The Fallout universe is a pseudo-historical RPG littered with relics of our reality, cultural conflict and a grim look at what could be a not so distant future. Stuck in a cultural limbo in the time period of the 1950's, with a mindset of paranoia that echoes the cold war, it offers an alternate timeline after world war 2, a country torn apart by conflict not only alongside neighbouring nations, but internally as well. This game does not take place in the 50's, but is a reimagining of the world similar to a "what if" scenario where 50's technology came into fruition so flying cars, robots that look like boxes, food in pill form etc. The timeline between our world and their world splits after World War II, except they had rapidly advanced their technology as in our world.
Amongst a host of other events that scatter the timeline perhaps one of the most important events was the energy crisis that caused the Resource War which unsurprisingly brings to light a global interest in reality; the acquisition of resources, renewable energy and the global plight of capital.
People of distinction who feature in-game have had a profound effect on our world as well, such as Nikola Tesla, the physicist who revolutionized how we utilize electricity, Howard Hughes aka Mr House, an industrialist, aviator, philanthropist, hotelier, engineer and an incredibly successful business magnate. Most of the characters in-game are all viable representatives for their real counterparts, not only adding to the game's complex structure, but offers the player some form of education whilst enjoying it.
Objects play an incredibly huge part to the games success, being able to construct weapons, helpful inventory items and in one game mode depend entirely on your wits and survival know-how. The integration of commodity items takes a playful turn, as their functions are regressed instead of performing their tasks normally they would be incorporated into either an aggressive implement or an item that will benefit you rather than complete some form of mundane or pointless task.
So essentially the best way to approach this essay would be to divide all the key areas of study into easy to digest chapters that will lead into one another to avoid distraction from the main question.
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Notes
Ok So I started shooting emails back and forth between me and Richard. This is what we had to say...
Right, well if you can throw yourself back a year to what my proposal was...
I like the topic, but not the title- computer games are obviously not real. Baudrillard would probably call them first or second order simulations. The more interesting question, revolving around the concept of hyperreality, would ask whether computer game worlds are informed by, or inform, reality. Put another way, does the simulation create it's own reality.
This should make a good dissertation. Get some introductory guides toBaudrillard. You'll also need to fill in a proposal form, which you can get from Yasmine
Richard
So first things first, read an introduction to Baudrillard!
Right, well if you can throw yourself back a year to what my proposal was...
Joking, the title was "to what extent are transgressive next-gen computer games real?"
So this would be comparing timelines in both the real world and the virtual plane to see if there are any connections in social, cultural or military values. Investigating and analysing the social hierarchy, politics and subsequent relationships relevant to each games timeline and 'timeline' respectively, looking at the connections between the real and virtual.
Also the technology, adaptation of mankind to new surroundings, as well as studying the interaction and relationship between player/character, how emotive responses to situations in-game have effects on the player as a person.
Some theory I will be using will be Ludology, Hyperreality, Virtuality, Ideology and Immersion.
But I was thinking that maybe toning the essay down a tad to make my workload more manageable as a whole, maybe something like comparing certain games to art, questioning the aesthetic of virtual simulation as well as giving games the philosophical platform they deserve.
I have included some images from the game the original proposal was written for to give you an idea about what it is I am writing about.
I also found a site with all the in-game poster designs that will give you a much better idea, http://fallout.wikia.
Thanks Rich,
Tom
This should make a good dissertation. Get some introductory guides toBaudrillard. You'll also need to fill in a proposal form, which you can get from Yasmine
Richard
So first things first, read an introduction to Baudrillard!
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
First Impressions
Following on from my last essay on Baudrillard, hyperreality and Philip K Dick, I have a rough idea of what I want to do my essay on. Last year, my proposal was accepted,
'to what extent are next-generation computer games real?'
Richard Miles' feedback outlined some more key sources to read concerning the impact of new technologies, the impact of said technologies based on textual experiences and to look at the emerging discipline of Game Studies, which will be vital as a methodological approach to my dissertation.
He mentioned that looking at a some case studies based on close readings of seminal computer games would help my essay from being too general.
So as a start, looking at some case studies concerning games, as well as starting some of the key texts highlighted by Richard.
I need to narrow down my essay title as well, but we will see as I go on what sort of things I will be studying in greater detail. At the moment possible titles are: 'Is the Fallout universe different from present day?' ' In the Fallout universe, how has the American dream survived for so long?' or 'To what extent does Fallout coincide with our reality?'
Obviously I will make sure I have a much more focussed title in a few weeks hopefully!
Monday, 10 May 2010
More Baudrillard
ANNOTATE> Dissertation ideas.
Towards Freedom: Television, Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchange
Posted by Stephen Groening / University of Minnesota on February 23rd, 2007 3 Comments Printer-Friendly
by: Stephen Groening / University of Minnesota
Tony Blair George Bush
Tony Blair (left) and George Bush (right) on Towards Freedom Television
For Jean Baudrillard, television is not a medium of communication but a technology of non-communication because it precludes the reciprocity necessary to symbolic exchange, an activity he compares to ritualized gift exchange described in the anthropological writings of Marcel Mauss (Merrin, 1999). The amount of signification produced by television overwhelms our ability to give meaning back and thus renders our world opaque. Since the television audience cannot “give back” to television, television prevents communication. Based on this model of the symbolic, Baudrillard famously declared that the 1991 Gulf War “did not take place” since a war requires a struggle between adversaries, which the first Iraq War clearly did not have. A true war would involve exchange and opposition. Baudrillard argued that the United States was a constant giver in this non-war and, at any rate, the goals of George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein overlapped so much that they were not adversaries (Baudrillard, 1995).
“Operation: Iraqi Freedom” (the second Iraq war) has been somewhat different. Although the invasion was a non-war by Baudrillard's definition, the occupation includes an amount of “symbolic exchange” to fulfill Baudrillard's requirements of actual, rather than virtual, war. The Bush administration and, according to polls, the U.S. citizenry are disconcerted by this turn of events. It is fairly clear that the invading forces did not want any part of any kind of symbolic exchange. An example from the use of television in the invasion suffices to support this point. On April 10, 2003, as part of an effort called Towards Freedom Television (TFTV) a specially equipped Hercules aircraft dubbed “Commando Solo” flew over Iraq and began broadcasting a series of televised speeches by George W. Bush and Tony Blair into Iraqi homes. In the tradition of leaflet dropping, balloon releases, radio broadcasts such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, Towards Freedom Television was not necessarily new or remarkable. But there are some intriguing developments in this form of imperial propaganda: a military plane beams television broadcasts into a country whose television stations were among the first targets to be destroyed by bombs and missiles, and the control of distribution is created through brute force. Thus, the invaders want to replace one form of what Baudrillard might term unilateral non-communication (that of Saddam Hussein's regime) with another (U.S. television).
Commando Solo
Commando Solo, the airplane used to transmit signals
In retrospect, TFTV was a failure and a surprising one, given that television is often seen as the propaganda device par excellence. Following Baudrillard's logic, both TFTV and the television system in the United States lack symbolic exchange and so one should work as well as the other. However, the breakdown really occurs in how unsuccessful TFTV is in simulating symbolic exchange; that is, how close TFTV approaches a model of communication. Because television in the United States more closely adheres to an imagined model of communication and reciprocity, it is rarely recognized as the non-communication it is. Through the slight-of-hand and misdirection called “freedom of choice” the non-communication of U.S. television appears to be communication through an appeal to freedom (of markets, of expression, of not watching). Iraqis, because of lived experience, were (and are) able to recognize non-reciprocity when they see it.
In the case of TFTV, freedom means broadcasting news from the big three American networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) in the place of Iraqi television. TFTV, run by the British company World Television (with apparent supervision from the Pentagon), consists of already created media products and promotion. These operations–destroying previous media apparatus and filling the airwaves with U.S. cultural product–paved the way for Norman Pattiz, chairman of Westwood One, to set up “Iraq and the World” a 24-hour satellite channel beaming similar material as TFTV to 22 countries in the Middle East.
I am neither surprised nor particularly upset by the military's effort to broadcast propaganda into foreign territory, it seems a relatively minor incident in the larger context of the war. I offer TFTV up as a graphic demonstration of the similarities between television's non-communication and the invasion's non-war, which calls attention to the fashion in which military and cultural activities seem interchangeable. Richard Denis Johnson, author of Seeds of Victory: Psychological Warfare and Propaganda made this equation explicit when he said of the leaflets alerting Iraqis of TFTV “It's almost like getting a TideTM coupon in the mail” (Coughlin, 2003). This observation is disturbing and chilling on several levels. First, it compares the violent destruction and subsequent replacement of a nation's media apparatus to the banal experience (to U.S. citizens) of receiving junk mail. Second, it reduces the messages of two of the most powerful men in contemporary society to laundry detergent. Third, it conflates violent military activity with consumerism. In this sense, it would seem Baudrillard is correct: no matter what we may hope for the media in contemporary society, it has become a form of symbolic violence by disallowing response and reciprocity. If leaflets from a hostile and invading army are equivalent to coupons, than the advertisements on television might be akin to the door-to-door raids carried out by the U.S. Army. Thus television is militarism carried onto another stage. Perhaps television is domination in an even purer form than military force, since, as we have seen in the past few years, the violence perpetrated by our invasion of Iraq has elicited more reciprocity and stronger responses than broadcast television in the United States.
The Air Force training for transmissions
The Air Force training for transmissions
While some debate the extent and nature of media influence, those in power already take it for granted. It does not matter to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Brian Williams or Bill O'Reilly if audiences adopt “negotiated” or “oppositional” position, if they “poach” meanings, or if programs are polysemic, transparent or open. The destruction of local media apparatus and the replacement with exogenous media transmissions demonstrates how television is a “push” technology; the explanatory power of the active audience thesis no longer pertains in the face of TFTV's kind of unilateralism (that this unilateralism is somehow different may be just a fantasy we want to believe). The question here is not of propaganda versus ideological influence, or of truth versus lies. Nor is it an exploration of the link between military technologies and communication technologies, which has been covered exceptionally well by others (Mattelart, 1994 and Virilio, 1989). The violence inflicted on television by invading powers graphically illustrates how much is at stake in controlling the content of the airwaves. This may seem like a mundane observation, but it sheds a different light on struggles over representation which constitute so much of the politics of television playing out in major daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines.
For Baudrillard questions of media control and distribution of content are misguided, since he presumes that we live in a mediatized, non-communicative society. According Baudrillard, what we need is to get back to the old practices of speaking to one another, to reject the simulacra and bring back symbolic exchange. This is a nostalgic view, which attempts to get back to a pre-modern society and include activities close to Mauss's descriptions of Native American rituals. In a sense, Baudrillard is a hippie: the social activist who leverages social privilege into primitivism and mutates social responsibility into rebellion. In his critique of Hans Magnus Enzensburger, “Requiem for the Media,” Baudrillard reveals himself to be precisely the kind of '68er Enzensburger critiques: the nostalgic who feels that non-industrial and artisanal media form symbolic exchange and constitute the only way out of the non-communicative society in which we live (Baudrillard, 1986).
So here is where we must depart from Baudrillard. For it is not enough to abandon certain media to the category of non-communication and uphold others as “symbolic exchange”. If television is indeed a form of symbolic imposition we must ask ourselves why unilateral non-communicative media arose in the 20th Century and became instituted in a society that professes liberalism and freedom of expression. In other words, Towards Freedom Television points to the need for historicity (attention to the specific situation of “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” would reveal opportunities for symbolic exchange) and sociological analysis. If we only look at television programming and audience activity in front of television sets (or other screens), we would miss much of this exchange and the kinds of communicative reciprocity that are taking place. Condemning the mass media as the enemy, as hopeless, or as inherently anti-social and anti-human is to retreat from the struggle of political and cultural representation; and it is a struggle we cannot afford to lose.
Works Cited
“Arab World now Faces Invasion by American TV.” The Guardian. 24 April 2003.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did not Take Place. Trans. and Intro. Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
—. “Requiem for the Media” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John G. Hanhardt. Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, in association with Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986.
“Bush and Blair's Iraq Broadcast.” BBC Online. 10 April 2003.
Coughlin, Kevin. “War- It's Not just Firing Guns.” GlobalSecurity.org. 11 April 2003.
“Iraq Media Dossier.” Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Merrin, William. “Television Is Killing the Art of Symbolic Exchange: Baudrillard's Theory of Communication.” Theory, Culture & Society. 16.3 (1999): 119-40.
Stewart-Smith, Charles. “Why Should the Iraqis Believe US TV?” The Guardian. 14 April 2003.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.
Towards Freedom: Television, Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchange
Posted by Stephen Groening / University of Minnesota on February 23rd, 2007 3 Comments Printer-Friendly
by: Stephen Groening / University of Minnesota
Tony Blair George Bush
Tony Blair (left) and George Bush (right) on Towards Freedom Television
For Jean Baudrillard, television is not a medium of communication but a technology of non-communication because it precludes the reciprocity necessary to symbolic exchange, an activity he compares to ritualized gift exchange described in the anthropological writings of Marcel Mauss (Merrin, 1999). The amount of signification produced by television overwhelms our ability to give meaning back and thus renders our world opaque. Since the television audience cannot “give back” to television, television prevents communication. Based on this model of the symbolic, Baudrillard famously declared that the 1991 Gulf War “did not take place” since a war requires a struggle between adversaries, which the first Iraq War clearly did not have. A true war would involve exchange and opposition. Baudrillard argued that the United States was a constant giver in this non-war and, at any rate, the goals of George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein overlapped so much that they were not adversaries (Baudrillard, 1995).
“Operation: Iraqi Freedom” (the second Iraq war) has been somewhat different. Although the invasion was a non-war by Baudrillard's definition, the occupation includes an amount of “symbolic exchange” to fulfill Baudrillard's requirements of actual, rather than virtual, war. The Bush administration and, according to polls, the U.S. citizenry are disconcerted by this turn of events. It is fairly clear that the invading forces did not want any part of any kind of symbolic exchange. An example from the use of television in the invasion suffices to support this point. On April 10, 2003, as part of an effort called Towards Freedom Television (TFTV) a specially equipped Hercules aircraft dubbed “Commando Solo” flew over Iraq and began broadcasting a series of televised speeches by George W. Bush and Tony Blair into Iraqi homes. In the tradition of leaflet dropping, balloon releases, radio broadcasts such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, Towards Freedom Television was not necessarily new or remarkable. But there are some intriguing developments in this form of imperial propaganda: a military plane beams television broadcasts into a country whose television stations were among the first targets to be destroyed by bombs and missiles, and the control of distribution is created through brute force. Thus, the invaders want to replace one form of what Baudrillard might term unilateral non-communication (that of Saddam Hussein's regime) with another (U.S. television).
Commando Solo
Commando Solo, the airplane used to transmit signals
In retrospect, TFTV was a failure and a surprising one, given that television is often seen as the propaganda device par excellence. Following Baudrillard's logic, both TFTV and the television system in the United States lack symbolic exchange and so one should work as well as the other. However, the breakdown really occurs in how unsuccessful TFTV is in simulating symbolic exchange; that is, how close TFTV approaches a model of communication. Because television in the United States more closely adheres to an imagined model of communication and reciprocity, it is rarely recognized as the non-communication it is. Through the slight-of-hand and misdirection called “freedom of choice” the non-communication of U.S. television appears to be communication through an appeal to freedom (of markets, of expression, of not watching). Iraqis, because of lived experience, were (and are) able to recognize non-reciprocity when they see it.
In the case of TFTV, freedom means broadcasting news from the big three American networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) in the place of Iraqi television. TFTV, run by the British company World Television (with apparent supervision from the Pentagon), consists of already created media products and promotion. These operations–destroying previous media apparatus and filling the airwaves with U.S. cultural product–paved the way for Norman Pattiz, chairman of Westwood One, to set up “Iraq and the World” a 24-hour satellite channel beaming similar material as TFTV to 22 countries in the Middle East.
I am neither surprised nor particularly upset by the military's effort to broadcast propaganda into foreign territory, it seems a relatively minor incident in the larger context of the war. I offer TFTV up as a graphic demonstration of the similarities between television's non-communication and the invasion's non-war, which calls attention to the fashion in which military and cultural activities seem interchangeable. Richard Denis Johnson, author of Seeds of Victory: Psychological Warfare and Propaganda made this equation explicit when he said of the leaflets alerting Iraqis of TFTV “It's almost like getting a TideTM coupon in the mail” (Coughlin, 2003). This observation is disturbing and chilling on several levels. First, it compares the violent destruction and subsequent replacement of a nation's media apparatus to the banal experience (to U.S. citizens) of receiving junk mail. Second, it reduces the messages of two of the most powerful men in contemporary society to laundry detergent. Third, it conflates violent military activity with consumerism. In this sense, it would seem Baudrillard is correct: no matter what we may hope for the media in contemporary society, it has become a form of symbolic violence by disallowing response and reciprocity. If leaflets from a hostile and invading army are equivalent to coupons, than the advertisements on television might be akin to the door-to-door raids carried out by the U.S. Army. Thus television is militarism carried onto another stage. Perhaps television is domination in an even purer form than military force, since, as we have seen in the past few years, the violence perpetrated by our invasion of Iraq has elicited more reciprocity and stronger responses than broadcast television in the United States.
The Air Force training for transmissions
The Air Force training for transmissions
While some debate the extent and nature of media influence, those in power already take it for granted. It does not matter to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Brian Williams or Bill O'Reilly if audiences adopt “negotiated” or “oppositional” position, if they “poach” meanings, or if programs are polysemic, transparent or open. The destruction of local media apparatus and the replacement with exogenous media transmissions demonstrates how television is a “push” technology; the explanatory power of the active audience thesis no longer pertains in the face of TFTV's kind of unilateralism (that this unilateralism is somehow different may be just a fantasy we want to believe). The question here is not of propaganda versus ideological influence, or of truth versus lies. Nor is it an exploration of the link between military technologies and communication technologies, which has been covered exceptionally well by others (Mattelart, 1994 and Virilio, 1989). The violence inflicted on television by invading powers graphically illustrates how much is at stake in controlling the content of the airwaves. This may seem like a mundane observation, but it sheds a different light on struggles over representation which constitute so much of the politics of television playing out in major daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines.
For Baudrillard questions of media control and distribution of content are misguided, since he presumes that we live in a mediatized, non-communicative society. According Baudrillard, what we need is to get back to the old practices of speaking to one another, to reject the simulacra and bring back symbolic exchange. This is a nostalgic view, which attempts to get back to a pre-modern society and include activities close to Mauss's descriptions of Native American rituals. In a sense, Baudrillard is a hippie: the social activist who leverages social privilege into primitivism and mutates social responsibility into rebellion. In his critique of Hans Magnus Enzensburger, “Requiem for the Media,” Baudrillard reveals himself to be precisely the kind of '68er Enzensburger critiques: the nostalgic who feels that non-industrial and artisanal media form symbolic exchange and constitute the only way out of the non-communicative society in which we live (Baudrillard, 1986).
So here is where we must depart from Baudrillard. For it is not enough to abandon certain media to the category of non-communication and uphold others as “symbolic exchange”. If television is indeed a form of symbolic imposition we must ask ourselves why unilateral non-communicative media arose in the 20th Century and became instituted in a society that professes liberalism and freedom of expression. In other words, Towards Freedom Television points to the need for historicity (attention to the specific situation of “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” would reveal opportunities for symbolic exchange) and sociological analysis. If we only look at television programming and audience activity in front of television sets (or other screens), we would miss much of this exchange and the kinds of communicative reciprocity that are taking place. Condemning the mass media as the enemy, as hopeless, or as inherently anti-social and anti-human is to retreat from the struggle of political and cultural representation; and it is a struggle we cannot afford to lose.
Works Cited
“Arab World now Faces Invasion by American TV.” The Guardian. 24 April 2003.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did not Take Place. Trans. and Intro. Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
—. “Requiem for the Media” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John G. Hanhardt. Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, in association with Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986.
“Bush and Blair's Iraq Broadcast.” BBC Online. 10 April 2003.
Coughlin, Kevin. “War- It's Not just Firing Guns.” GlobalSecurity.org. 11 April 2003.
“Iraq Media Dossier.” Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Merrin, William. “Television Is Killing the Art of Symbolic Exchange: Baudrillard's Theory of Communication.” Theory, Culture & Society. 16.3 (1999): 119-40.
Stewart-Smith, Charles. “Why Should the Iraqis Believe US TV?” The Guardian. 14 April 2003.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.
Monday, 22 March 2010
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
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