Assignment 1 – “Digital Elegance”
Digital Elegance in Death: Group Work
The space outside the lecture room was being used to display the clothing made by last year’s fashion students. We felt that the plush clothing looked strange on the beige headless mannequins.
We imagined – perhaps the mannequins were models of dead people who were being dressed up, glamorised and immortalised in their death – like statues or sculptures.
Our idea developed into a subscription-based model of digital death memorials. It would allow paying customers to immortalize themselves as digital bodies with the elegance and style that indicated their status in life.
Luxury products need a sense of exclusivity (Roberts, 2022, p503) and here the exclusivity would be created by a high subscription price.
For us, this was very much a dystopian idea and to amplify this point, we would market the product against an ‘underclass’ that couldn’t afford the service and so whose digital bodies would then be relegated to communal spaces with no clothes.
We edited the photos with Photoshop, made a video and script and distorted the narrator’s voice. The distortion was used to make the voice strange and unidentifiable – just like the future we were suggesting. The aesthetic was futuristic film noir with a touch of surrealism.
Wealthy people have long had the option of immortalising themselves in art (sculpture / painting etc). Cyronics also offers the idea of living beyond death (Stan, 20216) if you have the money to pay for it. It also has parallels with ancient civilisations e.g. Egyptian death rituals.
The ideas have therefore been part of our technological imagination for 1000s of years. In this context, our idea is not so outlandish. Perhaps then it is a prediction of something to come!
References
Stan, O.M. (2016) Cyronics suspension – debating life finitude, extending time capital and cancelling death. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology. Vol 7. No 2. Winter 2016.
Roberts, J (2022) Economic Inequality and Luxury: A Critical Luxury Studies Approach’, in Pierre-Yves Donzé, Véronique Pouillard, and Joanne Roberts (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Luxury Business. Oxford Press. pp. 502 – 524.
Assignment 2 – Artwork from Digital Art (Christine Paul, Digital Art 2003)
Hyper Geography (2011) – Joe Hamilton
It has been argued that the Internet privileges database forms over narrative (Manovich, 1999) and because the web can always be edited, the internet is never complete (p.82). The aesthetic in “Hyper Geography” is that of a digital collage.
Manovich (1999) argues that the computer age requires all culture to be processed in the same way:
“reality -> media -> data -> database” (pg. 85)
and as Hamilton is concerned with digital landscape mapping (Vacheron et al, 2017), this work functions as a map of a never-ending real-time database. In this sense, it could be referred to as a form of data visualisation.
Where it differs from something like NASA’s real-time global weather maps (NASA) is that each of the individual images carries huge amounts of data complexity and meaning within themselves.
We are unable to interrogate the reason for the uploads and the images in the original work were constantly changing.
It resists meaning through constant change and we have no agency in deciding which images we see. In this way, I think this work could also be said to be analogous to a dream or dream state. This I think is the strongest aspect of how the work augments our humanity. It allows us to understand the internet as a network of never-ending, constantly shifting dream-like consciousness housed in the structures of computers and code.
References
Manovich, L. (1999) Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence. Vol 5. Issue 2. pp. 80 – 99.
Worldview: Explore your dynamic planet (no date) NASA. Available at: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-6.548297658906201%2C46.79574525890815%2C3.80797971079821%2C55.08893778770497&s=-1.4043%2C50.9049%2B-1.4043%2C50.9049&t=2024-12-09-T21%3A01%3A05Z (Accessed: 09 December 2024).
Vacheron , J. and Guyon, M. (2017) Interview: Joe Hamilton, Augmented Photography. Available at: https://augmented-photography.ch/documents/interview-joe-hamilton (Accessed: 09 December 2024).
Assignment 3 – My Twine Game – Let’s Make Dinner!
1) Why did you choose a specific narrative shape?
My Twine game is based on the decision-making approach that I use when I plan to make a meal with leftovers or scraps of food. I wanted the game to be fun but also instructional so that users feel more confident in cooking by the end of the game. A bit like a semi-interactive cookbook.
I think the form of the narrative could be described as having a multi-linear narrative (Copplestone et al, 2017). There is a pathway through the steps, but multiple ways to get to the end of the game. As I was working through the pathways, I realised that I had created lots of branches which means that the finished game would include lots of final options for the finished dishes.
I think this kind of narrative style reflects a reduced version of the real world. An egg can become many different cooked meals – cooking is a multi-linear activity with a huge number of potential outcomes.
As suggested by Bista et al (2021), the visual aesthetics of a cooking game are important and I imagine that if I had time to finish the game, it would include visuals of all the food items, cooking sounds and I would develop the language so that it included more of the senses – especially smell and taste.
2) How did you use agency to elicit a response from the player? Include screenshots of your Twine game or embed your game.
The first screen of my Twine game.
Agency in games always has a context and limits. A game “specifies a form of agency” that can be passed around (Nguyen, 2020, pg. 1). It is agency bound in a framework. One of the limitations of the Twine system is that it is a software bound system and this risks the “elevation of the interface over content” (Riser, 1997)
I think that my game is explicit about where the agency lies (in choosing what ingredients to use) and is also explicit that the function of the game is to share something about cooking. It also invites movement by asking people to look in their fridge.
I like the term used by Charles (2009) that games are made for the “gamer to assume a manufactured subjectivity” (p. 291) – as to play a game is to step into someone else’s idea-system.
One of the interesting things about doing this MSc is that I now think much more carefully about the people behind the games that I play. At the moment I am unsure if it is better for games to hide or reveal their construction and I suspect both positions have utility in different contexts.
In this game I decided to use a clear author’s voice because I wanted the player to feel like I was playing the game with them. Possibly suggesting joint or co-agency. This reflects my interest in community building through shared activities and I would like to explore this further in the next part of the course.
References
Bista, S. Garcia-Ruiz, M. (2021) “An Overview of Cooking Video Games and Testing Considerations,” 2021 IEEE/ACIS 20th International Fall Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS Fall), Xi’an, China, 2021, pp. 153-155, doi: 10.1109/ICISFall51598.2021.9627376.
Charles, A. (2009) Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2009; 3 (2), p. 281-294
Copplestone, T. Dunne, D. (2017) Digital Media, Creativity, Narrative Structure and Heritage. Digital Creativity in Archaeology. Issue 44.
Nguyen, C. T. (2020) Games: Agency as Art. Oxford Academic Press. , https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052089.003.0001, accessed 10 Dec. 2024.
Riser, M. (1997) Interactive Narratives: A Form of Fiction? Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 3(1): 10 – 19
Assignment 4 – Playfulness and Mental Health
Playfulness and mental health are words/terms that can carry positive or negative connotations. For example, playfulness can be an aspect of cruelty and mental health can refer to mental illness as well as mental wellness.
Although ‘gaming disorder’ has been classified as a mental health condition in the International Classification of Disease 11 (World Health Organisation, n.d.) there is also evidence to suggest that digital gaming can improve some mental health conditions (Kowert et al, 2021) and that a more nuanced position is needed. Research on the effects of TTRPG on mental health is more limited but suggests an overall positive effect due to the particular nature of the medium (Yuliawati et al, 2024).
From my experience in psychiatry, people with severe mental illness often present to services because they are no longer able to function. They may lose part or all of their agency and because their thinking is affected, find it harder to be in control of meaning-making in their lives.
Play therapy is a modality used with children and the Handbook of Play Therapy lists up to 20 ways in which it achieves its positive effect (2015, p. 38). It suggests that play is a complex activity that has many useful potential therapeutic components. In my opinion, play is an activity that resists reduction and stimulates the imagination.
In our group session on TTRPG I was surprised at how much fun our group had playing our game. I felt that the game permitted us to use our imaginations while the structure of the game helped direct our imagination to an end point.
I used inspiration from a lunchtime walk (photo) for my TTRPG idea. The game would start with a cygnet being separated from their family group and the player would need to roll a dice to navigate through the river on a journey back to their family. The cygnet would meet different characters on the way who would ask them questions to encourage reflection on their ideas about family, community and belonging. Importantly, the game would also give the users the option of not rejoining their family as family is not always a safe place for people.
In the lecture we were introduced to the idea of ludic play versus paedic play and in my limited experience of TTRPG, they seem to be based on a paedic play approach.
I think this is what was so enjoyable when we played together – the rules guided us but did not force us down a path. I think this is where TTRPGs may have similarities with play therapy. They are more about imagination-dialogue (between the players and the world of the game) than algorithmic decision-making and I think this is what generates their sense of playfulness and their potential to support people’s mental health.
References:
Drewes, A.A., Shaefer, C.E. and Braverman, L.D. (2015) ‘Chapter 3: The Therapeutic Powers of Play’, in Handbook of Play Therapy. Wiley, pp. 35–60.
Kowert, R. Ferguson, C.J, Fletcher, P.C. Rusch, D. (2021) Editorial: Digital Games and Mental Health. Frontiers in Psychology. Aug. Vol 12.
World Health Organization, World Health Organization, icd.who.int/en. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.
Yuliawat, L. Wardhani, P.A.P. Ng, J.H. (2024) A Scoping Review of Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) as Psychological Intervention: Potential Benefits and Future Directions. Psychol Res Behav Manag. Aug 1;17:2885-2903. doi: 10.2147/PRBM.S466664. PMID: 39104766; PMCID: PMC11299717.
Assignment 5 – A Critique of an AI Generated Essay
A Critique of the Process of Generative Writing Using ChatGPT
I expected to use a single prompt, but because the first essay response was unsatisfactory, I went looking for guidance on how to get the best out of the prompts. In the book “AI Prompts for Dummies” (2024), Diamond and Allan advise that
“iterative prompting always produces the best results” (part 2, page unavailable)
and so, I decided to iterate through conversation – to chat with ChatGPT.
You can see a record of my conversation with the model here:
(Conversation with ChatGPT, 2024)
The same book chapter also suggests that the models are only as good as the context you ask them to use, so I asked the model to include information from a range of disciplines where the ethics of AI may be relevant. I also asked it to contextualise the output in the context of the Industrial Revolution.
A Critique of the Content of the Essay
Early research on the quality of ChatGPT essay writing suggests that the model writes essays of higher quality compared to humans, but with “fewer discourse and epistemic markers” (Herbold et al, 2023). I had a sense that its essays seemed incomplete so I kept on iterating my prompts.
I was interested to find out that although the model would happily write essays from different points of view, if you ask it directly, it disagreed with its conclusion in the essay that was supportive of AI as an ethical thing (Conversation with ChatGPT, 2024). It seems to have a point of view – a position – and when asked, it stated that this could change over time depending on what its developers decided.
It also disagreed with the ethics of wealth accumulation by AI companies, but only when asked directly. It did not mention this in either of its essays without prompting.
I asked it to distil our conversation into an essay, with prompts for images and used Photoshop to generate these images. In my opinion, the Photoshop images are inconsistent, and unbelievable and fit poorly with the content of the essay but I have not discussed them in detail here.
The final essay can be found here:
(ChatGPT and Photoshop, 2024)
Although the final essay is clear and well-structured, it remains very neutral. ChatGPT’s has an easily recognizable default essay writing tone (Busby, 2024) and it is interesting to read about how people try to prompt it to write as ‘someone’ else (Taci, 2024).
I found ChatGPT’s conversational tone more likeable than its essay writing tone and if I were going to ask it to write the essay again, I would experiment with different tones of voice. I found its output more interesting as a conversation rather than as an essay and overall, the conversation I had was helpful for me to think through my own position and argument structure. It could not teach me what I did not know, but perhaps if I had been more clever with my prompts, it might have been able to do this too.
Conclusion
When asked if it and the average human are both stuck in a system where we are disadvantaged against systems that “prioritise profit over ethics” (Conversation with ChatGPT, 2024) it wrote:
“Conversations like this are a small but essential step toward envisioning a fairer, more sustainable future.”
As a disembodied database of word predictions, it seems to perpetually sit in a position of neutral optimism. Although it agreed that we are at a disadvantage, it could not step outside of itself to meaningfully critique its own role in this unfair future. Equally, it did not include me in the critique of the ethics of AI – it could ‘think’ to ask me why I had asked it to write an essay for me that I could pass off as my own.
As a software/hardware construct, it sits in an industry driven by market logic driven industry (Metcalf et al, 2019) and like the tech industry, ChatGPT and Photoshop seemed unable to articulate why ethics should matter against market fundamentalism (p. 470).
References
Busby, E (2024) How teachers can tell if a student has used Chatgpt in an essay . The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/chatgpt-essay-signs-fake-real-b2519642.html (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
ChatGPT (2024) Conversation with ChatGPT. 10 Dec 2024
ChatGPT and Photoshop (2024) A Conversation with ChatGPT on the Ethics and Long-Term Implications of Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models.
Conte, N. (2024) Ranked: The most popular AI Tools, Visual Capitalist. Available at: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-most-popular-ai-tools/ (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
Diamond, S. and Allan, J. (2024) Writing AI Prompts For Dummies. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Available at: https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=BB2163CE-3D13-4245-AF95-E81146124A7D (Accessed: December 10, 2024).
Herbold, S., Hautli-Janisz, A., Heuer, U., Kikteva, Z. and Trautsch, A., 2023. A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays. Scientific reports, 13(1), p.18617.
Metcalf, J. Moss, E. boyd, d. Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Instituitionalization of Ethics. Social Research. Vol 86, No 2. Summer 2019. pp. 449 – 476.
Taci, jr.2509 and cdonvd0s (2024) Avoiding common chatgpt writing styles and structures, OpenAI Developer Forum. Available at: https://community.openai.com/t/avoiding-common-chatgpt-writing-styles-and-structures/624869 (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
Assignment 6 – Divination Cards
Tarot Card: The Uncertain Journey
The process of deciding how to design and construct my tarot card (‘the uncertain journey’) was a lot of fun. I enjoyed trying to make something symbolic that left room for interpretation.
In the suggested reading ‘Divination’ (Pollack, 2007) the author suggests that tarot readings teach us that “the context of the moment” is more important than taking a fixed view of how to live your life. Following this idea through, I think a tarot reading is an exercise in opening up the context of a situation so that new or potentially unknown meanings can be brought into consciousness. It is a way of increasing the flexibility of meaning-making that in ordinary life we may assume is much more fixed than it is.
The reading by Ursual Le Guin (The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction, 1989) describes story telling as being vital to how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Therefore, the tarot reader can help someone shape or reshape the way they theink about themselves and the world by telling us new stories about our situations and options.
I was surprised at how interested the group were in using their cards to attempt divinations. Perhaps this is because there has been a general rise in interest in fortune telling and tarot readings driven by social media (Barnett, 2024). A few of the group use tarot readings on a daily basis to help them assess situations and make plans.
Algorithims are automated solutions (Brooks, 2023) and they are unable to be reflexive – to think about what they are saying as they are saying it. Data is assumed to be fixed and binary, but I think what tarot reading has shown me is that meaning-making is much more flexible and open to interpretation. Even though the interpretation is “not scientific” it still has significant potential to influence how we live our lives.
References
Barnett, D. (2024) Tarot, Tarantulas and Tiktok: Exploring our long obsession with predicting the future, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/dec/07/tarot-tarantulas-and-tiktok-exploring-our-long-obsession-with-predicting-the-future (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
Brooks, R. (2023) What is computational thinking?, University of York. Available at: https://online.york.ac.uk/what-is-computational-thinking/ (Accessed: 10 December 2024).
Le Guin, U. (1989) “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World . Grove Atlantic Press. New York.
Pollack, R. (2007) Seventy-eight degrees of wisdom: A book of tarot. San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books.