Some day in the first half of April 2002 I ↵stumbled over gamemodding and slowly realized that there was more than something in it, legitimizing an anthropological look. Before that I was aware of player-created game-content, as I had played ↑“Descent” (1995) and lots of custom maps for it, but at that time I did in no way associate the thing with anthropology. This completely changed with my first encounter with the Max-Payne community, and since then I every day get more convinced that gamemodding is a relevant and central contemporary issue to be fathomed academically. Back in 2002 I … Continue reading
Daily Archives: Friday, 1st December 2006
↑About the ↑open access anthropology blog: This is the blog for Open Access Anthropology, an organization of volunteers interested in creating open access alternatives to anthropological publications. This blog will be the news outlet for the organization where we will announce news like current events progress within the discipline. We come from many different backgrounds within the discpline in order to promote freely accessible publications. … Continue reading
Technological politics and the networked PC However, the best illustration of the kind of positive cultural politics envisaged here concerns the culture of game modification. Games players write and exchange ‘mods’—modifications to games programs that include new twists of storyline and environment—and have succeeded, through this activity, in obliging games producers to leave their source code open for this purpose, something hackers have not yet persuaded the manufacturers of Windows to do. This has been achieved through the market, with astute games manufacturers recognising that there was demand for games with accessible source code, but also through successful negotiation and … Continue reading
Original, authentic, copy: Conceptual issues in digital texts For textual studies, digital texts present special problems and magnify others. Three examples will suffice. The first is a result of their ease of reproduction, alteration, corruption, and transmission, much greater than in the case of texts produced on paper—the challenge is in determining the relationships between apparently identical copies of the one digital text. Provenance of the file, reliable metadata, and some technical aids are important here. The second challenge comes as a result of computer processing requiring a kind of precision or at least removal of ambiguity in the work … Continue reading
Finally I introduced the subcategory ↵excerpts to the category ↵literature within this blog. That’s something I intended from the start on, but never did till now. Over time I realized that, maybe because of vanity, this blog more and more became a platform for publication, somehow I had started to write something like a private online magazine, and did no more see it as a work-in-progress information dumpster, no more as something containing raw material. The excerpts in this category may be boring for the occasional reader, but for me it’s the opportunity to have access to my material from … Continue reading