The anxieties of inaccessibility are starting to be addressed not because of artistic projects (it is amusing to me, if no one else, that artists seem more concerned with producing content and then worry about the form after it has been released to the public), but because of legal/commercial concerns. Massachusetts lead the way (lead in that it made it a very public and commercial issue) by adopting the OpenDocument format (for a number of reasons), but it always makes me wonder why artists submit to proprietary formats (like Storyspace). Do artists not realize that in adopting a proprietary format they are giving over control of their content to engineers and coders governed by commercial interests?

Writing about 2Advanced, I find myself intrigued by the idea of temporality and why I find it so threatening. That is, why do I find myself threatened/annoyed by the idea that content can disappear or only be available during certain points in time? (as a brief note, this was brought up in class at one point where we talked about the difference in having information online vs. in a book, and how digital information is at once more ethereal and more permanent than printed works).

Aside from the annoyances with illusionary temporality I already discussed (nothing annoys me more than a pretense to temporality that I can easily bypass), I wonder at my need to have things on my hard drive. That is, even though the video is on YouTube, why do I still feel the need to download it to my hard drive? Hard drives fail, as do other forms of media storage, so in some way the video is safer on YouTube than it is on my hard drive.

One of the most interesting things I found about many of the projects we looked at (the projects that seemed to have frustrating elements to them), was the seeming need to innovate broken forms. Much like House of Leaves or Only Revolutions, many of the projects we looked at seemed to take a traditional mode of expression (a web site/a book), and break it.

In the case of Danielewski’s works, I find the break to be intriguing and exciting. Somewhat scary – I’m not sure how I’m supposed to read them if there’s even a how to be found – but overall engaging and stimulating in a manner that makes me want to read them rather than avoid them. In many of our projects, however, I decidedly felt alienated and repulsed. Of course, one could attribute this to the fact that website design is a profession for me, and dealing with websites that break from convention is both threatening and frustrating for me as a professional – not a very interesting interpretation. Instead, I think there’s a reason why some innovators produce forms that are engaging and others repulsive.

I find it interesting that while there's only really one way to view the main text, there are multiple ways of dealing with the comments, either as sidebars to the main text, or as pages all by themselves organizable by time posted or card (added this past June). It feels to me like an attempt to add legitimacy to the comments, or perhaps make them seem more important or intergral to the work than they actually are. Because a lot of the comments don't feel particularly useful to the reading of the text, and seemed to really taper off once people adjusted to the format of the primary text.

Going back to an issue Shock and Awe raised in an entry a few weeks ago about form vs. content, I'd like to ask that question again in relation to GAM3R 7H30RY.

I noticed that this week's topic on the syllabus is "the networked book" and GAM3R 7H30RY (which is a huge hassle to type because of the author's decision to alternate between numbers and letters) is our sole reading. I know that this in no way limits our discussion of GAM3R 7H30RY to just issues relating to the networked book because GAM3R 7H30RY itself has a lot of interesting ideas in it about gaming/theory that we could definitely talk about, but I realize that its strange and unique form is a huge topic of discussion in itself and may replace discussion of the content itself. I mean, look at me right now. I'm merely talking about the format rather than the actual content because the format is such an interesting issue.

There are *exactly* 25 paragraphs per chapter. It strikes me as...weird. I'm not the sort of person who usually counts paragraphs. The way the site is formatted, though, the entire structure revolves around this constant.

Is it a weird coincidence that the web-designer(s) decided to capitalize on? Or are there paragraphs missing, or fluffy filler put in for aesthetic reasons, that will be changed around when it's published as a book? The further along in it I get, the more awkward the form feels.

So I'm reading GAM3R 7H30RY (and let me tell you, it freaks me out that even though a part of my brain processes that it's not all standard alphabet, most of my brain reads it like perfectly normal text), and was struck by the passage on card 10: "Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen any more. Not least for children, who if they are to be the winsome offspring of win-all parents, find themselves drafted into endless evening shifts of team sport...Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is morality, it is necessity."

I grew up in a family that never really encouraged joining sports teams. My father had been on a lot of teams as a kid and enjoyed it, and we were never told we *couldn't* be on teams, but it was never really pushed. My parents felt it was more important to run around the backyard and play amongst ourselves than get caught up in the cut-throat competitiveness of suburban rec leagues.

But we played cards and board games for blood.