MDST*1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Hanging, Corrupted Blood Incident, Quantum Entanglement
Week 11: Scientific Looking, Vision and Truth, Television/Film/Video Games as cultural artifacts
-Because Scientific Imagery often comes with confident authority behind it in the form of images
made by “experts”, we assume these images are objective representations of knowledge,
whether we view them from through popular media or through professional publications.
-Our understanding of technology is mediated, to some extent, through cultural depictions on
TV, games and film. Science fiction (SF) gives us especially rich examples of this kind of
mediation where future technological advancements, not yet available in the real world, slowly
come to be normalized through the consistent depictions we observe through the media—so
much so, that when the real-life prototypes of formerly SF technologies are introduced, society
accommodates them quickly and unquestioningly.
-Interior Design, weapons, space exploration, transportation, robotics, wearable and mobile
technology, and computer interfaces have seen their evolution originate and evolve alongside
fictional representations within SF games and films
-What can be taken from their analysis is that design that is developed for real-world application
affects fiction, which in turn affects the way designers view technology, for example, long before
cell phones were invented, similar technology was presented within Gene Roddenberry’s Star
Trek world as ‘tricorders’—a device enabling characters to assess and analyze information in
their
environment such as global positioning. Perhaps Roddenberry was a visionary, able to
understand the shape of future technological advancement, but more likely, the developers of
technology took their cues from the world of Star Trek. This interplay between fictional and real
technological
development is an example of how fiction can shape reality.
Games in the real world and the real world in games.
-The design artefacts encountered within digital games (like weapons, maps and interfaces)
contribute to the development of systems of representation which can then be transferred to
other areas and disciplines, for example, in the game Mass Effect, the main character
encounters a lag-free communications device called the ‘quantum entanglement communicator’
described as
“two sub-atomic particles which are created in an entangled state, one of which is installed here
[the spaceship] and one is installed in the illusive man’s office [the boss], when one particle
occupies a given quantum state, its entangled partner will always take up the opposite state, no
matter the distance between them” (as quoted by Edi in the game Mass Effect).
World of Warcraft
-An example of a real-world application arising from game environments intended for play was
revealed in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft
(WoW). In 2006, a programming mistake allowed “corrupted blood” (a pathogen intended to
affect those players in a small region of the gameworld) to proliferate into the greater game-
world.
-In an article in the “Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal” in 2007, Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren
of the Tufts University School of Medicine said the “Corrupted Blood” incident “raised the
possibility for valuable scientific content to be gained from this unintentional
game error”—providing insight into real-world pandemics, and in 2009, Reuters published an
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Week 11: scientific looking, vision and truth, television/film/video games as cultural artifacts. Because scientific imagery often comes with confident authority behind it in the form of images made by experts , we assume these images are objective representations of knowledge, whether we view them from through popular media or through professional publications. Our understanding of technology is mediated, to some extent, through cultural depictions on. Interior design, weapons, space exploration, transportation, robotics, wearable and mobile technology, and computer interfaces have seen their evolution originate and evolve alongside fictional representations within sf games and films. Trek world as tricorders" a device enabling characters to assess and analyze information in their environment such as global positioning. Perhaps roddenberry was a visionary, able to understand the shape of future technological advancement, but more likely, the developers of technology took their cues from the world of star trek.
