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Art of the Pan-Opt-in-a-Con: FarmVille and the Gamification of the Digital Landscape [Original: The Tyranny of Completion; Or, How Electronic Art Can Engage the Firehose]
Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:20
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Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.
Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.
Alisa Nikolaevna Ammosova - 29.09.2021 - 00:05
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Fall 2020 Editors' Note
Last March, halfway through assembling the Spring 2020 issue of The New River, we had to adjust to a fully online mode of collaboration. Between then and now, though a tremendous amount has changed, our mission has remained the same. Since its foundation, The New River has devoted its platform to emerging and established artists exploring the intersection of digital art and literature. The COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on what it means to run a digital journal, especially at a time when so many of our daily interactions and responsibilities have, by necessity, shifted to the digital realm.
The work we have selected for our Fall 2020 issue helps us come into a deeper understanding of how this current period of crisis strips bare long-standing inequities and injustices, calling us to exercise a cache of empathy and compassion we might have never known before. These pieces demonstrate how art can be a guiding force through even the most turbulent times, pushing us beyond our private quarantine bubbles and back into the world, where art and creativity persist.
Amanda Hodes - 07.06.2022 - 20:46
