A New Government Website

Twitter Quake

A local radio broadcast, "Caltech earthquake rumor shakes Twittersphere," shows how a rumor that "Caltech was sending employees and students home because seismologists were predicting a major earthquake was about to hit the Southland" could by magnified by dissemination on the popular social network site Facebook. Commentators pointed out that there were two significant factors to the story: 1) the fact that many local Twitter and Facebook users weren't exposed to the story might expose the weaknesses of these distributed platforms as a means for risk communication and 2) the fact that Internet fact-checking practices are as central to user behavior as uncritical message forwarding might indicate that the Internet may be as important for checking rumor as for spreading it.

Talking Turkey

I mentioned last week how lame this year's April Fools Day pranks from Google were. However, not all of their efforts worldwide were as painfully unfunny. Check out the Google Translate for Animals, which is supposedly available for the Android phone, to see videos for the fictional app.

Don't Give Up Your Day Job

Usually I find the Google April Fool's Day hoax at least an attempt at funny. Sure Google Romance, CADIE, and the Gmail Autopilot were certainly funnier than the overly corporate Virgle prank, but even Virgle had some geekitude going for it with all the Mars talk and science fandom send-ups. But this year's Topeka prank was just stupid and unfunny. It didn't even say anything particularly clever about the ubiquity of the Google name, and it felt like the worst kind of product placement. And the fact that so many cities have failed in their wireless initiatives without big corporate backers and that so many civic institutions and forms of governance are eagerly outsourcing their IT to Google hardly makes this gag about the slipperiness of the public and the private much of a laughing matter. As a spoof complete with city proclamations that makes light of the failure of government broadband, I don't think America really wants to get this particular joke.

Meltdown

The social advertising blog Osocio reports that Canada has shut down parody websites created by the anti-globalization and corporatization activists The Yes Men, which claim to announce the Canadian government's commitment to reducing greenhouse gasses. What I find interesting is to see the long disclaimer at enviro-canada.ca and ec-gc.ca from the service provider who was obviously complying with the government's directive under duress:

Serverloft blocked the IP-range for this server because of the content of the client's website and would only unblock the IP-range if we suspended the website. The website was used in a spoof by The Yes Men.

Serverloft blocked the IP-range without a warrant and without calling us and thus affecting servers hosting 4500 of our customers' websites until we ourselves discovered the problem, and convinced Serverloft to unblock. Serverloft did send us an email explaining that they would not unblock the IP-range until the websites were taken offline. The email was sent 5 minutes after they cut of the access to the mail server, so we only received the email after the 4500 websites were back online.

Convincing Serverloft that their systems had blocked access on purpose was hard because Serverloft frontline support claimed that all their systems were working fine and they therefore assumed that the problem was a configuration problem on our server. They refused to help troubleshooting the issue.

Serverloft could simply have called us and asked us to deal with the situation. We would then have asked the Canadians for a warrant. If the Canadians had shown us a warrant we would have taken down the site immediately. As others have pointed out the Canadians could probably just have gone through CIRA and have the domain suspended, which would not have affected any of the other 4500 websites.

This is much more than a simple 404 message and even includes a timeline of the controversy with background information and an excerpt of the e-mail that the company received from their hosting service, which claims that a phishing incident was the cause for the suspension. It also emphasizes a rhetorical stance of accommodation and rationality in the conflict.

The Ministry of Silly Walks

In an MLA session on "Links and Kinks in the Chain," the idea of the digital humanities as a kind of "Ministry of Silly Walks" was raised to illustrate the absurdity of attempting to group the idiosyncratic scholarly interests of a range of individuals into a single bureaucratic organization. In the discussion, Bethany Nowviskie also made a spirited defense of the importance of recognizing the labor of "hybrid scholars" who make important contributions to the digital humanities and embracing the spirit of "intellectual egalitarianism" in an honest conversation about status in the digital humanities. The line-up also included Laura C. Mandell, who is known for the range of her work from text-encoding initiatives to data visualizations, and Timothy B. Powell, whose work on Ojibwe culture I had seen earlier at the American Studies Association annual meeting. Much as Kim Christen has worked to keep cultural artifacts of her subjects in Aboriginal Australia off the public Internet, Powell has found himself questioning ideologies of openness promulgated by the digital humanities.

Last up was Jason C. Rhody of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, who discussed the challenges of overcoming the fiction of the solitary scholar and using both carrots and sticks to encourage people to collaborate on important initiatives like the Shakespeare folio project being undertaken by the Folger Library and a number of other institutional stakeholders. Rhody also discussed the importance of understanding that "infrastructure can be people" and not taking the contributions of librarians and computer scientists for granted. He cautioned that when it came to collaboration "2+2+2' might only add up to "3."

In the question and answer session Jason B. Jones discussed how his own campus had experimented with giving all students an iPod touch as a vehicle for course content, but the problems that arose when students were separated from institutional infrastructures in their non-wireless homes.

This was not the only session talking about the limitations and challenges of the digital humanities at the MLA. Earlier in the day in a session on "Making Research: Limits and Barriers in the Age of Digital Reproduction," other obstacles to utopian outcomes were also detailed. William Baker discussed "The History and Limitations of Digitalization" and grad student Elizabeth Vincelette pointed out how the hypertext party has been declared over by Alan Liu in a talk called "Moving Past the Hype of Hypertext: Limits of Scholarly Digital Ventures." Vincelette discussed how such projects might exploit the labor of graduate students, adjuncts, and OCR monitors and document scanners in developing nations. She singled out Google Book Search as a flawed privatized program that has been justifiably criticized by Geoffrey Nunberg and the issue of the theology surrounding Google that were first made explicit by Thomas Friedman. Graduate student and Tennyson scholar Jan Pridmore did not completely clarify the procedures in "A Proposed Model for Peer Review of Online Publications," but she did explain how her low budget, high quality site literaryhistory.com managed to produce so many pages and still avoid copyright battles with her large bibliographies of linked literary criticism. Pridmore singled out scholars like Marjorie Perloff for praise by putting so many of her scholarly essays online. On this morning panel only Kerry Kilner of AustLit played cheerleader.

As the Twitter archive of tweets from the MLA indicates, there was a lively backchannel. One of the "rockstars" of the twitterati was the man who was called "missing in action" by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Brian Croxall. Croxall's name appears prominently in the Twitter wordcloud above and his blog entry explaining his absence for reasons of poverty became a must-read.

Meanwhile, Twitter has also been a vehicle for the Twitter feed that complements the yearly MLAde send-up of Aaron Winter.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick's round-up of all the digital humanities playfulness and caution at the MLA is here.

Thanks to Mark Sample for the word cloud!

Update: More great data visualizations about the MLA for Mark Sample here. I'm only a small piece of the pie!

Would Rush Limbaugh Believe in Bonsai Kitty Too?

As the New York Daily News notes in "Limbaugh falls for Obama thesis hoax - but is in no Rush to apologize," the conservative talk show host obviously lacked the media literacy to spot fake content on the Internet. Apparently Limbaugh's staff fell for a satiric version of what was alleged to be President Obama's undergraduate thesis at Columbia in which a young Obama was supposed to be defending a radical redistribution of wealth. What's amazing is to see is the gusto for amateurism and swagger in the original source, "Obama College Thesis: 'Constitution is Inherently Flawed," which appeared in a publicity-hungry Blogspot blog called Jumping in Pools.

What's also striking about the story is the rifts in the conservative blogosphere that it reveals. For example, in contrast to Limbaugh's refusal to issue a retraction, bloggers at the National Review quickly acknowledged their mistake. And in a recent posting, Jumping in Pools takes on conservative mega-blog Little Green Footballs.

Acorny Sentiments

As a recent book on Digital Media and Democracy points out, Internet grassroots media production doesn't necessarily foster progressive politics. A case in point is the recent attention being paid to the online videos of James O'Keefe, who describes himself as an "activist filmmaker," while also using the language of Hollywood "credits" and work "directed, scripted, produced and acted in." Although his work at Veritas Visuals has been getting a lot of airtime on Fox News and other networks for seeming to show a pimp and prostitute being advised about how to falsify documents and hide assets in an ACORN office, he previously boast of creating "a series of undercover videos showcasing racism and statutory rape at Planned Parenthood in 2007 and 2008" and other work for Right.org. This piece on the "YouTube right-o-sphere" from TechPresident points out that equations between right and left-wing muckraking are part of the rhetoric surrounding the films. As one conservative media operative says, "I couldn't help thinking, this is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society." Even an interview with O'Keefe in the Los Angeles Times acknowledges that some might have merely been playing along with the spoof, which is one of the dangers of putting in such an over-the-top performance. Meanwhile the website of ACORN itself is dutifully recording its own investigations and censures.

Update: Now ACORN is suing the video's creator for unauthorized filming.

Morning After Danish

This viral video created by the tourist office at VisitDenmark.com generated a lot of public interest with its mix of a sentimental appeal involving an abandoned woman with a fatherless child and winking European sexual sophistication. Of course, there are already parodies like this one and this one and this one and this one.

Update: As you can see, the tourist agency is using a copyright claim that prevents others from seeing the content of their publicity stunt, which has since been criticized by cultural conservatives.

The Biggest Faker of All

Fellow Harvard Lampoon alumnus Andy Borowitz was surprised to discover his joke story in The Huffington Post, "Gingrich Accuses Sotomayor of Faking Broken Ankle," was circulated as a true description of the actions of the former Speaker of the House by credulous pundits in the blogosphere and was eventually picked up in news feeds. Now commentators from places like the Augusta Daily Gazette are issuing non-apologies like "Sometimes it's good to be wrong." Critics might say that the problem was that the gag about the Supreme Court nominee wasn't funny enough to be taken as humor, but for now Borowitz seems to ba having the last laugh.

Wake Up Humans

The ethics of the "Wake Up Humans" at Amnesty International Belgium are complicated. The campaign uses elements of alternate reality games that incorporate SMS messages, seemingly hijacked websites, and street theatre to generate interest in their human rights campaigns and lead traffic to their website. And yet the use of what is essentially a hoax to make a rhetorical point might seem to strengthen the claims of those who often dismiss concerns about the improper exercise of state authority as conspiratorial delusion.

Thanks to Osocio for the link!

Wikipedia Journalism

I've written before about the problem of what I call "Facebook journalism" and the fact that many newspaper reporters may be putting the print media in even greater jeopardy by relying on Internet surfing rather than talking to their actual subjects in person, so that newspapers become less likely to do investigative reporting than some online sources.

Now Ian Bogost has pointed out an article called "Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote," which seems to show how what could be called "Wikipedia journalism" could distort the historical record. After French composer Mauricel Jarre died, twenty-two-year-old Shane Fitzgerald seeded Jarre's Wikipedia entry, with a sappy false quotation that would be tempting for hack obituary writers to cite: "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear." Sure enough, a number of newspapers, including The Guardian, printed the quotation in their coverage of Jarre's death and didn't uncover the true source until Fitzgerald himself announced his deception. This kind of exploit could be even more destabilizing to truth claims the more that recursion comes into play, since a false Wikipedia fact could be cited in a newspaper story, and then the newspaper story could be used to source the so-called fact.

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

In "Wikipedia, Obits and Faking" a writer for the Washington post argues that this tendancy to not list sources is part of the obituary genre's emphasis on fluent narrative:

Colleagues of mine at the obit desk feel too much attribution ruins the flow of the story. At what point to readers want a good uninterrupted tale, and at what point do they need to know where the information is coming from?

Fitzgerald explains in an opinion piece in Irish Times how he hit upon the idea of an improvised research project while faced with "the arduous task of writing yet another essay on social science’s current fad – globalisation."

Ironically, the Wikipedia entry of Jarre's son Jean Michel Jarre is now slated for a radical revision to redres other kinds of sloppiness in the information presented about the junior Jarre's life and work as a composer. Fitzgerald himself has been added to Wikipedia, although the site's editors are apparently already considering deletion of his entry.

Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to challenge Wikipedia's dominance in market share.

The Riddle of the Sphinx

This weekend was the celebration for the 100th anniversary of the mock-Flemish castle of The Harvard Lampoon, which was designed by Edmund March Wheelwright. Yes, the Lampoon is, in a number of ways, a secret society, but access to digital cameras and Internet posting is changing its public face profoundly. For example, this Flickr set of the spectacle leading up to the party within the castle's walls, which was designed by my partner Mel Horan, represents just a small portion of the social media responses to the event. One of the musicians who performed on the Castle steps also recorded the event in her blog.

Not all digital citizens have warm feelings about the humor organization. A few years ago, Lampoon members participated in sending a fake e-mail that purported to announce that unpopular president Larry Summers would not be stepping down. The prank was derided by the magazine's publishing rival The Harvard Crimson. However, this coverage in Ivy Gate addresses the larger issues of Internet credibility raises that the stunt raises. (Apparently in excuting such pranks, Lampoon members have to resort to elaborate measures to avoid violating the university's computer use policies, such as typing in all e-mail addresses by hand.)

Who's Fooling Who?

This example of a supposed April Fool's prank shows the subject's familiarity with many aspects of the coming out video a distinctive YouTube genre that combines the channel's familiar webcam confessionalism and database surveillance with a communal affirmation of resistance to YouTube's normative sexuality, as an example of what Alexandra Juhasz has called "NicheTube."

I've been collecting other examples of YouTube videos about public affirmations of sexuality and coming out in this gallery, and I've been struck by four themes or features that come up in many of the samples I have found:

1) protests against online homophobia and the anonymity that fosters it
2) how-to advice about coming out as a step-by-step DIY process
3) reminders of the seasonality or occasional character of an alternative calender with Gay Pride Month and National Coming Out Day as singular and yet iterative events
4) rhetorical engagement with response, comment, dialogue, and debate that sometimes uses direct address to second person interlocutors

Political campaigns to legalize gay marriage have also created their own online channels with personal stories and first-person narratives about coming out, often featuring celebrities, which may superficially seem similar to the amateur videos online. But these commercially produced videos are fundamentally different from their vernacular counterparts because messages that follow the model of commercial broadcast networks obfuscate difficulties created by being forced to manage competing networked publics and insist that the social actors who are presented "stay on message" rather than address seemingly unrelated elements or personal conversations between vloggers that may be very germane to the surrounding rhetorical situation in which more home-made YouTube videos are often highly engaged.

Gotcha

In the Internet era, April 1 has a lot more cultural significance now that it has become associated with a set of rhetorical conventions involving pranks from large software corporations in which they tout parodic new products.



Introducing Opera Face Gestures is a comical look at a mixed reality browsing system driven by funny faces. If one attempts to download the software, one is told that the program is already installed and that one should hook up one's web camera and start making idiotic expressions as instructed in the step-by-step guide.

This joke might not be as funny to disabled people who are hopeful that such technologies could be improved to serve their needs.

At Google, Introducing CADIE takes the reader to a howlingly bad home page with dorky music, chaotic imagery, and cretinous animations. Much like the World's Worst Website that I write about in the Virtualpolitik book it serves as an inverse exemplar to demonstrate what not to do in web design. (The also have a similarly moronic CADIE YouTube channel.)

It's worth noting that the blog postings for CADIE on the page mention a Dr. Norvig, who is now director of Google research. Norvig achieved a certain amount of fame in digital rhetoric circles several years ago with his hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation. (Norvig allowed for an image from this imaginary slideware presentation by President Lincoln to be reproduced in the "Hacking Aristotle: What is Digital Rhetoric?" chapter of the Virtualpolitik book.)

The CADIE system itself is billed as a next-gen semantic web application that uses artificial intelligence technologies to emulate user-generated content

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

The gag continues on several other Google applications. There is a CADIE Google Maps page, for example with highlights from the Google geospatial universe emphasize. But the fake application that has been creating the most consternation is the Gmail Autopilot that supposedly analyzes the text of the user's e-mail and generates responses automatically to messages in one's inbox. Even a few somewhat gullible writing program administrators fell for it but later correctly identified it as an updated form of ars dictaminis for the digital era.

The more Gmail messages Autopilot can sample, the better. With fewer than 100 messages, there may not be enough data to calibrate Autopilot effectively. You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.

Several humorous samples of how such a system would work (or not work) are also provided.

Google also promises to provide an ELIZA-style chatbot for live chat as well. Of course, pranksters had to take the idea to its farthest possible logical conclusion:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.

Google presents the reductio ad absurdum of Geert Lovink's Zero Comments in which web users not only stop reading but stop writing as well, as they hand over the Internet to their corporate caretakers.

Microsoft probably thinks the day is no laughing matter as they try to hunt down the creators of the Conficker Worm set to cause mayhem today.

Update: Ian Bogost points out that Microsoft did get into the April Fool's game with its supposed new Xbox game, Alpine Legend. And those on YouTube also got into the act.

Do You Have Blackbeard in a Can?

Cathy Davidson of HASTAC points out a clever hoax perpetuated by a class at George Mason University in "Edward Owens, Pirate and Hoax: Shiver Me Timbers!" Apparently some bloggers were taken in by the story of "The Last American Pirate," particularly when students were playing along with stories of "finds" like the last will and testament of Owens. I particularly like the earnest peer reviewer who expressed the following disingenuous statements about the will:

This is AMAZING!! I wish I had found something like this for my paper. Most of my information for my paper is coming from interviews from people in the area. Which I think would be something helpful for your paper. If you need more help talk to the people in the area.

In addition to spreading the Owens narrative through blogs and person-to-person social media contacts, the group also concocted a Wikipedia entry about the fictional Edward Owens, which has now been corrected to reveal the hoax.

Of course, given how real-life classes are using blogs and wikis in collective intelligence projects that showcase the work of student historians, such as the Keywords for American Cultural Studies project, this hoax could be read in a number of ways, not all of them flattering to Web 2.0 teaching. The course had one of my favorite catalog titles,"Lying about the Past," taught by T. Mills Kelly, author of edwired.

Is Sarah Palin's Refrigerator Running?

I'm always amazed at the tendency of people to assume that material on the Internet is truthful. I would hope that readers of this blog, who would cite content from its electronic pages, would check to make sure that I really am who I claim to be, perhaps by checking a university directory or vetting me with other academic bloggers who know me from my face-to-face presence at conferences.

Nonetheless, as the New York Times reports in "A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence," a couple of Internet hoaxsters managed to convince not only pseudojournalistic bloggers but also at least one cable news station that a fictional neocon from the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy was the source for the leak that claimed Sarah Palin told debate coaches that she thought Africa was a country. Unlike the Hoover Institution, the Harding Institute's bare-bones website has several clues that it is a fake. Furthermore, literary bloggers at Shakespeare's Sister (now known as Shakesville) revealed months ago that this supposedly high-profile conservative expert wasn't the man he was purported to be.


Nonetheless, the multimedia campaign of the character that they had created, Martin Eisenstadt, with his own YouTube channel and blog, managed to take in a number of so-called journalists who were eager to have damaging revelations supposedly from within the McCain campaign occupy their cameras.

All the News That's Fit to Print

The nation's chief paper of record has already responded to the alternate reality spoof of its pages, which was described as follows in an e-mail today:

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war.

The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama's "Yes we REALLY can" speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)

The beginning of a subsequent e-mail reads:

Hundreds of independent writers, artists, and activists are claiming credit for an elaborate project, 6 months in the making, in which 1.2 million copies of a "special edition" of the New York Times were distributed in cities across the U.S. by thousands of volunteers.

Since I was teaching a unit on tactical media today, it was a particularly appropriate illustrative example. Ironically, Virtualpolitik pal David Folkenflik has also been reporting about how the former head of the NYTimes online, who turned it into a top news website, will be taking over the reins of NPR.

(Thanks to Vivian Folkenflik for the link.)

Never Forget as a PowerPoint

A mass e-mail with a chain mail admonition is widely circulating with this PowerPoint presentation about the Holocaust. It contains a number of very graphic images of corpses in the death camps that many might normally be filtered out by those concerned about NSFW or "not safe for work" content.

One recipient of the e-mail in the group I was in was skeptical about its message for reasons very different from those one would suspect from the Holocaust deniers who might dispute the truth of its historical information. (The PowerPoint begins with a photograph of Dwight D Eisenhower and his call for documenting the genocide of the Jews.) This person referred the group to a number of Internet resources that contradicted its claim that European textbook manufacturers were removing references to the Holocaust from their curricular materials.

It is mostly disturbing when the Holocaust is being used as a mean to spread false rumors.

Before taking for granted any suspicious information spread virally over the net I urge you to ascertain its veracity.

The fact is that the United Kingdom has NOT erased the Holocaust from its curriculum. Just Google "United Kingdom - Holocaust - Curriculum" and you'll find plenty of information dispelling this distorted piece of news. As Lenin once said "a lie told often enough becomes the truth!".

Here are some links:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/holocaust.asp
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/UK-holocaust-removal.shtml
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_the_UK_suspend_its_holocaust_curriculum.HTML
http://news.BBC.co.UK/2/hi/UK_news/education/6517359.stm
http://urbanlegends.about.com/do/historical/a/holocaust_chain.htm

Spore Sports

Like many households this week in which the much-anticipated game Spore has arrived, there's been nonstop creature-creation in our home on one of the laptop PCs, sometimes -- as this photo shows -- until the wee hours of the night.

It's certainly worth asking, as Ian Bogost has, "Is Spore for Everyone?", but to me there are at least two interesting pedagogical aspects to the game: what it teaches about science and what it teaches about international relations.

What does Spore teach about evolution? What does it mean to equate leveling up with evolving?

At a time when fewer Americans believe in the theory of evolution than any other time since my birth, it is interesting that EA has decided to release this high-profile big-budget game, which transports a potential political agenda. Of course, the worldwide market for the game would not be affected by the rising attachment to creationism among citizens of the United States. Phrases like "then human beings evolved" seem to appear as uncontested factual statements in public discourses in French, German, and Japanese and among the denizens of other English-speaking countries. Yet the company might be interested in capitalizing on possible controversy to move units, although the seeming right-wing blog AntiSpore: Resisting EA's War on Creationism was recently revealed to be a hoax.

Slate magazine recently ran a long piece about "Spore's Intelligent Designer" that argues that the politics of Spore's creator reflect both progressive and reactionary philosophies ant that the game may not necessarily be the book to Darwinians that it might initially seem to be, since many advocates for Intelligent Design have already latched upon the game.

Some pro-I.D. groups have already targeted Spore as a possible eduational vehicle. "It raises a lot of the questions we've been thinking about," Casey Luskin of the Intelligent Design Evolution and Awareness Center told me three months ago. "It has interesting pro-I.D. implications. ... I know of at least two video-game developers affiliated with this who are pro-I.D." Luskin wouldn't tell me who those developers were, but he did recently weigh in on the Discovery Institute's blog to list five reasons why Spore will destroy common objections to intelligent design. His conclusion: "Spore is a video game that is intelligently designed to allow users to create fantasy worlds where evolution really can take place."

The author also argues that the actual science of the game does little to teach the principles of the evolution of distinct species: not only does the game make "no room for random mutation, the real source of differentiation," but also "natural selection plays only a minor role." Certainly, I see certain Lamarckian tendencies in the game, although it does work against the fallacy of gradualism with its panoramas of punctuated equilibrium characterized by sudden shifts and massive extinctions.

As someone who has taught the Origin of Species, it seems that that little is also done with that tricky chapter on sexual selection, which caused such a problem for Darwin the Victorian patriarch who focused on the combat between males where survival of the fittest would depend on superior strength and obviously adaptive traits, and yet -- as a specialist in birds -- he could not ignore the role of female preference for particular kinds of mates, some with features that would seem to make them more likely to be subject to predators or less equipped for hunting and gathering.

(It is interesting that the religious right doesn't appear yet to be bothering itself about the number of phallic creatures that are possible to generate with the software and the plethora of sexual organs frolicking about computer screens with their gorgeous procedural animation. I personally would prefer to make one of these anti-DRM critters.)

How does Spore depict the exploitation of foreign peoples and their material resources?

As Celia Pearce points out, games like Civilization and Age of Empires often could be described as "sanitized colonialism" or "Disneyfied imperialism" in which the conquest of supposedly inferior people always maximizes your chances for success in the game and rarely produces any blowback. In contrast, players who follow the path of the warmonger in Spore often find themselves meeting unexpected forms of postcolonial resistance or unanticipated systemic failures as they attempt to subjugate others and cart away their valuable spices and precious goods.

Pearce and I are actually working on the preliminary stages of a research project about ideologies of war in videogames that should bring together her scholarship on player communities and group ideologies and my work in the Humanities Core Course teaching about the literature, philosophy, and history of colonialism and globalization. Possible topics for considering how these attitudes toward war and combat in game worlds are formulated include just war doctrine, rules of engagement, the definition of war crimes, preventative war theory, etc. I'll be presenting some of this work in a PAMLA session on "Violence and Representation: Epistemologies of War in Philosophy, Fiction, and Film" in November.

(Thanks to Robert Tercek for pointing out the link to the Slate.com piece. I haven't yet been able to play the game for myself for any extended period, so I'd be interested in exploring the supposed emphasis on religious practices in the game -- something my own kids seem to be ignoring -- which the article describes as well.)