Last week, we discussed how coding and technology affects our perception of games and gaming culture. We read a number of articles and passages covering different topics, but the ones I’d like to focus on are Bogost’s Pelé’s Soccer: Platform, Sicart’s Queering the Controller, and Tveten’s Code is Political. Bogost had made the argument that older, simplistic games are sub-par and inferior to modern games because of their technological limitations. From our class discussion, I believe the common consensus was that, yes, the games were simplistic and technologically limited; However, if we look at the game for what it was capable of for its time, it turns out to be quite advanced and innovative. I feel its a pretty ignorant way to look at games, or anything for that matter, by deciding its value based on the present. Its like saying the sword was terrible and worthless because we have firearms now.

Another topic that was covered was the Sicart’s piece which argued that we should explore the controller based on pleasure. The article within itself was a bit strange to me and the sentiment seemed to be shared by a few other classmates. The author uses a lot of references to sex toys and pleasure to argue that we should look at creating a more emotional medium to the games we play as it will increase immersion. Overall, I felt the article was a bit off putting and that the message could of have conveyed in a easier fashion. While I don’t totally agree with the author’s “manifesto”, I definitely see the merit in exploring what a person wants and finds pleasurable when playing games. There have been similar notions amongst the corporate world on employee treatment. Traditional corporations enforced restrictive rules which push conformity while expecting the employee to give their body and soul to the company. In more recent years, many large corporations began encouraging employee health with fitness programs, flexible work hours, more paid leave and vacation time. By looking at what people want and what makes them happy, we have improved quality of life. So to some degree, I do feel there is a purpose to exploring what makes us happy when we use a controller.

Finally, we have Tveten’s article which argues that coding is inherently political because the common coding languages all use English. Personally, I heavily disagree with this article. One of the examples the author uses is how an Arabic-based coding language is incapable of reaching any lengths due to its inability to integrate with preexisting languages. Coding was popularized in the 80’s and 90’s in the US; despite the various nationalities and backgrounds of prominent coders, English became the common language to use. The language used in various code is arbitrary and not political. For example, “popMatrix () ;” by itself pretty meaningless is entirely meaningless to the average person. No matter how fluent your English is, you wouldn’t know that this function helps translate objects. The programming language, Processing, which is based on JavaScript, is simply utilizing English syntax to represent a built in function. If simply using a language makes something political, then couldn’t you argue this very blog post is political with imperialistic undertones because I’m speaking English. Then numbers and math would be political because most of the world uses Arabic numerals. Why can’t we all just use Chinese numerals instead? I feel the author is grasping for straws in this article with very little substance to back up their claims. Throughout the rest of the article, the author brings up coding languages like C+= and TrumpScript as evidence. These languages were developed by people who wished to use coding as their political soap box; it doesn’t mean that coding as a concept and profession is inherently political. On a similar note, a video was shown in class that argued on a similar vein. I didn’t quite catch the name of the video but it claimed that AI is racist because a facial recognition program had misgendered several black women. Coming from an electrical engineering and software background, I wholeheartedly know that it is extremely difficult to design and perfect AI. One of the pictures being mistaken had said the woman had a handle bar mustache due to the dark shadow from her smile. Such programs tend to struggle with darker colors, often mistaking them for shadows caused by poor lighting. The AI learns from evaluating previous pictures in which a common trend is for men to have shorter hair and defined facial features. The notion that the AI is inherently racist and the people who designed it are racist simply because their program isn’t perfect is ludicrous and down right insulting. I would like to invite the individual who made this claim to develop their own facial recognition AI that is perfect and flawless. It irritates me to know that these people who take risks to innovate and push technology forward are being falsely accused of racism simply because their program made a mistake.