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Researchers are using the oceans of data in Everquest’s logs for psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other studies. Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, has found clear evidence that gamers use the scientific method, experimenting and communicating results, to understand the virtual worlds in which they play.

Academia is finally standing up to take notice of gaming as cultural phenomenon, and Volume 2 of the Journal Transformative Works and Cultures focuses on Games as Transformative Works, dedicating all of the journal articles to various aspects of gaming from a variety of academic perspectives.

Casey O’Donnell’s The everyday lives of video game developers takes an anthropological eye towards the culture of video game developers and their technoscientific art. Rebecca Bryant’s Dungeons & Dragons: The gamers are revolting! explores the fascinating recent history of Wizards of the Coast’s buying the rights to the then waning D&D, making it open-source as a marketing strategy, attempting and failing to revoke the open-license, and finally releasing a new, copyrighted edition of the game and fans hated it. Joe Bisz’z The birth of a community, the death of the win: Player production of the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game explores the life of dedicated gamers after the company producing their game goes under, and makes the most succinct explanation for the appeal of collectible card games, “Though CCG cards are premade, players have the power to edit their own unique deck of 60 cards, a process that can be compared to writing one’s own dramatic television script for an established series.”

I thoroughly enjoyed all of these essays, but Will Brooker’s Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s resonated with me the most. In it, Brooker describes his experiences revisiting the video games of his youth from the mid 1980s:

I don’t remember Zzoom as a garish clutter of magenta airplanes and bright red tanks, like a kid’s poster painting of a war zone. I remember the way palm trees rushed toward your windscreen in the desert zone, and the way, between attack waves, the camera drifted up into the clouds in a brief, calm interlude. In both cases, I remember landscapes, skies, seas, and natural environments rather than military hardware.

Zork

Zork and other text-based adventures had no graphics at all, and I spent months adventuring in their dark dungeons and travelling in their fantastic starships. Wasteland was my all-time favorite game on the Commodore 64. It came out in 1986, and, despite being able to push a human-looking icon around on a map, the details of the world were all described in text.

Ultima II Cover VS Actual Game

The idea that a screen with stick people could serve as a rich, complex environment may seem silly to today’s gamers, but at the time games like Wasteland, Ultima I-IV, and others provided endless hours of engaging adventure. Brooker observes that these limited in-game graphics were enhanced with elaborate artwork on the box, like the way old arcade games were decorated with action-oriented cartoons to dress up the comparatively simple graphics on the screen. I remember games like the Ultima series coming with cloth maps, code wheels, miniature books, and coins to bring something tangible to the experience.

Ultima IV Map of Britannia

Some games were based on motion pictures, and relied on the player’s experiences watching the movie to enhance the game play. One of the scariest games I ever played on the C64 was Alien, where you must try and kill the alien running around on the ship before it kills all the crewmembers… or failing that, at least make it to the escape pod. Looking at the graphics now makes the fear the game evoked seem silly.

Alien

Brooker doesn’t fall into the trap of claiming modern games fail to provoke an imaginative response in the player. Rather, he argues that in games like Grand Theft Auto, “I could map my experiences of the simulated spaces—Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas—onto my memories of the real geography of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.” So video games are still an imaginative adventure, requiring a suspension of disbelief, or “consensual hallucination” as William Gibson put it. Only the games today have more power to persuade us.

I found a video of someone running through Wasteland in 16 minutes (using cuts and speeded up play). Here’s the first part:

You can play all the old Infocom text-adventures online.

Baby and Godmother Credit: kton25

Harvard Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn presents a fascinating conundrum concerning the development of a human embryo: In order for the brain to process the two images our eyes transmit to it in 3-D stereovision, complete with the ability to estimate distances accurately, it must know the distance between the eyes; however, at the moment of conception, there’s no way for the genes to know this distance, which depends on bone growth, which depends on the mother’s and infant’s diet.

So how do the genes do it?

What the genes did is really clever: Young children (peaking at about age 18 months) have more connections among neurons than do adults; in fact, until about eight years old, children have about twice as many neural connections as they do as adults. But only some of these connections provide useful information. For example, when the infant reaches, only the connections from some neurons will correctly guide reaching. The brain uses a process called pruning to get rid of the useless connections…

…the genes overpopulate the brain, giving us options for different environments (where the distance between eyes and length of the arms are part of the brain’s “environment,” in this sense), and then the environment selects which connections are appropriate. In other words, the genes take advantage of the environment to configure the brain.

So one metaphor for the developing brain is natural selection, producing an overabundance of neurons, and then killing off the ones that aren’t performing. This is just one of many reasons the whole Nature versus Nurture debate is considered silly. Is it genes or environment? Genes and environment are not dichotomous, but rather a feedback loop.

The brain’s need to properly interface with the body is why babies kick in the womb according to researchers:

Rat pups in their litter display frequent muscle twitches and non-directed limb and whole body jerks, which are similar to human fetal movements. By studying the relationship between these movements and neuronal activity in the sensory part of the cerebral cortex, the researchers determined that the information provided to the developing brain by these random movements are critical for creating the proper representation of the body in the sensory cortex. By analogy, spontaneous kicks babies perform during the late stages of pregnancy should perform the same service for the human sensor.

The developing baby kicks, not only to work out the joints and muscles, but also so the brain can wire properly into the muscles. So another metaphor is that the brain is doing science, positing a plethora of hypotheses in the form of neurons, experimenting, testing out the environment of the body, keeping those hypotheses that work, and tossing those that don’t. Not only are scientists, learning to live in the environments we are born into, but our brains, the organ that houses our consciousness, acts as a scientist as well.

Science is in our scaffolding.

To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings. —Thomas Eisner

They crawl, they fly, they swim. They communicate with dance, chemicals, and sounds. They act alone or gather together into superorganisms. They possibly represent 90% of the differing life forms on the planet.

Insect in Amber Credit: Moi

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. – Edward O. Wilson

In David Brin’s The Postman, greatest post-apocalyptic book ever, the protagonist finds shelter in an old mail truck and keeps warm by making a blanket out of the letters. Recently, Vicky and I checked out the Camden County Jeep Trail, where we came across the old mail truck below, inexplicably wedged between the trees way off the trail, as if it had been dropped from the sky into the wetlands. The style puts it at 50-plus years-old.

Old Mail Truck Out in the Middle of a Swamp (Complete Mystery how it got there) GeoCoordinates: 36 12.197, -76 01.593 Credit: Vicky

On another adventure, went exploring around the Newbold-White House Recreation Trail. There, on the shoreline, we found the nearly buried remnants of some sort of tractor, or automobile. Suspension springs and a rusting engine block were recognizable, just peaking out of the sand.

Unidentified Species of Automobile Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Many scientists agree that the Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene, marked by the profound changes we humans are making to the environment. It begins with the growth of farming 8,000 years ago, but the most dramatic effects have come with the industrial revolution.

The cars we found in the wilderness will quickly rust into unrecognizable dust, but the rubber tires and plastic will have longer lives. Plastic shopping bags can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and if they are buried, they may not decompose at all… at least, not until something else on Earth evolves to get at the energy-rich hydrocarbons, found naturally in crude oil, just as microbes evolved to eat cellulose in plants.

Sand Filled Radio Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Glass is not biodegradable, and, unlike plastics, does not have any form of chemical energy stored within it. The silicas making up glass are also found in the cell walls of diatoms, but since the chemical compound is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust, it’s doubtful life here will start deconstructing the glass we leave behind for spare parts.

Perfectly Preserved Fuses Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Wired magazine founder, Kevin Kelly, has coined the term Technium to refer the explosion of technology that survives within the unique ecological niche we have created. Modern life requires microwaves, computers, and cars. The best technologies survive and we reproduce them, evolve them to better suit our needs, and in this respect Kelly makes a persuasive argument that they are the “7th Kingdom of Life.”

If we go, the Technium will go, but together we have left a distinct mark on Earth’s timeline. An alien scientist studying the history of our planet millions of years from now will find a thin layer in the geological strata marked by heavy metals, plastic bottles, and a huge surge in carbon dioxide. The Earth will recover from us, but have to make sure we can recover from ourselves.

You can see more car fossil photos here.