Flame WarsPub Date : 1993-10-01DOI: 10.1215/9780822396765-014
M. Pauline
{"title":"Survival Research Laboratories Performs in Austria","authors":"M. Pauline","doi":"10.1215/9780822396765-014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396765-014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":128028,"journal":{"name":"Flame Wars","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1993-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116105407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Flame WarsPub Date : 1993-10-01DOI: 10.1215/9780822396765-003
E. Davis
{"title":"Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information","authors":"E. Davis","doi":"10.1215/9780822396765-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396765-003","url":null,"abstract":"ions, tend towards baroque complexity, contain magical or hyperdimensional operations and frequently represent their abstractions spatially. Like allegory, interfaces blend mimetic symbols (in the Mac's case, trashcans and folders) with unreal magical symbols (a phoenix in a didactic alchemical engraving is no mere image, but like icons on a Hypercard, \"opens\" onto a particular operation or unit of information). And some in the avant-garde of computer interface design are developing \"agents,\" programmed anthropomorphic functions which help the user manage information space. As computer interfaces become more robust, the Mac's desktop \"metaphor\" may open like some sigil-encrusted gateway onto a huge realm of allegory. It's therefore no surprise that when we look at one of the computer's earliest virtual spaces, we discover the allegorical mode in all its magical splendor. Adventure was a text-based fantasy game created by programmers on the mainframes of Stanford's AI Lab in the '70s. By typing simple commands, players could probe Adventure's underworld cartography, gather treasure and spells, solve puzzles, kill trolls. Adventure was similar to Dungeons and Dragons, an impressively virtual game which consists of not hing more than dice-rolls, simple math, printed manuals and the imaginations of the players interacting with a virtual cartography described by the \"dungeon master.\" In Adventure, the computer was the dungeon master, greeting the player with this description: \"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.\" This image is schematic but strangely potent, and it may remind us of another traveller, at the end of another road, about to begin another grand adventure: When I had journeyed half our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. [14] So does Dante begin his descent into the underworld of the Inferno. Dante and a computer game resonate because both inhabit the peculiar environment of coded space. As Fletcher noted, allegory is \"a fundamental process of encoding our speech.\" [15] Allegory's coded levels of meaning are not distinct from its surface, but the two levels interpenetrate each other. Neither reading is fully realized, but are held in an ambiguous tension which Fletcher believes creates the frequently enigmatic, surreal and magical quality of the mode. Dante's images thus compel us to tear through the surface imagery and unpack distinct meanings: historical personages, medieval theology, Italian politics. But the poetry, the phantasm, always comes back. Appropriately, when the Dartmouth Dante Project created a searchable on-line Dante database that linked six centuries of commentary with Dante's text, they embedded the tension between text and interpretation in cyberspace. Though the project was later discontinued, Dante became for a while a multi-dimensional cluster","PeriodicalId":128028,"journal":{"name":"Flame Wars","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1993-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131129911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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