Academia – Page 2 – My Life, or Something Like It

(Video)Games: A Need to Cheat

Along with the idea of fairness comes its necessary complement: cheating. Cheating is what someone does to give him/herself a more than even chance to win. At least, that’s what we most often call cheating.

When I happen to notice you attempting to draw universal attention to my little cheat, I am aware that the motivation for your sudden intensity stems not as much from your concern that I have broken a rule as from your feeling that I have somehow deprived you of your opportunity to win…

It is obvious that your concern with my cheating is biased in your behalf. If I’m doing something wrong, even if I’m in flagrant violation of the rules of the game, as long as you perceive yourself as winning, everything’s cool (Koven 24-25).

To what lengths will you go to win, to succeed, to overcome the technical rules of whatever game you’re playing to get a little bit of an advantage? Would it make a difference if the game enabled you to accomplish this task via embedded cheat codes? What do we make of sanctioned cheating vs. unsanctioned cheating? What if you don’t even know you’re circumventing the rules-as-intended?

When playing board or card games with friends, we already know the routine. Often “house rules” need to be established alongside “legitimate” ones, because we seem to have a predisposition to change games as they’re presented to us. We demand that our friends and family reveal their house rules before a game even begins, lest we find out mid-way through that people are actually not on the same page. What happens when you land in free parking in Monopoly? I’m sure we’d be very divided on the answer. “Wait, that’s cheating!” we’d be inclined to say, when our peers reveal themselves to be playing an entirely different game than us, while all looking at the same board. Some strange parallel reality where someone jumps up and stops you from buying a house on your second pass of “GO” in Monopoly.

It’s not surprising that this was a heated conversation in the board games subreddit, and spawned at least one thread trying to spin the ‘positivity’ of house rules. These are things we usually only find in board and card games, because (without mods or hacking), in video games, the code simply doesn’t allow us these affordances. This is thanks to Procedural Rhetoric, where game philosophy and developer ideological visions are written into the very laws which govern how the game operates. For example, when playing UNO on the Xbox 360 (or other ports), the kinds of house rules faced by this unfortunate redditor would simply not be possible.

The code would prevent such frustrations from occuring in a the videogame version of this card classic. Even when “house rules” are allowed, they’re usually custom-made and allow only for people to enter into the game acknowledging them in advance, with no room for mid-game shifts in playstyle. Even custom games in more recent first-person shooter titles like Halo or Overwatch, lay all the custom rules upfront–people know what they’re getting into. At all stages of these custom maps or games, players are often required to choose from what the developers have already accepted as “sanctioned” deviations from the norm.

This idea of customizing game rules and house rules within board games and their video game companions brings us closer to the question of what it means to cheat in games. The implementation and adaptability of board and card game house rules are perhaps more complicated than a handful of blog entries can address, but, I think we can safely look at why and how we cheat in our games through looking at some specific videogame history and case-study-style examples via the following series:

Academic References/Further Reading from the Series:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (2010)
Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play (2009).
Isbister, Katherine How Games Move Us (2016)
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure (2013)
Koven, Bernard De. The Well-Played Game (2013)
Pearce, Celia. “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright.” Game Studies (2001)

Through the Looking Glass

Popular media often serve as a reflection through which we view culture. Like mirrors at a funhouse, they can distort as much as they can show true. We’ve talked about it in class, and I’ve otherwise previously discussed on this blog (here and here), how pulp magazines can be interpreted as presenting a certain way of enacting American life. A very particular way of being a ‘proper’ citizen. As much as the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments served to train a population to see the world a certain way, so too did the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments reflect aspects of the world that already existed.

This week, we read topics on gender and race depiction in pulp magazines. While we have discussed these themes throughout the course, this week they take primary focus.

1889n4og4e6c5jpg — A mural from *BioShock Infinite*, featuring racial stereotypes of ‘undesireables’ and ‘societal moochers,’ that “proper” citizens of the game’s flying city of Columbia are supposed to protect against. This echoes a general theme of racist representations throughout the game, associated with the dominant white and affluent citizen body.

Nathan Madison explores racism in pulp magazines thoroughly in Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960. In particular, we read about “The Yellow Peril,” or rather the representation of stereotypes and orientalism within the covers of 1919 and 1935’s pulp magazines. Some of the imagery and quotations are quite jarring and unfortunately illuminating, not only for the cultures of the time, but also how long-lasting the tropes were. Towards the end of the chapter, Madison revisits the political nature of anti-foreign (particularly Chinese) climate surrounding these magazines from 1882-1930s. Laws prohibiting inter-race marriage, revoking citizenship from American women who ‘dared’ marry a Chinese man, limits to Chinese immigration.

He states on page 83:

In such an atmosphere, what do the stories found in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and the 1930s tell us about Americans, and, specifically, about their views of Asians and foreigners in general? It is difficult, and rash, to simply assign racism to such a time period that differs from the current in so many ways. One reason for this difficulty, aside from the error of attempting to impose early twenty-first century political correctness upon those living in the early twentieth century, is the contradicting evidence of racial tolerance, and even racial acceptance, on the part of many Americans at the time. For every act of the federal government that attempted to impose immigration restrictions, there was an outcry from many denouncing the racial intolerance such acts legalized.

Continually we return to the complex nature of history and scholarship. It is not enough to simply see these works and stories as reflections of rampant racism at the time. However, as Madison points out, the tendancies were there. It is hard to judge the past based on the morals of the present, and yet in many cases, I would argue, we should. As much as it ‘was different’ in their time, it does not mean we should forgive and forget what happened. In many cases these very damaging stereotypes and racial beliefs created an indoctrinating effect on the populace which persists to this day in many, albiet sometimes more subtle, ways. Amongst the stories that perpetuated the “yellow peril” within the pulps, others did try to subvert it, even to the point of having Chinese protagonists, even if stories like these were more rare.

world-war-2-propaganda — World War II Propaganda Poster

What concerns me about this side of pulp magazines is the overt propagandan nature of “yellow peril” narratives. Madison ends the chapter discussing how the discussion of “yellow” versus “white” races changes leading into World War II, thanks in part to a shift in a percieved gobal villain. He notes, however, that the legacy of this time continues much longer after the fact. We see the effect of orientalism repeat through a variety of funhouse mirrors throughout history, as people from the psudo-mythological East are demonized or exoticised to promote the master-narrative, especially in the contemporary U.S.A. these days. Propaganda narratives like the “yellow peril” catch like wildfire in cultural memory and have damaging effects on the landscape. When everything around you, from the news, to advertisements, to the entertainment you consume, tells a different version of the same story, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against it.

It’s insidious as hell, and exactly why diverse opinions and representations continue to be important in media, and in scholarship.

Today is International Women’s Day, and I cannot fathom closing out this post without briefly mentioning the looking glass mirrors of gender roles in pulp magazines. That being said, I’ll be brief, as I’ve talked about gender roles briefly before.

Much like racial tropes and stereotypes, the representation of gender roles and “types” of women are equally present within pulp magazines. While there are examples of women who break the mold, often women serve as narrative elements, part of the backdrop to serve the story’s progression. Object of affection, of scandal, of motherhood…representations of women in pulp magazines echo a much longer history of one dimensional or restricted depictions that women continue to fight against today. What I did find interesting in this week’s readings, however, was the fact that many of the writers and editors of the “girlie” pulp mags were in fact women themselves. While it is less shocking to read that women also made up a sizeable portion of the readership, I am curious as to the motivations of these women to participate in these kinds of narratives. I don’t care for the ‘morality’ of their involvement, but rather the desire to perpetuate stories of women they knew weren’t wholly true? Sex sells as they say, and I suppose writing as ‘an insider’ would provide that extra oompf that would rack in additional sales. Alas, as is pointed out, little about the authors and editors themselves is known, and tracking down any motivations for their involvement is unlikely.

All that being said, I get a kick out of the list of “do’s and don’t’s” for writing into Spicy Detective. “A nude female corpse is allowed, of course.” Naturally.

Screenshot 2018-03-09 at 12.46.35 AM — *Pulp Magazines Project –* “Birth of Girlie Pulps“

The sad part is, while things are changing in contemporary media, they haven’t changed all that much. Here’s hoping that as consumers of media, and as scholars, we can do better, with both race and gender.

Toying with Voyant

So over the weekend I ran a PDF version of our pulp magazine Amazing Stories through the Voyant Tools site. I’m a huge fan of word maps and it was pretty cool to see what kinds of words came up most frequently throughout our magazine in a graphic format.

Naturally, the leading character of a story gets a larger representation with “Calvert,” a term that’s used 177 times. That’s a pretty staggering figure, given the fact that the character only appears in one story in the middle. Much like my experiences with The Last Stand, it seems as though using names frequently is a commonplace feature of early 20th Century writing. Though I would be curious as to what a contemporary article or short story might show when run through Voyant.

Interestingly enough, “amazing” is only used 114 times vs. “stories” used 142 (next just after “Calvert”). I’m curious how many places amazing and stories appear. I couldn’t get the correlations tab to work to show me, but even still, it seems like a staggering amount of potential self-referential verbiage happening throughout the magazine. Similarly, by looking at this word map I would assume that either there’s a story about a doctor, or that Calvert himself is a doctor. In overlapping the frequencies of the words, this seemed to prove true.

While the frequency of “like” doesn’t surprise me all that much as the number one word, I am curious why “time” is the second most used word in the magazine. Ironically, “new” being the fifth-most used word I find rather hilarious, as it seems to be counter what ‘new’ would stand for. How many things could possibly be new within a single volume? Surely not 140 of them. What’s great is that “new” isn’t even concentrated at the beginning or the end, but rather has a few peaks and valleys throughout the magazine. Similarly, time is a constant (*laugh track*) throughout.

All in all, I think Voyant is a super interesting tool for tracking trends on the quick. If you can get past common words like “like”, and look for interesting ones like “don’t” (honestly, why is that showing up 104 times??), you can extrapolate some intriguing information. Similarly, if you uploaded a number of volumes of the same type of magazine, you might get some interesting linguistic trends across a magazine’s history, perhaps even track the rise and fall of terms. Overall a really neat tool.

It also creates some really entertaining mind poetry if you let your mind wander across the word map. Or perhaps I’m just struggling from too much cold medication.

New stories make amazing little good water;
Come doctor, feet people.
Man came days.
Joane eyes old know time.

Travel All of Space & Time – From Your Living Room

Stories have always been a way to travel without leaving your surrounds–gateways to another place, another time. Is this transportation affected by how we indulge in stories?

Over reading week I was tasked with a reading project, in efforts to recreate a modern take on reading aloud from a pulp magazine to a group. It was an enlightening experience.

It was my logic that as some people in the class were setting out to read aloud in an in-person group setting, I would try to recreate the experience over the web. A pseudo-recreation of course, as the people I would be reading to, and interacting with, would not be in the room with me. I tried to adapt in advance to suit this need, showing the document on screen with a picture-in-picture display of my face and the text, in addition to some other features. As often happens with these things, I was unable to anticipate everything.

To start, I set the mood as it were, by playing a “Steamboat Willie” cartoon as my opener. Normally I would do a countdown, but I figured some sort of cartoon would be a cute way to get as close to the 1913 era of the pulp magazine serial as I could. Along the same lines, I queued up a playlist of big band/swing music to play in the background as I read. Part of this was my own fear of reading against silence while in ‘entertainment’ mode, but also in part because I imagined that radios and music would be commonplace enough in historical homes, possibly even through reading stories together. Either way, I set things up, started the stream, and began my very awkward read through of the last part of B.M. Bower’s The Last Stand.

While some in the class read from the original book, the version I read on stream was from the FlipBook version from the Pulp Magazine Project. This led to a number of problems, mainly an issue of readabilty. Partially due to linguistic conventions of the time, and partially due to the layout of the text, the document was fairly difficult to read. I was out of my element, and had not read aloud in a long time. While I had streamed countless times, this kind of entertainment was different. There were no pictures to distract my audience and many, including myself, found things hard to follow for the first while. Eventually things got a bit more melodical, and I was able to get into the rhythm of the narrative. While we discussed this week that the inclusion of full names were a status symbol for the characters, I have to say, that after reading them over out loud countless times, I’m through with people being referred to with their full three word names after the initial introduction.

There were a lot of similarities between the other read-aloud group and myself. Issues in legibility, reading comprehension, etc. I was surprised to learn that they had taken longer than me to read the entirety of the selection, including a ten-minute break as I started to lose my voice. Perhaps it was because they swapped who was reading back and forth, perhaps I read too quickly. Streaming did result in some interesting complications and improvements, however. I found that I was able to make commentary as it happened. I could voice my opinion about the story, the characters, or my fumblings and capture it candidly (as you can easily see in the above video). I was also able to pause at will and address the Twitch chat, or include their feedback into my commentary. Their voices were unobtrusive as the text cleanly popped up on the side. If we were in the same setting, their comments could have been lost or withheld, out of fear of interrupting. This way, they were perserved as they happened, and could be addressed when the timing was ‘right.’ Similarly, this method gave me no marker of my audience. Without facial reactions, I didn’t know if I was going too quickly, or too slowly, unless people spoke up about it. In-person you could gauge your audience and adjust accordingly.

Ultimately, this experience allowed me to reflect a lot on what it meant to read a pulp magazine, but also to read aloud in a group at that time. While I nearly lost my voice (and in truth my throat hurt the day after), I wondered if such a thing would have been passed around in a family setting to prevent such a thing, or if voices would have been accustomed to longer periods of reading at that time. Would pictures have made it more engaging for my audience? For any audience? How would have ‘city folk’ reading this story related to the tales of the wild west?

As we discussed in class, the serial in the pulp magazine, later a book, was one in a series of stories about “The Flying U” band of cowboys and their ranch. I imagine that contemporary readers of this publication would have been much more invested in their stories, and would have taken to binge-like behaviour to absorb more information about the fictional world. With more limited access to entertainment at the time, particularly affordable entertainment, I would wager the audience of the time would have been much more captivated as well.

Ultimately learning more about B.M. Bower also endeared me to her writing further. Like I discussed in Gendering History, an acknowledgement of female writers and of female participation in the Western genre has been sorely lacking, if not ignored, in scholarship. Learning that Bower fell victim to this in her own time was heartbreaking. She was successful after a period of personal strife, yes, but she could have been even more so, had there not been such a fear of being ‘outed’ as a female writer of Western stories. My change of heart, also highlights the importance of taking cultural contexts into consideration when doing academic work. It’s easy to dismiss something you don’t personally like or aren’t interested in, but when doing academic studies, it’s important to look at works holistically–to understand them from as many perspectives as possible.

I’m interested in giving her a second shot. Just because the last quarter of The Last Stand isn’t for me, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be had in the Westerns of the time, particularly such a popular pulp writer as Bower. After all, I love me some Sci-Fi Westerns.

I may just have to avoid reading them aloud in the future…

Imagining Text

It’s not surprising that in our contemporary minds, graphics matter. Over the years we’ve seen a steady increase in getting the biggest, best picture we can get for our visual screens. 4K resolution screens, virtual reality, and augmented reality technologies are changing how we view and interact with narrative. Not long ago, however, things were much more low key.In fact, for millenia, humanity utilized a much more limited toolkit for expressing ourselves visually. While the methods for visual representations have continued to evolve over time, the fact remains that even the earliest cave paintings tell stories–stories of everyday life, of existance.

There’s a great deal of scholarship involved in the art of visual rhetoric–how we use graphical tools to transmit specific messages. Sometimes, the images themselves convey the message, othertimes, the message comes alongside the image. In this case, text and image interact with one another to create a more rounded version of the message.

As industrialization progressed, and pulp magazines were established, we see an increased use of graphical accompanyment alongside included stories. In Sillar’s chapter “Illustrated Magazines” from Visualisation in Popular Fiction, he challenges scholars to look at the relationship between images and text–how does their blending contribute to our expeirence of reading? To the overall ideology of the magazines? (76) Quite often, included images do not depict the entirety of a story, but rather highlight specific moments, often climaxes or otherwise dramatic situations. While these may have served to draw in potential readers with flashy renditions of narrative elements, they also served to enhance the stories themselves. While this may not surprise modern audiences, inondated with pop up ads, GIFs, videos, and flashy graphics infiltrating stories read online, graphic inclusion in pulp magazines would have been a vastly different story. While cover art and advertising images were commonplace, not all stories were given a graphical counterpart. Rarer still it seems, at least in the magazine’s we’ve surveyed thus far, was it for stories to be given more than one graphic, if they were given one at all. While covers drew readers into a particular story, increased use of graphics in other areas would help to engage readership further, and perhaps, produce repeat customers.

“The Sunken World” *— Amazing Stories Quarterly,* Summer 1928, p. 297

It’s interesting to consider how print technology changed alongside the earliest days of pulp magazines and throughout their run; the cultural elements that went alongside what kinds of images were or were not included. It is here we again see an artifical divide between high and low culture. As Mussell discusses in Chapter 2 of The Ninteenth Century Press in the Digital Age, while both ‘proper’ literature and pulp magazines utilized versions of woodcut print technology, woodcuts/wood engravings for pulp magazines were considered vulgar and quick. Conversely, wood carvings were considered high art forms that took longer to produce, and thus matched the cultural strata of “real” literature. As culturally low as woodcuts may or may not have been precieved, their inclusion in pulp magazines (and later hand-drawn graphics) opened up a wide array of new options for would-be readers. In addition to a likelihood of increased engagement (after all, who doesn’t love pictures), they also helped to make each magazine more unique by developing an art style. Like Sillars suggested above, images produced in these magazines contributed to the ethos of the magazine–who they would market themselves as and who they would market to. Pictures also allowed for individuals to engage with the material who struggled with reading the stories, or perhaps couldn’t read at all.

In preparing for class this week, I was struck by just how much my opinion of an image could change how I read or understood a story in a pulp magazine. While the image I chose to work on was relatively simple, it depicted a very specific climax of the story. I made note of what I could “read” in the image before actually reading the story, as well as a reflection after the fact. In truth, on its own, the image did very little to entice me to the story, but its inclusion gave me a lot of things to reflect on after the fact. Beyond my own analysis, I was even further impressed at how versatile such an image was for engagement throughout the class, as multiple people had chosen this image for their own analysis. While some of us struck the same chords, there was a lot of variation in how the image affected our individual perspectives.

For me, the image served more to reinforce the ‘moral’ of the story, which appeared to be governed by a less-than-covert warning against rising above your station. Aristocratic/Upper Class woman rises too high into the clouds, sees a ghost, tumbles nearly to her death, and vows never to fly again, lest she ‘go too high.’ There’s safety to stay within your means. The woman in the image is clearly finely dressed, and flying at the time of this publication would have been exorbitantly expensive. Before reading the story, consumers of this may have understood that the main character was upper class based on this image. Further still, the moral of the story, may have run louder because of it. If a woman of high stature can fall to this, perhaps I can too? Perhaps I should be more cautious?

All of this of course, goes along with the idea that pulp magazines cultivated particular cultural goals for their readership to consume. Ways to be proper citizens, proper men, proper women. I digress slightly from the goal of this post, but stereotypes and cultural roles would have been just as enforced in the artwork that surrounded pulp magazines, as their printed stories and ads would have. Different images would have conveyed different messages, but for the time and cost involved in image inclusion, we can be sure the messages were deliberate. Who was in charge of creating the message, or what message was intended, however, is an intriguing question worth pursuing in this area of study.

Gendering History

If you’ve even dabbled into the discussion of gender and history, you’ve more than likely stumbled by a mention of a lack of female representation in the documented past. It’s something that’s come up in pretty much every course that deals with the past throughout university. Documentaion of women’s affect and even their presence in history is lacking because they just weren’t the ones who were writing it down.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Women were writing, and they were participating in documentation, but not quite as much as their male colleagues. Additionally, it was only usually women of power or money who had any time or ability to write anything at all. We see this even as early as with Sappho, the ancient Greek poet. She was a wealthy citizen, and as a result, had the privilege to leisure time and thus was able to write. While there are very few documented female voices in history, there are even fewer of the average women who would have lived alongside their much more represented male counterparts. Even when women may have written their perspective, carved their story, or have been celebrated in their time, historians have traditionally washed away female participation from the record. Anything which presents women as vocal individuals in their own right, in their own lens, detracts from the male domination narrative you see.

It’s not all that cut and dry, however, as there are plenty of women’s studies and history classes to teach the messiness of such a subject. Where we can tackle however, is something that we discussed in class this week, namely the male-washing of the Western genre. While industrialization allowed for more and more women to gain access to reading and writing, the legacy of their participation in the literary market would go overlooked.

As we discussed in class, the Western genre in its earliest days, when looking at the pulp magazines themselves, had high female engagement. Not just in reading either. Women were writing stories too. While scholarship on Westerns focused on literary sources, skewed towards male authors, the truth remained that the Western genre developed through simultaneous and mutual involvement in the genre. It’s no surprise that in the 1950s and 60s, eras desperately trying to embolden gender roles against an influx of new thinking, that scholarship would erase the presence of female participation. Naturally, it would seem to them, women would have come to the genre only for the romance. Women didn’t want to see the guns or action stories, nay (or perhaps neigh), they only wanted to read about stories where subservient (or perhaps wild-then-tamed) women fall in love with dominent men and start a new life in the West. They couldn’t possibly be interested in the same “men” stuff *insert chest bump here*.

Does my sarcasm read strong enough? It’s so incredibly infurating as an academic to look back and be faced with misled and unfounded historical scholarship. We are now taught to look at the entire picture. To preserve all that we can about a text or an artifact, in hopes that even if we can’t analyze the whole picture, someone, someday, might. When faced with situations like this, one cannot help but be infurated by the scholarship of dominant male authorities, which changed official analysis of history to fit their own goals. Nevermind that the female-driven/written pulps lasted longer than their guns-blazing counterparts. Nevermind that the blended magazines came first. Nevermind that women had any active role whatsoever.

I regret that I’m getting fired up about this more than I intended to, but it strike a chord with me. I have, thanks to my training through a very forward-thinking parent, I’ve always grated against imposed gender roles. Why should boys get all the fun stuff? Women have always been interested in things beyond romance and beautification, but because gender roles (albiet ever shifting) shame them for it, they either train themselves not to be interested, or find an excuse for something societally acceptable within them to like. It makes me hurt, not only for contemporary audiences and issues, but also for the women in history who have had their voices silenced or ignored–or worse yet, attributed to a male counterpart. There is a place for everyone in this analysis, in this field, and it’s up to us to go back and return life to those who we can find within these pages. To give back credit where it is due, and to change scholarship on history to better represent the truth of gender (and race) participation.

I’ve visually referenced Westworld twice in this post–a brilliant TV show (which if you haven’t watched it, stop, drop, and binge it all right now), created by the joint efforts of a male and a female, produced by a female, and containing an amazing cast of strong-willed, well rounded, and well-written female characters. In the sci-fi/western/drama category, it’s everything an inclusive audience should want, and it’s no wonder it was critically recieved accordingly. It deals with complex issues of romance, action, drama, abuse, artificial intelligence, ethics, free will, and consumerism (alongside so much else), against a backdrop of stunning visuals, breathtaking sets, and a moving score. It’s a show, for me, which proves that Westerns can be for everyone (well, except maybe not kids in this case). I can only imagine, that in the age of pulp magazines, a well written Western would have the same effect on its audience as Westworld has today. A good story need a blend of a variety of elements, and the best way to accomplish that would have been to incorporate blended perspectives and angles into a magazine.

If for nothing else, the lesson of male-washed Western genre scholarship calls for us to use a critical eye when looking at other pulp magazine genres, as well as literature more broadly. Just because it’s not obvious, or its been overwritten, doesn’t mean female voices aren’t there–that female participation isn’t there. Sometimes you just need to dig a little deeper, find meaning in the blank spaces, and help to try and uncover what history has tried to erase. We cannot hope to move foward in our own scholarship, if we continue to accept ingrained and perpetuated biases about the people we study.

The cycle has to end somewhere, why not with us?

The Good of the Many

After class this week, I was elated to receive our pulp magazine in the mail, timely and well-packaged. I slipped it carefully out of its protective sleeve of cardboard and plastic, before gently flipping through its pages. Hints of stories to read flashed before my eyes as I gingerly touched its fragile pages. Then it struck me, I needed to document this magazine–to scan its pages, and upload them to the PMP. While I had known this all along, I was suddenly disheartened. The well-preserved mag possessed a very deliberate spine that didn’t seem to want to give way, even to read it wide open. Conservation would be troublesome at best, and I feared that I would have to break the spine in order to scan it properly. What is lost in breaking the original so that a digital copy may live?

A very à propos question to be sure, following our discussions from this week. What is lost in the digital preservation of pulp magazines? What is gained? We spent a great deal of time analyzing the ways in which scholarship and individuals could benefit from a database like the PMP. For my MA thesis I spent a great deal of time looking at archaeological artifacts and 3D replicas. In order to do this, I analyzed the semantics and meaning-networks of ‘originals’ vs. their digital replicas. While my thesis was focused on actual material replicas, I briefly touched upon purely digital replicas as well. Mass-access, availability, and production were all benefits to such a phenomenon. While not going into the ethics of digital replication (mainly of cultural objects you may have no authority to duplicate), I came to the conclusion that the benefits of digital reproduction and preservation outweighed the costs, at least for educational purposes. Most relevant to our topic this week however, I found that meanings and that something extra held within an original artifact only has meaning because we give it meaning. While something can be argued for seeing ‘the real thing,’ many people would not know any different if presented a reliably produced replica. While the old must of a vintage pulp magazine may be hard to duplicate, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were propmasters who could come up a solid approximation for the layperson, which would be indistinguishable, save for perhaps having them side by side.

Suffice to say, there are dangers to certain kinds of object-replication. In the case of the PMP, and something that never occured to me before I held one in my hand, is the potential need to break the spine in order to accurately scan the magazine. In this way, the original is broken, is altered due to digitization. My research explored non-invasive digitization of artifacts, and as a result, this adds an entirely new element to such a study. Do the scales shift when the act of digitization destroys, or at least alters, the thing we’re trying to save? Does the good of the many [scholars] outweigh the needs of the few [magazines]?

FLASHFORGE_Flyer_FRONT — 3D Replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace

I have to say I’m philosophically at a loss as to the most correct answer in this regard. My inner archaeologist wants me to preserve the original at all costs. That being said, my inner scholar would rather see it digitized before the original crumbles to dust. That’s the thing about paper objects versus stone tools or clay pots–they deteriorate so much faster, and are in so much more need of early digitization to preserve their integrity. It would seem to me that in this case, that Spock was more correct than Kirk at the end of The Wrath of Khan. Sacrificing the physical integrity of the original object for a prolonged digital life, feels as though it’s the right thing to do. The paper copy will ultimately fade and fall apart, even with perfect preservation. It will deteriorate. Pulps were not made to last after all–it’s a miracle we have as many as we do. A digital replica, at least we hope, will never fade beyond the moment the original is scanned. It can be transmitted, duplicated, and shared without fear of lost pages or damages. In an ideal world, one can save both the magazine and create a perfect replica, but I have yet to see if we can pull off a proper Kobayashi Maru. Or are we, like Starfleet officers in training, meant to accept defeat for the greater good?

It seems to me that it’s good our group chose sci-fi after all. It has so much to teach us.

That feel when…

You receive your 1936 Sci-Fi pulp fiction magazine in the mail at last.

With only minor (and careful) flipping through of the issue, I’m very excited to get engaged with it. I think we made a good choice.

Also, there’s a literal story about “gaslighting.” However, it’s quite literally about the history of Gas Lighters (by the looks of things). And let’s not forget the existence of a circa 1930’s science questionnaire. I’m hyped.

Ready to Party

Things got a little more lively this week as we started to really get into thinking about how to analyze pulp magazines. Class discussion was fruitful and I was very engaged with how much people pulled from the day’s readings. While we covered both Christine Bold’s introduction to The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Vol. 6: U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 and the introduction to Mussell’s Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age, we spent the majority of our discussion working through an anatomical study of Popular Magazine, where people got really into things.

Something that came out of our discussions, which I really carries forward from my initial topic area last week, is the problematic history of pulp magazines. In class last week we discussed the origins of pulp magazines in Dime and Nickel magazines, which were predominantly of a “dangerous” and “sensational” variety, governed by a white and male master narrative.

bioshock_history_2 — One of the many areas where racial tensions are highlighted in an alternative history setting in *BioShock Infinite.*

Pulp magazines, coming out of this tradition, had to struggle to establish themselves as a quality source of reading material, away from the juvenility of the Dime mags. As we see in pulp magazines however, this was not entirely possible to get away from, as a lot of the master narrative elements continued. This is something that is picked up in BioShock Infinite, a game that explores issues of race and class extensively, mirroring issues of the pulp magazine era, while forcing us to analyze our own cultural perspectives (e.g. as explored more fully by Waypoint or HowManyPrincesses).

For now I’d like to hold off on the contemporary comparisons to pulps, and instead focus on the analysis of pulps themselves. As demonstrated by Bold, pulps historically fell into a low culture motif, despite their attempt to remove themselves from the Dime and Nickel days.

While this worked, somewhat, to elevate their cultural status, the dichotomous approach to culture remained a dominant force in their ‘place’ in the world — including in academic study. While ‘high’ culture is as much culture as ‘low’ culture, the social elites have continued to try to defame ‘low’ culture in order to keep social groups separate. This has been a problem for academic study in particular, as often ‘low’ cultural elements have trouble being studied in any depth–believed to be lacking any cultural relevance. Naturally, this is far from the truth.

With a large surge of literate Americans and ease of access to printing via the industrial revolution, pulp magazines became a tool of expression for the public at large. This was not without some sort of control however, that as much as pulps were avenues of expression for the non-elites (especially as more sub-genres developed), so too did they serve to normalize and establish a desirable master narrative of Americana. We saw this clearly when we performed an “anatomical study” on The Popular Magazine from December of 1908.

In this early pulp magazine we found a steady theme of adventure…but only so far. Quite frequently the stories in the magazine conveyed a sense that adventure can be found anywhere for the everyman–even just outside of the city. It is oriented towards this everyman, who is capable of reaching his own potential, if only he tries hard enough (read like traditional Americana or what). The advertisements (at this time) reinforce this theme, with promotions of becoming a better business man, family values, as well as patriotism and nationalism, naturally. This is quite literally laid out at the end of the magazine, where “A Chat With You” leads potential writers into how they should tailor their stories for the magazine. Underpinning these normative performances, we also see simplified and stereotypical representations of People of Colour and immigrants–quite often negative ones at that.

Finally, we took to buying our very own pulp magazines. Searching the e-racks of Ebay, we tried to find an authentic, interesting, and affordable magazine to call our own, and to document for the rest of the term. As a group, we readily decided on a sci-fi theme, as the stories they promised were sure to be entertaining, if only just to see how people saw the future. Luckily, we had a lot of potential options, and settled on a copy of “Amazing Stories” from the mid-1930’s. Sadly we weren’t able to get a synopsis of any of its contents but its cover alone was enough to draw us in. Some sort of squid people rolling people in a Christmas-ornament style orb–what isn’t to love? Here’s hoping its as interesting as its cover suggests–but wasn’t that the hope of all pulp cover art? To draw you in? Well, this one surely has us hooked, and luckily, it follows a nautical theme with “The Maelstrom of Atlantis.”

I’m ready to dive in.

Breaking into Pulp Reading

I have always been a fan of detective fiction, mystery, and sci-fi novels. This has extended to movies and video games that delve into these topics from a variety of levels. For me, pulp fiction magazines highlight some ways in which these genres came to be developed in a different, more easily digestible, way.

BioShock Infinite Ad — Advertisement from *BioShock* Infinite

In particular, some of my favourite games feature art, themes, and graphical styles based on the same styles seen in pulp magazines (BioShock series, Fallout, etc.), and there’s a

real movement towards narration or satire based on the themes originated in pulp. I would love to trace how some of these things are enacted and developed in pulp magazines, versus how they are manifest in video game contexts. I am curious to see if the tropes and imagery are blatantly pulled from these precursors, or if they are used and adapted to fit the motivations of the game. I know in many cases the themes are adapted, but I am sure there are places that are near recreations of pulp-styles. It’s also interesting to consider how pulp motifs play out in a video game setting, that is often the opposite of quick and digestible.

In considering this possibility, I spent a great deal of time pouring over various magazine covers from the Pulp Magazine Project (PMP), and doing a visual overview of various art and media messages found in the BioShock and Fallout series. It was of no surprise that there were a lot of similarities in advertising and message. There are a ton of background advertising stills, videos, and audio clips played throughout both the BioShock and Fallout universes–aimed at creating a very specific type of atmosphere. It is at once ‘nostalgic’ but also a little surreal as they both take what’s familiar (Art Deco, 1950’s suburbia, etc.) and twist them to fit the worlds they want to represent. We buy in because we recognize these cultural markers, but we are carried along by how those markers are shifted and inverted to show us entirely new and often self-reflexive perspectives.

One of the things that I enjoy so much about these worlds, and why I find them so important for informing my study of pulp magazines, is that the visual motifs used from these video games are derived quite deliberately from the eras that pulps come from. Not only do they play on nostalgia, but they outright present alternative history representations of the same visual style.

“[Developers] also [make] use of a game’s atmosphere to support narrative–the architecture of the cities, the ambient conversations of the citizens, the advertising of the time period” (Fast Company).

In developing BioShock Infinite, the third BioShock in the series, creator Ken Levine “…was drawn to the time between the Civil War and World War I, a time of scientific progress that saw the development of electricity and the telephone but also religious belief and nationalism. Specifically, he cited, ‘Devil in the White City, which is a great book about the 1893 World’s Fair, and then certain movies give you a feel–There Will Be Blood gave me the weird vibe of revivalism and frontierism'” (Fast Company). As Levine highlights, movies like There Will Be Blood or tv shows like Downton Abbey sensationalize and stylize the eras these pulp magazines represent. They create a feeling–a feeling that I experience simply by looking at the real covers in the PMP. I’m curious if that feeling is because of the pre-conceived cultural understandings I have of those eras, or if any impression is at all factual.

From a more technical angle, I’ve always been interested in typography and layout in magazines, print media, and advertising of all kinds. I would also be interested in exploring how pulp developed their genre visually and typographically. What threads exist between sub-genres, and how do those tie into larger visual symbols.

While we ultimately discussed in class that advertising could not necessarily be tied to a sub-genre of pulp magazine due to mass-sales of advertising space across a publishing company, it remains interesting to see what kinds of advertising entered into pulps at all. What did companies think the readers of pulp wanted to buy? What did they want them to buy? What can we learn from their sales attempts (including how advertisements are placed throughout a magazine, etc.).

I’m excited to find out.