Friday 2 October 2015

Seen and heard: September 2015

Her Story - very good and interesting video-based game by Sam Barlow. The interface simulates a database of short digitised clips from a series of police interviews between June and July 1994, and by searching for keywords you have to work out what happened in the case. To start you off, you're given the keyword "murder", which returns four clips, from which you can work out that the woman interviewed, superbly played by Viva Seifert, is under suspicion of having murdered her husband, but where you go from then is up to you. It's not just about accumulating information; more by luck than judgement, within half a dozen searches I discovered that some of the woman's statements did not fit together at all; and that the story was entering some very murky waters indeed. The game necessarily draws you in, as you start hypothesising about what might be going on, and what keywords might lead you forwards. So powerful is the involvement that some players continue to wonder if even the scripted solution of sorts really tells the full story and whether some of their more outlandish ideas might have a place; Barlow wisely does nothing to discourage this!

Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert - a full and detailed biography of the TV producer (famous for having brought Dr Who to life), but after the early years - pioneering for both TV drama and women in TV drama, a great deal less interesting than I was expecting, at least for those of us outside the business. The chapters increasingly become name-check lists: she produced or commissioned this play or series, which was a triumph or a disaster; she worked with or had a flaming row with this script editor or director or television chief; she had an affair with or broke up with or married this person. Wouldn't make a great TV drama.

The Ascent of Woman - very watchable TV series by historian Amanda Foreman, eschewing grand feminist theory but nevertheless giving intelligent erudite commentary to a world tour of women who made or challenged the tenor of their times. Most of the names will be familiar to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of feminist history, but the neat and unique thing which she does is to let us hear from present-day women of the countries where the historical characters lived, saying what they mean to them. So the past and present is made to feel whole and continuous, somehow affirming and encouraging.

The Pedagogy of Distance and Online Education - Ph.D. thesis by Mary Thorpe (Open University, 2014). A pre-retirement Ph.D. by publication from one of the big names in the field, going back to the era of print-based distance education, and - as one might expect - a consistent defender and proponent of pedagogical sophistication and enrichment, repeatedly challenging lazy but common assumptions that certain technologies (such as print) either entail limited pedagogies or (such as conferencing) will lead to better learning. It's sent me back to several of her key publications: 'The challenge facing course design', in F. Lockwood (ed.) Open and Distance Learning Today (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 175-184; 'Assessment and "third generation" distance education', Distance Education, 19 (1998), pp 266-286; 'Encouraging students to reflect as part of the assignment process: student responses and tutor feedback', Active Learning in Higher Education, 1 (2000), pp. 79-92.

It's Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens, by Danah Boyd (Yale University Press, 2014). Really tremendous and very readable book, astonishingly available free as a PDF, which to a discussion still dominated by doom and utopianism brings good sense, clear thinking and some decent ethnographic research. Boyd is especially good at tracing the continuities of teenage relationship management, rather than giving in to the temptation to see the advent of digital social media as a radical break. Her insights include: teens' engagement with social media is tied to their broader peer groups, so the norms that get reproduced online don't devitate much from the norms that exist at school; they do value privacy but are mostly concerned about evading the gaze of adults with power over them, and they have many strategies other than limiting access for achieving privacy in online public spaces; social divisions often get reproduced online, so information inequalities also get reproduced; and technical skills are correlated with quality of access, which is itself correlated with socio-economic status, so that many "digital natives" are actually quite digitally naive.

Tropes versus Women in Video Games - funny and cool video lectures by Anita Sarkessian, on the stereotyped way women usually appear in computer games. Typically "damselised" - that is, reduced to a state of passive helplessness to provide the plot direction of their rescue by the (male) player-character - alarmingly they often die or are killed at the end of the game, thereby relieving the player character from the task of establishing or sustaining a mature adult relationship with a woman. As she observes, shooter-type games, in which the player's principle means of interacting with the game world is shooting things, don't offer much possibility for sophisticated plot or character development. How sad that a woman should come in for such hostility (as described in her Guardian interview) just for talking sense.

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