Einstein was a storyteller, obviously.
Category: meta
Is Nutella Left- or Right-Wing? Is Chess?
The International Herald Tribune reports of a current discussion in Italy of whether Nutella (the chocolate spread) is left- or right-wing.
“Only Italians could turn something like this into an ideological question,” said Gigi Padovani, who put the question to a group of students at the Velso Mucci Institute, a technical school for chefs and waiters in this small town in northern Italy.
As the dark creamy treat turns 40, intellectuals throughout the country have been debating what Padovani calls the “cultural, social, artistic and gastronomic phenomenon” that is Nutella.
I often discuss ideology in games with TL, Gonzalo, and my other colleagues. I am always the one saying that ideology is partially a matter of interpretation and that you can’t really determine the ideology of Sim City or the Sims.
The Nutella discussion makes me realize that the problem is that I don’t really think ideologies work. That is, we do have ideologies, but ideologies are simply not able to describe and evaluate the world to the detail that we imagine.
I think that actual ideologies are flawed piles of contradictory beliefs, and that most of the actual world is too complex to be understood (or ruled) by a single ideology.
That is, we may believe ourselves to have a complete, good, and amazingly coherent ideology (left- or right-wing, for example) but in actuality each of us entertains numerous wildy contradictory beliefs a the same time.
Especially when it comes to art (and food), many of the actual determinations (left wing or right wing?) are going to be completely random. There is nothing in Nutella to give it affinity with any particular ideology (left or right).
The Russian composer Shostakovich was denounced as “formalist” (shudder) several times under Stalin. Now, while there certainly was an ideology that all things, art included, had a completely objective and determinable ideology, I think we would be hard pressed to claim any compelling connection between Marxism and being against “formalist” musical compositions.
Returning to games, Hans Petschar has an analysis of the history of chess across different cultures, where the introduction of diagonal movement for the queen and bishops is a “dynamization of space” and reflects European thought. I don’t find this terribly compelling either.
Many games just don’t “really have” an ideology, yet some games do convey messages and beliefs.
When is the ideology we see just a mirror of our expectations, and when is it really there?
How can we tell the difference?
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?
Every year, John Brockman’s ever-interesting edge.org poses a question to a number of scientists and thinkers.
This year it’s
What do you believe to be true but cannot prove?
Here are a few:
I believe that deceit and self deception play a disproportoinate role in human-generated disasters, including misguided wars, international affairs more generally, the collapse of civilizations, and state affairs, including disastrous social, political and economic policies and miscarriages of justice.
I can’t prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can’t prove. I am dead serious about this.
Nature Is Culture. I believe that nature and culture can now be understood as one unified process, not two distinct domains separated by some property of humans such as written or spoken language, consciousness, or ethics.
It’s all good stuff.
OT: The same Results from Contrary Assumptions
Now that the week’s been rather grim, let’s touch on something else that’s also depressing.
A review in The New Republic discusses comparisons between Hitler and Stalin. Always a dangerous thing to do, but the review points to what is possibly the most ignored lesson of history these days: Nazism assumed that all human traits were based completely on race and biology, but Stalinism assumed that there was no DNA nor human nature. While in theory completely opposed, both assumptions killed millions of people.
Strangely, the dangers of the second assumption are frequently ignored.
I think the most dangerous thing you can do is to think that your personal beliefs are inherently good.
Happy new year.
Double-coding
With the discussion of academia vs. industry/practice blossoming at Intelligent Artifice and Terra Nova, a comment at the Zen of Design blog strikes a chord:
Double-coding is the practice of creating a work of art that speaks to two different audiences in different ways. It’s most often used to describe Children’s shows that also entertain adults. For example, Animaniacs and the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons are double-coded well – they have many references that a child won’t get but will amuse an adult. ‘Blues Clues’ is not double-coded – and as such, an adult watching it will be put to sleep.
Double-coding is what we, the academics (pick one) are / should be / shouldn’t be doing: Creating work that speaks to academics and to developers at the same time.
Academics are Stupid!
Actually, I say the above frequently.
But in First Person, Mark Barrett has written a response to Janet Murray’s article on cyberdrama.
Discussion at Intelligent Artifice.
Suffice to say that video game academics (all of us) get a terrible review. If you ask me, Barrett is doing some unnuanced generalizations, and he is about as wrong as he is right.
Since he seems to heavily dislike all academic video game theory ever, I wonder what kind of theory he would like? What would industry- (or Barrett-) friendly theory look like?
Derrida Dead
Story at BBC News. Le Monde (more fitting).
I am not sure what to say about that – he was a mythological figure when I began my university studies and I suppose I always thought he was interesting and provocative while being unintelligible and plain old wrong half of the time. And clever me always thought that while arguing against logocentrism, he was the biggest logocentrist of them all. And so on.
Perhaps the BBC piece doesn’t quite get what it was all about. When I watched the Derrida movie in Boston, the presenter explained that Derrida had always fought for the oppressed people of the Earth – which is a really far-fetched interpretation. I mean, he was an esoteric intellectual arguably working from a Christian/Jewish tradition of seeing everything as beginning with the word. (I read an article making this connection somewhere – makes sense.)
But I think the perception of Derrida-as-activist is going to stick nevertheless.
(Update: The New York Times obituary is much better and captures the whole range of responses to deconstruction from the accusation of defending Nazism to its contemporary association with progressive causes.)
Honestly, WE are the good guys. Here is what you should believe.
Off-topic, I continue to marvel at the ferocity of people who are promoting an esoteric intellectual idea that is somehow understood to be good in some absolute sense. OK, so everybody is doing it, but a sense of history could be of value. Terry Eagleton writes in a book review in the New Statesman:
We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity – all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.
It’s strange, but so it goes.