Year Note 4 – Fit the Fourth – Play
Posted: November 25, 2010 Filed under: on the academy, weeknotes | Tags: play Leave a comment »Ah, I think I need to play more. The last four years have seen a complete drain in playfulness in what I do. Which is more than a little ironic seeing as I’m spending all my time teaching and researching gaming and urban play.
I have probably said this somewhere before, but the career change to being an academic was like shifting into two new jobs at once. Trying to pick up a full time teaching job, whilst at the same time trying to become a researcher. A traditional academic route lets you do one after the other and it is hard enough then. On top of that having a child squeezes all those spare hours out of one’s life.
And this was meant to be a fun career change, doing a whole bunch of things I wanted to do and when I started out intending to be playful and cheeky with it. But the grind of continuous deadlines, faced down, alone, late at night, got rid of any desire for play.
Anyway, my new resolution is to make play time for myself during the day and more importantly, to make and manage my time to play with other people. I need some laterality and space for exploration in what I do in my day job. That is the thing that needs changing in my academic practice, which will make me both playful and more productive.
Year Note 4 – Fit the Second – Rituals and Institutions
Posted: November 18, 2010 Filed under: on the academy, weeknotes | Tags: ritual, UWE 1 Comment »Having just come back from a graduation ceremony the fact that being an academic is not just a job is apparent. All the pomp and ceremony and hanging out in a big, breezy cathedral are not the normal aspects of a regular job.
When I graduated I thought universities and their ritual were a bit of an anachronism, and probably still did a little when I started out at UWE. They were cute, but past their time. It took me a couple of years, and some of my own students graduating, before I actually attended one. But I think the rituals like graduation highlight two very important and seemingly undervalued aspects of universities. There is the position of the academy as a social/cultural institution and the position of the academic as a role (or station) in society. Both of which I don’t think I particularly, or fully, appreciated when I started out, and also both of which are being every more quickly eroded ((especially under the new UK corporate management, though it is not just them that are to blame)).
Now though, rather than this being something vestigial, I actually think there is too little ritual and ceremony around university ((The only things we seem to have are freshers week/end and then graduation. Nothing else really fills the roll.)). Not that I think there should be some quirky oxbridge snobbery, strange handshakes and weird underwear. No, these need to be events, happenings, spaces and place that help the university fit into the city and the community. Also when I say university, that is the whole shooting match: the students, staff, academics, campus, branding, strategy, etc. Ground up, top down. One of the reasons that graudation is nice, and actually rather unusual, is that a lot of us are all together at the same time.
And the reason for needing more ritual, events, I think, is that universities are, and should be social institutions, not just businesses who churn out students and commodifiable knowledge. So they need rituals, events, activities and places where they can interact with the various communities in a variety of ways. Not just big flashy stuff, but little events too.
UWE’s position as “the partnership university” is good. And it does come through by partnering with communities outside itself. Not that I have any experience of other universities, but I think it does do it better than most.
I went into this graduation today, a bit glum, mulling over some of these thoughts about ritual, universities as social institutions and community relationships. But the talks from both the honorary PhD and the Pro-Chancellor were quite uplifting in that they really pushed home the relationships between the university, graduates and industry, as well as the wider community. They both described the university in the way I think it should be.
Plus I got to eat cupcakes with excited graduates.
Year Note 4 – Fit the First – Hunting the Academic
Posted: November 17, 2010 Filed under: on the academy, weeknotes Leave a comment »The search for what it means to be an “academic” reminds me of the The Hunting of the Snark; very aptly titled “An Agony In Eight Fits”. The snark is very suggestive of this thing that we call an academic, it comes in many varieties, some with feathers that bite, some with whiskers that scratch. They are very ambitious and also like to sleep late into the day. However as we learn from the poem, when seeking the snark, one must beware that it is not a boojum. It is unclear from the poem whether a snark does really exist, are they all boojums, or is that just the one the baker meets? Certainly snarks are very tricky beasts, and going after one will be a life changing activity.
My academic ‘birthday’ happened a couple of weeks ago, I started being an academic on the 1st November. But like a typical lecturer I didn’t actually have the time to stop and reflect at the time, so I’m going to grab that time now, or it will never happen.
Four years means that this is now the longest job I’ve held down. I spent just under four years at both syzygy and the BBC. Both of which were formative experiences, but one’s where I felt I got my head around the job much quicker, although each of them kept throwing curveballs to the end. I felt comfortable in each after a couple of years and then a bit uncomfortable towards the end of four years. Which is why I moved on from each. I’m still trying to figure out what being an academic at UWE is all about. Four years felt like a long time at each of those jobs, but four years in a university doesn’t feel long.
After four years here I’m still constantly reconfiguring my approach and attitude towards what I’m doing. The job-ness of it is quite interesting at this point in time, both through my own experience and also through what is currently happening to higher education under the current government. Being an academic is not a job, it is more like a lifestyle choice, the boundaries are blurry and whilst I can walk away from the computer, the things I’m working on are never far from mind. Though walking away is difficult.
There is this idea, from outside the academy, that being a lecturer is all about sitting around drinking tea and having lots of time to have erudite discussion and pontificating about esoteric subjects. I think, deep down, there was a naive kernel of that in me when I took the job. I though that it would be a nice easy move from the big smoke to a more laid back lifestyle in the provinces, do some teaching and work on a PhD. How mistaken I was, and I only learnt that after having my life nuked by the teaching workload; unable to concentrate on what I had intended to do, let along my personal life. Two years ago I went for a job at Nokia, and when they offered me the job (in the end I turned it down) they, very seriously, said that this job wasn’t like academia and it would require doing some actual work. I had to try very hard not to laugh out loud.
I managed to find some good-looking data on unpaid overtime, it is a bit old, but lecturers (with teachers) are at the top of the list of unpaid overtime. Over eleven hours a week. This bears out with what I’ve experienced, in the first couple of years when I must have been doing more like twenty extra hours every week during term time, but luckily for me it has gotten a bit more controllable. Though the last couple of weeks the boojum is back and I’ve been working every opportunity I can and sometimes into the wee small hours.
However, I’m not complaining, this is something I want, and part of what it means to be an academic. I think the point is that this is not a “normal” job in a “normal” company. But a discussion of that will have to wait till at least tomorrow and Fit the Second.
Week 210
Posted: November 15, 2010 Filed under: game studies, weeknotes | Tags: game studies, grammar, semiotics, syntactic Leave a comment »Finished Critical Debates assignment, wrote a short paper in the weekend and went from zero to lecture in two hours. Two very late nights and feeling wiped out by the week, but accomplished a lot.
Managed to really get into thinking about semiotics through doing the Critical Debates assignment. Since then I’ve been thinking about some of the semiotic inspired work in Game Studies. David Myers has been using it for many years and there is a Gonzalo Frasca article from the Video Game Reader that stands out in my mind. One of the questions that seem to come up through the work I’ve read, is wheter semiotics can be applied, as is, to games. The Myers work argues that there is a depth to the semiosis that can only happen through playing the game, the surface sign is not sufficient to truly understand the meaning. The Frasca article calls for a ‘simiotics’ to replace semiotics.
Semiotics is a huge, scary, amorphous field that crosses many disciplines and uses. Not that I really know that much about semiotics, but from what I read last week, I think that, as it stands, it has a lot of power for analysing games. But that gameplay and semiosis needs to take account of all three levels of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Some of the work I’ve read that discounts semiotics seems to only engage with the semantic nature of the field. Games create a syntax that alters the meanings of the signs in the system, and these systems are different from linguistic systems. They are a very different sort of “text” to read. I may have missed a big chunk of Game Studies somewhere (and believe me I really might have, I don’t get the time to read as much as I would like) that takes up the syntactic torch, but either it doesn’t exist or hasn’t been attempted.
That is not to say that this should specifically be a formalist approach like linguistics. But a shift, or recognition of some of the broad ways that meaning emerges from the interrelationships between signs in games, not through the signs by themselves.
Some of this sounds a little like the operational logics and unit operations discussed by Wardrip-Fruin, Mateas and Bogost. But there is a mass of work in semiotics that feels like it would be useful.
I’m talking about the Ethnography of Big/Pervasive Games (5 Nov)
Posted: November 2, 2010 Filed under: presentations | Tags: DCRC, ethnography, pervasive games, PMStudio, talk Leave a comment »This Friday, 5th November at the Pervasive Media Studio.
What is exactly is pervasive gaming? Why do people create and play these games? What makes them fun? What do hipsters and big games have in common?
This Friday I’m giving a talk on the ethnographic work I’ve been doing on Big/Pervasive/Urban Games. It’s an early stage presentation of some of my results. In it I will discuss what I think they are, why it is important to study them, some current interesting trends and leading to why I’ve been doing the ethnographic work in the specific settings I’m currently using in my work.
Using ethnographic excerpts it will illustrate thematic issues around the social and cultural situation of this gaming phenomena as well as explore the aesthetics of the gameplay itself. It will not be a highly academic talk and it is intended to help you understand the methods used in the research and the value of this approach. And yes, you will find out exactly how hipsters fit in.