Massively Amateur Culture
Animutation, Machinima, and Virtual Fashion as HCI
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Interaction design reflects culture.
Interaction design produces culture.
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Interaction Criticism
Rigorous, evidence-based interpretive analysis
that explicates relationships among elements
of an interface and the meanings, affects,
moods, intuitions, and social inclinations they
produce in the people that interact with them;
the immediate goal of this analysis is the
generation of innovative design insights.
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Good Reasons
Cultural theory reasons
Quality of life: interfaces should delight, enlighten, be just
HCI reasons
Understand how people appropriate technologies
Remain relevant in “third-wave” HCI (Bødker)
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Agenda
Interaction criticism in amateur multimedia communities
Multimedia authoring software shapes visual languages
Diachronic evolution of these languages share a number of
characteristics
These amateur multimedia visual languages interact with
mainstream culture in dynamic ways
Discuss AMM as a problem space for research
Discuss, Q&A
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I.
The Usable is the Message
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Multimedia Authoring Tools
Not merely instrumental “tools” subjects to human
intention
They facilitate the creation of certain kinds of messages
More usable features become more used features
More used features constitute visual languages
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Art Reconfigured as Data
A multimedia file is a database
(Manovich)
Its parts remain forever discrete and
can only be composited
These pieces are spatiotemporally
managed
Digital material with qualities
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How Tools Shape Creativity
3 paradigms of art creation in multimedia tools
From scratch
From primitives
From components
Primitives are by far the easiest to work with
And so composition with primitives is the dominant
paradigm of most amateur multimedia visual languages
Usability is a major criterion of natural selection
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The Practice of Creativity
The acquisition of primitives
From authoring software tools (rectangles; cubes), importing
bitmaps, sounds, video
Their management in the authoring tool
Their composition (design time or real-time)
We can see this in the Flash genre, “animutation”
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“Hyakugojyuuichi!”
Neil Cicierega
albinoblacksheep.com
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Common Messages
Pastiche/parody and “WTF” Also, keep in mind that I
play can do relatively good
animation, it's just that bad
Aesthetic of “crap” animation is better. Yay.
Commentary, interfaces to --Neil Cicierega,
inventor of animutation
other media (Johnson)
Self-referential
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“Making an Internet Cartoon Tutorial”
Keaton
albinoblacksheep.com
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II.
Emergent Aesthetics: The Parallel Histories
of Machinima and Second Life Fashion
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Machinima Basics
Videos shot in video game environments
Created almost by accident in 1994 with the in-game
record feature of Doom
By 1996’s Quake it had become a basic medium of
expression
Early uses: Recording gameplay, boasting, clan/guild
identity and dialogue
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Diary of a Camper [Quake]
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Machinima Styles
Ludic machinima
Gameplay prior, filmmaking and craft secondary
Cinematic machinima
Filmmaking, storytelling, production primary; gameplay often
but not always present
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Ludic: Pwned!
WoW funeral
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Ludic: Sports
Warthog Jump: A Halo Physics Experiment
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Cinematic: Skit
Internet is for Porn [WoW]
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Cinematic: Sitcom
Red vs. Blue [Halo]
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Cinematic: Music Video
Still Seeing Breen [Half-Life]
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Cinematic: Music Video 2
Big Blue Dress [WoW]
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Cinematic: Transgressive Art
To Heaven [Halo]
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Cinematic: Experimental Art
1K Project
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Two Generative Strategies
Feature gameplay
Comment on the games
Fuse gameplay and other cultural forms
Comment on mainstream society
Modernism/futurism: develop new forms that shock the
senses and enable new messages
Similarity to animutation in terms of bricolage and
commentary
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Dominant Characteristics
Demonstrate mastery of the game (cred)
Gameplay extends beyond the game, or, other media
are drawn into the game (boundaries blurred)
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The Rise of Virtual Fashion
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Virtual Fashion Industry
Second Life is a user-created virtual world
Only natural that users could create their own
look more radically than in the “choose your
face, choose your hair, choose your pants”
paradigm
People accordingly started making clothes
Over the next 3 years, a hobby (serious
amateurs) became an industry (serious
professionals)
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Avatar Design = Multimedia Authoring
Libraries (inventory system)
Body as 3D canvas
39 body “slots”
Layers: mesh, skin, underwear,
shirt/skirt/pants, outerwear,
accessories
Objects organized in space
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Creation of SL Fashion Items
Authored
From scratch
From primitives
From components
Usability problems discourage creating from scratch
Usability problems, flexibility, cost discourage from
components
SL fashion is a language built out of prims (WoW even more)
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The Message of SL Fashion
“Outfits” (ready-made and sold
collections of items) easiest (due to
management issues)
Diminished functional purpose to
clothing
Protection, modesty, immodesty
Stylization of the self. Leads to:
Fetish/subculture
Punk, goth, S&M
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Critical Language of SL Fashion
“I can hardly do anything but admire
the technical construction -- the lace
SL fashion blogs on what
tops of the stockings with hardly any
makes good fashion: distortion, stress wrinkles on the side
panels -- just fantastic.”
Looks great -- Second Style Fashionista
Technically savvy vis-à-vis SL’s
authoring capabilities
Conveys the right symbolic “Antonia Marat, Artilleri, brought
lifestyle out her Kats Coat [link] in 6
versions. Great for the chilly
Facilitates interaction
weather that’s a-comin’.”
-- Appearance Mode
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Disclosure/
Policies
X Seen in world
X Review copy
Friends list
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Common Characteristics
Made out of readily And comment on both,
available prims often as parody
Composited out of Inside jokes and reference
libraries onto a specialized to your microcommunity
technical canvas
All this with low production
Liberally borrow from quality
external visual languages
Fuse external and internal
languages for meaning
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III.
Out of the Subculture, Into the Mainstream
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Case Study: SWK
These emergent visual languages don’t just take from
the mainstream
They enter into dialogue with the mainstream
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Star Wars Kid Montage
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IV.
Researching Amateur Multimedia: Towards an
Agenda
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Summary of the Problem
Massive numbers of Not: Democracy,
dispersed users professional performance,
scientific discovery
Multimedia content is non-
textual Yes: Humor, inside jokes,
mindbending experiences,
Meaning emerges in cultural commentary from
microcommunities a “hip” small network of
peers, learn how to
Knowledge/information
improve at a game, wild
versus affect/experience
sex, self-discovery and
identity play
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My Strategy: Habitus or Sensibility
Stolterman’s “sensibility”: Bourdieu’s habitus
A developed a taste for It’s “a system of
a material’s special dispositions” that incline
qualities actors to perceive and
act in certain ways, a
A wine lover’s wine; a “feel for the game”
literature lover’s poem
It can be shared by
large groups (e.g., a
social class)
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A Hermeneutics of AMM
Understanding arises by fusing AMM participants’
habitus with the researcher’s
Philosophically problematic (sorry)
To cultivate this habitus, we need to understand and
participate in the “field of digital cultural production”
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The Field of Digital Cultural Production
“Field” is understood in Bourdieu’s sense
A socio-cultural-economic space of possible positions,
and in which actors must take positions
Good versus crappy animation, high versus low art, symbolic
capital versus economic capital, innovation versus least-
common-denominator, radical versus reactionary
You can participate in the field only if you have the right
habitus
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AMM Network Theory
Not simple networks, but networks of networks
SL fashionistas not only work in-world, but post tutorials/
fashion shows on YouTube, have MySpace-like sites devoted
to SL avatars, their own blogs, virtual magazines
Postmodern identity factories
Proliferating simulacra loosely anchored to the RL self
In corporate speak: Disaggregated identity
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AMM Critical Languages
Criticism
Complex systems theory
Emergent systems
Memes (elements of “cultural DNA”)
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Participating in Participatory Culture
Get in there and live it
Learn authoring tools as prerequisite for understanding
visual language
Researcher needs not to be a n00b
There is nothing worse online than being a n00b
Isolated from microcommunities, microvocabularies,
microintertextualities
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Conclusion
Authoring tools have a direct I offered here a vision of
and visible impact on amateur interaction criticism in the
multimedia culture domain of amateur multimedia
research as
This culture is making it into
mainstream culture Formation of the habitus/
sensibility
Therefore interaction design is
a significant input into Both scientific and critical
contemporary culture research into the field of
digital cultural production
HCI needs a discipline of
interaction criticism
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Thanks, Q&A
Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.
Human-Computer Interaction Design
School of Informatics
Indiana University
jbardzel@indiana.edu
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Bonus!
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