t the Politicians
• Why not add another lane to the freeway?
• Currently, potential drivers are choosing not to drive. If
you widen the road, those drivers will make a trip.
• This is not to say that more lanes can ever be part of the
solution, it just can’t be the ONLY solution.
• Extreme short-term thinking with a strong bias toward
agency
• Long-term consequences are ignored or treated as
inevitable
• Retain visions of prior crises that were resolved, thus
they were ’fake’
– So yes, good news might make it harder to deal with bad
news
LET’S BUILD A GOVERNMENT.
Important questions
• What is the link between the desires of
people and the action of the state?
• How do people register their
preferences?
• Can we manage the differences
between groups?
• When do we address abstract and
macro level preferences?
Less Sci-Fi
• Regularly scheduled elections cause
problems.
• Why does your government shut down
while those of Germany, Australia,
Israel, Japan (insert industrialized
country here) doesn’t?
• Why do you only have one President?
Design by Accident
• Nixon violated basic concepts in
appropriations law, so they made it
automatic, so people overspent, which
created reconciliation bills.
• The Filibuster.
• The 25th Amendment assumes a VP
who is responsible
• SCOTUS should have 13 Justices
What went wrong?
• Bad defaults
• Incentive conflicts
• Seeing ”econs”
– Direct Democracy, Term Limits
– Why don’t people want to live in a concrete
bunker served by a mega-train?
– Agency pervades
• Mistaking structures for cultures
Design is hard
• You will need to overcome many
obstacles and consider many
possibilities
• In the last instance, you need to be an
effective communicator.
• Semiotic theories help you understand
those communications.
It’s Complicated…
NMC 260 New Media Futures
THIS IS HELVETICA.
They are also complicated. What do people do with social
media…
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS ARE
COMPLEX
Things people do
• They do face work
• They broadcast their emotional states
• They keep kin
• They throw shade
• They search for romantic partners
• They break-up
• They negotiate boundaries
• They share a moment
• They coordinate movement
People are complicated.
THIS BUTTON.
NOW THIS ONE…
SO INSTEAD OF A PANOPLY OF
FUNCTIONS TIED TO A SINGLE,
RELATIVELY WELL UNDERSTOOD
SIGNIFIER, WE HAVE FIVE.
AND EXACTLY WHAT IS RIGHT
ABOUT THIS BUTTON.
The technical system of
Facebook is complex
• Complexity is necessary to make
Facebook work.
• Think of how complex the programs
which write the program must be.
• Finding the optimal design of a media
system to match with an experience is
what is at stake/what kind of content
the page is populated with.
What is simplicity?
• Norman: Simplicity is a mental state,
highly coupled with understanding.
Something is perceived as simple when
its actions, options, and appearance
match the persons conceptual model.
• Simplicity is an experience which
depends on how a person experiences
their interaction with a complex
system.
BUT NOT TOO SIMPLE. THIS IS
WHY YOU NEVER SEE NONSTAINLESS PRO-STYLE
APPLIANCES ON HGTV.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE LIKE
BUTTON?
DID IT PRODUCE AN INTERFACE
MORE IN LINE WITH THE
PSYCHOLOGICAL
EXPECTATIONS OF THE USER?
None of these trade-off
• Each term has a distinct meaning.
• Systems should be designed for real
users with the experience in mind.
• Complexity and simplicity are NOT
zero-sum.
• Sometimes things will be complicated,
if your design can co-exist in this
situation, you have achieved
excellently.
How do we translate these smaller affects into larger systems
and codes?
AFFECT.
Those capacities of a system that you perceive and your
capacity to perceive them.
AFFORDANCE.
Is it bad to look good?
AESTHETICS AND DESIGN