Anyway here it is!! I was a little nervous about this topic as I am a middle class white male.. but I think I came of fair and not sounding like someone that should be stoned. I would just like to ad I do not consider myself racist in anyway. So here it is!

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How individual reaction to bigoted cartoon imagery may change over time:
An explanation through semiotics

You may download the essay here in pdf!

The history of cartoons dates back as far as the early days of 1910. The social and political difference between then and modern times leads to a division in sensibilities in what is not and what is acceptable behaviour. This means that a great bulk of work has been lost to the general public, mainly due to its depiction of racial and sexual stereotypes now deemed offensive and unacceptable. While the content of these older cartoons is still reprehensible to many they are slowly getting excised from the ban lists and finding their way into mass distributed mediums like dvd. Through the use of semiotics and in particular the tools of diachronic analysis we can explain why these previously unacceptable cartoons are now able to be sold and even shown publicly, and yet still be considered as unacceptable. To focus this essay we will discuss the Warner Brothers (1918) cartoon Southern Fried Rabbit (Freleng, 1953)and use the methods of diachronic analysis to explain how the social impact of this cartoon has changed over time, leading to its censorship being lifted and becoming freely available with its original unedited content.

Cultural models form a framework in which individual lives are defined and enclosed by generally accepted ideologies. Ideology itself, as Marx postulated, is a nearly obtuse by-product of the separation of power, an “upside-down” (Gee, 2007, p. 28) representation of reality where things are not how they are but instead are an unreal prototype of how society will be. While this is unrelated to the current state of society, the future society is in fact a by-product extrapolated out of the constraints formed from these dominant social framings (Gee, 2007). Ideology has an immediate impact on how individuals conduct their lives. There is a constant negotiation and arguably a moral obligation for the individual to challenge how their perceptions are being filtered through the ideological framework that forms the society around them. This means that any given ideology is in itself an evolving process, a system of creation contemplation and modification (Gee, 2007). This evolution creates a separation in time, a separation where we as a society have moved past the predictions from the prototype that the ideology of the past implied. This forms an ideological fossil. A fixed set of values and beliefs that remains unchanged, static and immutable, unlike the constantly evolving ideologies that are framing the society of the present (Marcuse, 1964). So while ideology itself is a representation of a given cultural group’s aspiration of the future, whether that is change or stability through reinforcement, ideology from the past is a signpost signifying where society has come from, and what it has rejected or replaced.

Southern Fried Rabbit depicts Bugs Bunny as a Yankee and Yosemite Sam as a Confederate. The controversy surrounding this particular cartoon comes from a scene depicting Bugs Bunny, drawn as a coloured man grovelling on his knees begging Sam, who is in full Confederate uniform and holding a whip, to not beat him while using language like “massa”. This particular cartoon was one of the first to be removed from the ban list due to it being relatively mild in comparison to other cartoons from much early days (Smoodin, 1993). This is partly due to it being produced in the 1950s where it was free from what is now considered horrific depictions of race used to deliberately demonize the enemy during World War II. It also means that the social reforms sweeping American society during that period while still fledgling, where much closer to the way we perceive such things today. This gives this American cartoon a smaller gap to bridge between the then thinking and the now thinking, meaning that while still offensive, it is not as offensive as other cartoons made before the US civil rights movement had any traction at all and racial awareness was largely missing from the American social conscience. (Smoodin, 1993)

Diachronic analysis was popularised by Brugmann and Delbruck during its use in their masterwork the Outline of Comparative Grammar of the Indo European Languages (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). Diachronic by itself means something changing over time (Dictionary, 2010) and one of the fundamental precepts of diachronic analysis is that the signs are always in a state of flux and are dynamic in relation to the decoder’s position in history. This means that a sign can have the same meaning, unchanged though history, yet our personalised reactions to it can differ. The symbol’s meaning itself becomes a warped version of how someone in a different time would have seen it (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). A common everyday example of this is how a comedian may not make a joke about a given tragedy but after a respectful period of time the comedian is freed to make light of said event.

What is happening in the case of Southern Fried Rabbit is simular, as the distance in time from the when the original encoding occurred to now is creating a detached personalisation for the modern decoder (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). While we as modern decoders recognise the imagery and content as racist and most likely unacceptable, we feel less of a connection to the society that originally spawned the symbols. This detachment to the society that spawned the symbol at the time of the encoding means that the modern viewer is somewhat free from making a social comparison to their own society. The moral values of the past are perceived as separate and archaic and in no way a representation of the decoder’s society’s current conventions (Henry & Sears, 2002). When reading about the Romans feeding Christians to the lions at the colosseum few people find offence due to the passage of time detaching this act form the decoder. This, of course is an extreme example.

While most viewers still recognise the racism in Southern Fried Rabbit, many now find their personal reaction to it to be more focused on the history of racism in comparison to focusing on the current state of racism that they live with. This is in sync with how the movement to save the lost cartoons is structured. Many of the arguments to unban and restore these older cartoons are made from a preservation standpoint, much like the arguments that eventually led to the restoration, preservation, and publication of the Nazi anti-Jewish films form World War II. The detachment doesn’t mean condoning, nor does it mean a lack of realisation about the symbol’s meanings but instead the detachment blunts how the icons affect people on a personal level. (Thompson, 1985)

Southern Fried Rabbit was one of the first cartoons to be removed from the ban list as it has an extra method of blunting the signals of racial abuse, that is to say, a postmodern reflection of racism. Umberto Ecco spoke of a function called aberrant decoding. (Hodge & Gunther, 1998). This means that the decoder uses a different code to extract meaning from a sign than the code used to encode it in the first place. This is a facet of postmodernism, the rejection of objective truth to form a negotiated meaning (Eco, 1965, pp. 131-150). One of the most blatant forms of aberrant decoding is to encode a deliberately overt signal thus shifting the focus of meaning form the sign itself to what is associated with that sign. Southern Fried Rabbit is not trying to debase blacks; instead it is making fun of the Confederate values. The encoding is using racist signals; the decoder is using aberrant decoding to shift the meaning from the racism to a critical representation of racists. Sam is shocked and uncomfortable at Bugs’s behaviour. He looks at the whip in astonishment and then is embarrassed and tries to hide it when Bugs appears dressed as Lincoln. There is no approval, unconscious or otherwise. That is not to say that signals cannot be offensive despite their objective meaning. To a culture that only a few years later had to use the army upon its own populace to enforce the safety of children at mixed race schools, such loaded imagery regardless of the meaning is still contentious. It is only just recently through the depersonalisation of time that society can start to view this cartoon and others without the iconography overwhelming the encoded meaning. This is why Southern Fried Rabbit is among the first off the ban list for in addition to the blunting of the imagery by time, it also has the saving grace to be in line with much of the current thinking; as it is consciously disapproving.

Few would see Southern Fried Rabbit and not recognise the racist imagery and some, of course, will still be offended. For many though, the cartoon is disconnected to how they see themselves and their place in society. The aberrant decoding of the racist iconography creates a cushion of disapproval. This coupled with the depersonalisation of the ideology though time leaves the decoder with an understanding of content without the social commentary being a reflection of self. The discussion of whether this in itself is acceptable or not is out of the scope of this essay. Still, the diachronic and postmodernist processes show us how icons can still be recognised and understood to have the same meaning through time yet our reactions to them change over time, transforming a widely unacceptable cartoon to be accepted by many, while the signs inside it remain unchanged and are still perceived as unacceptable.

References

Dictionary, Oxford. (2010, April). diachronic. Retrieved April 27, 2012, from Oxford Univercity Press: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diachronic

Eco, U. (1965). Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message. Corner & Hawthorn (Edition 1980).

Freleng, F. (Director). (1953). Southern Fried Rabbit [Motion Picture].

Gee, J. P. (2007). Social Linguistics and the Literacies: Ideology in Discources. Taylor & Francis Group.

Henry, P. J., & Sears, D. O. (2002). The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale. Political Psychology, 253-283.

Hodge, R., & Gunther, K. (1998). Social Semiotics. Cornell.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimentional Man: Studies of the ideology of Advanced Industrial Sociaty. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Smoodin, E. (1993). Animated Culture: Hollywood cartoons from the sound era. New Jersey: Rutgers Univercity Press.

Thompson, J. B. (1985). Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Univercity of California Pr.

Warner, J., Warner, H., Warner, A., & Warner, S. (1918). Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Warner Bros. Pictures / Warner Bros. America.

Original Presentation Slides

Anyway. I had such a terrible time getting my Mac setup and working that I thought I would make a short tutorial on how to get the Mac setup. Mainly so if I screw it up I can do it all again.

Some Basic Boot Tips

When getting your MacBook running smoothly there are some basic tips you might want to remember about how it boots. These will help you in future.

1. Hold down C during boot will force the MB to boot from the DvD drive
2. Hold down OPTION during boot will take you to the default MB partition loading menu
3. Hold down COMMAND + R to load into recovery mode. This one is important. If you screw up you can always reinstall the OS form the internet. The command will even load the boot partition from the internet, so if you (like I did a few times) delete or break your recovery partition you can still recover. This is a nice feature.
4. The mac OS I am using is called LION. Now I have always hated the yway OS guys name OSs. Even the uBuntu guys do this and it is fucking retarded. To this day I am not 100% sure what lion is.. but I am pretty sure it is MacOS 10.x or somthing. While logged in on your Mac you can clikc the apple icon and “about this mac” and it will show you the VERSION number.. then you will need to google to find out what your version is called. I couldn’t find any other way.

Ok lets get this started!!

STEP 01 – iREFit – Alternative Mac Boot Loader.

Ok we have a nice neat MB… first thing we want to do is replace the lame partition boot loader Apple uses with something a little more useful. We will be suing iREFit (iRefit) I could go into detail about how the Mac partitioning works.. but it is fucking retarded and really flaky. If you are interested in the more techy crap about this read this page and either cry or laugh.. both are valid responses to how Apple handles this

This is what we are going for, a triple boot of Lion (that is the Mac OS I am currently using), Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

Now, iREFit is easy to get working.. just go to the iREFit weboage and download the files onto your mac and follow the MANUAL install instructions. At this time iREFit 0.14 installer will not work, at least I couldn’t get it to.

So follow the Manual install instructions for iREFit and when you next boot you should be greeted with the iREFit boot menu.

IMPORTANT

You want to sync the partition information at this point. So form the iREFit menu simple highlight the Partition Tool icon and load it and it will auto sync for you and do much of the hellish fdisk commands for you to sync the automatically syncing the boot tables.

STEP 02 – Partitioning

The first thing we need to do is partition your Mac drive to allow you to install the other OSs. Now there is the Apple way of doing this and the correct way. Lets do the correct way so we will NOT be using bootcamp. So go to launch pad or w/e it is called and find DISK UTILITIES. Load it up and lets do it manually.

Now this is pretty strait forward. Simple click on the drive itself.. click on the Partition button and then click the + button until you have 4 drives. Format all the new drives as FAT (MSDOS) Resize them to what you would like. I only wanted to sue windows to get access to some apps I like (Visual Studio 2010) and possibly some games so I gave win7 a 150 GB partition. I gave Linux a 250GB partition and you also need to make a linux swap drive. This should be a minimum of 2 gigs but it is bets for it to be around the same your ram. I have 4 gig of ram so I made the swap drive 3.5GB. This left me with about 500GB for mac I think. Do not worry about this to much as when we are done each OS will be able to access the other drives anyway. Many people prefer to have small OS drives and then a single large shared data drive (5 partitions) but I just prefer my way .. so what .. wana fight about it?

Do not be scared this is a non destructive process. It is very simple.. click the + button 4 times. Set the new partitions to FAT(MSDos) and remember to NAME them.. mine are simple Mac, Windows, Ubuntu, UbuntuSwap. After you have done that.. make sure you take note of the partition IDs. it should be something like Disk2 – 6. To find these if you can not see on the left click on each disk and hit the INFO button. It isn’t hard to remember.. Mac Os on disk2, the boot information is on disk 1 (hidden by Apple) and disk 3 is the recovery partition (also hidden) so Windows is Disk 4 and Ubuntu will be disk5 and the swap will be disk6.

Ok that is it.. lets install this crap…

Oh wait b4 we do that.. grab a USB stick and pop it in the drive and then go to BOOTCAMP and use it to download onto the USB stick the apple drivers for windows 7. So just tick the 2nd option “Download Latest Windows 7 software form Apple” and follow the on-screen instructions to save it to your USB

Ok so that is all done. Lets install Windows!

STEP 03 – Installing Windows

Put in your windows 7 install disk and reboot your MB. Hold down “c” while it is booting and it should force it to load form the DvD drive. (OMG you know how long this took me to find out how to do!) The windows 7 install thing-o will pop up and choose “CUSTOM INSTALL”

You will be presented with windows lame way of displaying the the partition information by NOT showing the actual partition IDs. You might note that the OS is saying you can not install on ANY of these partitions.. that is fine. If your lucky and have the service pack version of the win7 installer you will see your volume names .. simply high light the one that you named WINDOWS.. if you are like 98% of the earth and have the original win7 installer this information will not be here and Microsfot hides the fucking disk IDs.. not to worry you should see the data type.. in this case we formatted the partition in the Mac OS as FAT. so you should see 3 partition you do nto want to fuck with then 3 fat partitions.. click the 1st one.. it should be the WINDOWS one we set up if you followed my instructions.

Click FORMAT and now you should be able to install. Simply follow the win7 install instructions and all should be good. Once you get into win7 make sure you remember to install the software you saved to that USB.

Now when you boot iREFit should now show you anew Icon for win7.. awesome! But for now boot back into Lion.

STEP 04 – Installing Ubuntu

For those of you that do not know, Ubuntu is a linux distribution and is a 100% open source and free OS. It is also a fantastic OS and arguable much better than the big guns MS and Apple produce. God forbid that a usre might want to install one of the most powerful and customisable OSs available.. Apple do not support this in anyway.. in fact they have added hidden features specificity designed to block people from installing this.. so ti is a little more complex. I love Ubuntu and it is my mainly used OS of choice nowdays, with the win8 debacle it might be time for ubuntu to finally get more of a mainstream user base.

Anyway from LION (yes there is a reason we do this on the Mac OS.. you can download on windows if you like but easier to do it on Mac) go to the ubuntu website and download the latest 64bit desktop installer.

Leave that in the downloads dir but rename it to ubuntu.iso. Not strictly speaking needed but makes it a lot easier. To burn the disk simple load Disk Utilities, click the burn button select the iso and insert a CDr…

Now the tricky stuff. We can not just install the OS now as once we boot into the linux OS the apple dvd drive will stop functioning for a small time due to how Apple handles disk access on a hardware level. The reason win7 can load is that Apple have a deal with them and have built the hardware for it. This is a way of trying to force the consumer to not use “unapproved” OSs.

Anyway… we can get around it.. put a USB in your MB and in disk utilities erase it to MSDOS. Now, click on the USB drive itself.. NOT the partition and then click the INFO button. Take note of the disk identifier it will be like disk1 or 2 or w/e… either copy this to clipboard or write it down. Now click on the partition of the USB and click the unmount button.

now open a terminal and type in – dd if=~/Downloads/ubuntu.iso of=/dev/diskN bs=1m but replace diskN with the disk identifier you saw before. Use anything but disk0 as this is most likly your harddrive with the mac os and your windows installation on it. :)  Now what we are doing here is copying the ubuntu.iso from downloads to the USB in a way that it will make the USB identify as a CDdrive.

When you run the command the terminal will look like it has hung… this takes a while to do. Just give it time. If your USB has a light on it you should see it madly blinking. At the end it will print out a report on how much data was transferred.

Now we can reboot holding C to load from the ubuntu CD.. when the drive fails due the OS hardware, it will now automatically switch to the USB drive thinking it is in fact the CDdrive. Allowing the ubuntu install to continue. Neat!

STEP 05 – Ubuntu Installation

Now you should be seeing the “try ubuntu” or “install ubuntu” icons. Simply hit the install ubuntu select “SOMETHING ELSE” and follow the on screen instructions until you see a partition menu.

Now.. ubuntu like Lion dose show us the disk ids. So simply highlight /dev/sda5. You should see a lot of info here. I haven’t got screen shots.. but take some time to really look at the screen and you should see 2 MSdos partitions as windows has reformatted as NTFS. They are most likely after the  NTFS partition.. probably at 5 and 6. One small one bigger.

• Click on the larger one (5) and click CHANGE set it to EXT4, tick the format button and set the mount point to /
• Click the smaller one (6) and click on CHANGE set it to SWAP.

Probably silly thing to say.. but make sure you are not trying to install on the USB stick… I did this once and it was a pain to fix.. if you do.. reboot into the install and in the partition menu select the correct drives BUT make sure you delete the swap partition from the USB.

NOW ULTRA IMPORTANT OR YOU NEED TO START AGAIN You should see drop down at the bottom of the partition window concerning the about the “boot loader” YOU HAVE TO SET THIS TO THE SAME PARTITION YOU ARE INSTALLING IT ON. DO NOT LEAVE DEFAULT. if you do not see this, well you should but you can access this again latter at the overview b4 you commit by hitting the advanced button.

So just to restate.. make sure you set the BOOTLOADER to the same partition you are installing ubuntu on itself.

Ok.. that is it.. install and be happy!!

STEP 05 – Fix the Boot Partition (AGAIN!)

Right we are almost done!! You should be able to boot into mac, windows and linux.. though.. many people will find that selecting the linux icon will still boot them into windows. This is easy to fix.. so boot into your Mac and we will manually create the MBR booter ourselves.

• Install gDisk
• Load the mac terminal
• type: sudo gdisk /dev/disk0
• Press ‘r’ to repair and ‘o’ or ‘p’ to view the current partition information. What you should see is that the MBR is not matching the partitions we want to use… you may need to refer to these print outs.. so read them.
• press “h” to build a new one.
• Simply type in the disk numbers you wish to use for booting separated by a space.. nothing else no commas or anything. In my case it was “2 4 5″ Remember 1 is the boot partition itself, 2 is the mac os, 3 is the recovery disk. 4 is our windows install, 5 is ubuntu and 6 is the ubuntu swap. (assuming you followed my lame instructions)
• Accept the default/recommended placement of EFI. This will add another partition to the selected three; hMBR has a maximum of 4. You can add the recovery disk as well.. but it is not needed.. you can still boot off it regardless. though the command+r boot hotkey i mentioned at the start.
• Then for all the partitions but the ubuntu one.. select the defaults. For windows say YES to the BOOT question but for Mac say NO. If you added the recovery disk, say NO to that as well.. everything else default (just press enter)
• for the linux install instead of default.. type in “83″ and select YES for boot.
• ok your done.. hit “o” to verify and read it.. then “w” to write it out.

That is it.. you should now have a cool triple boot macbook running all the neat OSs on the market!!! Woot finally what  a cluster fuck… but worth it.. though I pretty much just use ubuntu it is cool having the other OSs.

STEP 06 – Ubuntu Fine Tuning

One problem for ubuntu with some users is that it is a little less friendly to setup, though once running it is sweet candy. You will notice some minor problems. like WIFI not working. This is fixable…1st just run the update manager and update everything

After reboot load a terminal and type these commands

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mpodroid/mactel
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

Now we just want to edit a text file and we are done… so type
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and add the line: blacklist ndiswrapper

Then type
sudo nano /etc/pm/config.d/modules

and it will edit or create a file and add: SUSPEND_MODULES=”b43 bcma”

reboot and wifi will be working! There is a number of other cool things you can do to tweak your ubuntu experience … see this info page..

I recommend the trackpad tweak to get the same functionality in the tarckpad as in LION.

That is it… everything should be funky… have fun ]]> http://live4everordietrying.info/2012/05/03/macbook-pro-15-inch-late-2011-lion-win7-and-ubuntu/feed/ 1 http://live4everordietrying.info/2012/04/23/global-nuclear-war-des101-assessment/ http://live4everordietrying.info/2012/04/23/global-nuclear-war-des101-assessment/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:00:56 +0000 Jynks http://live4everordietrying.info/?p=339 Well here is my MidTerm assessment project!!

It is a small game called Global Nuclear War. It is a very simple console game but I had a blast doing it and worked pretty hard on it.

There is still a occasional bug that crashes it but I feel that fixing this one bug is not a major concern for me as I’m not trying to produce anything, just learn. The project got a little out of hand for me and the once neat code block design degenerated into a real mess. I feel that if i trashed it all and started again I would do a lot better, including range checks on my vector accesses.. witch is the error here, and going though and putting them all in is not teaching me anything and is but an exercise.

I feel I will be better served by trying to incorporate my lessons learnt into a new project rather than “fix” up this one.

Still this might hurt my mark, but I am not really a “mark whore”. I could have done a super simple version of the game and gotten a better score… but chose to experiment. The only thing I am really upset about is that in the adding of all the fluff I never got to put in the CPU player option :(

Still I had a lot of fun and SFML once I got it kinda working, was a real nice way to add some spice to the game. I intend to keep using it for my next project witch will be a similar simple type of thing but this time I will use 2D gfx powered by SFML! Though I have a break coming form UNI and it is semester renewal time so I’ll try and do something during this time as well.

–== Download == –
Global Nuclear War v1.0 (PC ONLY)

If you get a DLL error you may need to install this:
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) / Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (64bit)

It has been a while from when I last used the camera, so I am really rusty. I forgot how much tweaking can be done on RAW files so I now wish I did the exposure tweaking in the RAW a bit more and left the ISO lower. Having high ISO gives better light information but increases noise. As he was so far away and under the trees shade and a pretty cloudy day anyway I had the ISO pumped right up… so there is a lot of grain unfortunately.. I will go back again and try to grab some pics with a lower ISO or even shutter speed and adjust in post using the RAW format. I know raw isn’t a replacement for good lenz settings, but it can nudge them.. so I think this would have been a better option as slight colour error is not as bad a noise imo.

Anyway, I think they came out pretty cool! I had a lot of fun walking about taking photos.. I really should do more of this in the future.

Anyway.. here it is!.. Tell me what you think.

Sketch

Colour

I was originally going to hand sketch it all but I spoke to my teacher and the entire “point” of the assessment is photo manipulation, so I had to use real pictures… so I had to source some…

Hope you like it!

If you do not know what a Cintiq is.. watch this video!

Here is my old office of 3 few years ago when the original cintiq came out.

Here is my new office!!

Awesome!!! Lucky my next project for Des101 is a photoshop thing so I did that asap as I was so keen, I’ll be posting that in 5 secs…

Still some more office stuff to go. The 3rd monitor is going ot be moved to a crate behind the wacom so I can have source material and a pallet drop there while sculpting and painting. Also I bought a gaming device…. it is about the size of my hand. I plan to map my hotkeys to this device and place it next to the wacom as I have always foudn the kayboard to be very unwieldy and interferer with drawing.. this way I can place this small device exactly where I hand rests.

Also I ordered a new keyboard. I have been meaning to do this for ages. I just haven’t gotten around to it, but as I am doing the office I thought may as well do it now. Basically I have always loved my old IBM keyboard from my old XT like in the early 90s. In fact I used that keyboard until recently like say 5 years or so ago, as they are simply the best keyboards ever. Anyway, I recently found a website http://www.pckeyboard.com/ that sells these old school “click-idy-clack” keyboards. These are using full bucket-springs just like the original IBMs… so I am really happy. There is simply no typing experience even in the same league. The are not as pretty as modern keyboards but they are way better, and you could probably bludgeon to death a home invader with this keyboard and then still use it with out any problems. They are that solid…. well the original IBM ones are.

So yeah that is my new hardware!! woot a loot a lot!!

I did the files in a opensource application called INKSCAPE. It is a 100% free opensource replacement for illustrator, and in truth from my experience with it .. not even in the same league really. Well that is a little harsh.. it can do almost everything but there is a elegance to the UI and tool design in illustrator that INKSCAPE dose not have… kind of reminds me a bit of Blender (an opensource 3d app).. the way opensource projects are put together they are all about function and little effort is put into combining everything into a sleek elegant application for the user. Still I have been wanting to test inkscape for a long time form when od told me about it like years ago, so I did these in that app.

These are the 5 versions I ended up doing but I can only put in 4….

Leave a comment and tell me witch one I should remove! I can only hand in 4, and I have 5 done.

1078 Words

 
The Semiotic Signals leading to Genre Classification in Starcraft II

Starcraft 2 (Browder, 2010) is part of an extremely successful franchise by Blizzard Entertainment. The series itself is a version of a common game type called RTS or “real-time strategy”. This means players control units and manage an economy for unit production inside a real-time environment. The express purpose of which is to control a given region and its contained resources, while in conflict with other opposing forces. Starcraft uses common symbols which can be identified and deconstructed though semiotics to enforce genre identification among science fiction fans. This has the express purpose of announcing that Starcaft has a science fiction framing device, that in turn communicates it will be enjoyed by those who like science fiction as a genre, before considerations about the game itself.

These signs are pervasive throughout the entirety of Starcraft and occur not just while playing the game but in every given moment, an example of this is the poster like space imagery of alien planets that adorn the loading screens (Starcraft 2 – Loading Screens, 2010). The player is forced to observe these loading screens in a purely passive state and they have no functional gameplay aspect, they simply remind the player of the setting by sending an encoded sign that is recognised as genre specific. The way we recognise science fiction has changed through the development of new technologies (Aguirre, 2011). Current invention has realised, and in some cases surpassed the speculative imaginings on which the concept of science fiction was defined as in the first place. The Saturn Space Rockets of the sixties blasting out of Cape Canaveral or arc lightning being produced from tesla coils can no longer be considered as semiotic iconography representing the future and yet these examples still represent science fiction itself (Aguirre, 2011).

Starcraft bypasses the premise of science fiction as a prediction of the future, instead focusing on signs that are historically defined as science fiction. This produces imagery that is recognisable as part of the genre because the connotative focus of the images is upon science fiction itself. The current technology and understanding of science are beyond the physical and hard to represent visually, such as the internet or ideas like quantum physics. By extension the extrapolation into future invention that these current technologies and areas of knowledge may lead to are also lacking any kind of visual key that can be recognised, say subspace, quantum computing, or even a biological evolution such as telepathy. This means that the iconography of science fiction needs to remain “unflaggingly conservative” (Bukatman, 1993, p. 6) though the use of out-dated imagery which is historically understood and recognised as science fiction (Bukatman, 1993). Starcraft contains these sweeping semiotic signals that have existed from the birth of science fiction when it was initially separated from traditional fantasy. Some such examples would be alien vistas, space ships, alien creatures, giant robots and large control panels. Signals such as these were originally formed from predictions of the future based on the then current technology (Bukatman, 1993). These signs form a convention that is available to the encoder which triggers understanding of the desired message through the decoding of the historical meaning. The alien worlds upon the load screens read as science fiction due to the use of these conventions and are decoded without any relation, understanding or reference to science, technology or the coming future but instead to the visions of the future form previous generations, visions we today interpret as science fiction. (Bukatman, 1993).

It is these signs that Starcraft utilises to communicate its definition as science fiction. Icons inside Starcraft such as the Mothership (Glane, 2009) are decoded as science fiction, not only as a self-contained sign with its own negotiated meanings, but as a reference to science fiction itself. This adds an accumulative pressure upon how all the signs in Starcraft combine for a globally perceived connotation. Semiotic communication relies on this kind of continual flow of one idea to the next, where meaning is carried through one sign and transposed onto the sign that is read in following (Briggs & Bautnan, 1992). No one sign can exist in a vacuum and Starcraft needs to be considered as a single icon trying to impart a single message before other more specific information is attempted to be communicated.

This can most startlingly be represented if we substitute science fiction with another genre, such as traditional fantasy. We can imagine this by referencing another RTS game set in the fantasy genre that has the same gameplay, the same core concepts and unit types; Warcraft (Pardo, 2003) is for all intents and purposes the same game. There is of course some variance, but the main difference between these titles is not the games themselves, but the genre of the framing. Starcraft’s identity as a science fiction work which connects to specific people through genre identification is capitalising on a strong social force that solidifies personalised identity into larger social groups (Okada, 2005). This effect is instrumental to its success. The image of the alien Protos using psychic powers to make kinetic bolts of energy in Starcraft is projecting a very different meaning than a mage with a staff and a long white beard sending out fireballs with magic, as seen in Warcraft. Both units are in simular games, and both units are throwing self-generated destructive projectiles but the intertextual linking between the units and the genre of the entire product as a whole make the Protos Unit read as an evolutionary advanced life form with psychic abilities and not as a mysterious arcane mage. These two different readings will appeal to different people, even though they are nearly identical in function at a gameplay level.

Starcraft’s use of recognisable science fiction imagery allows people who identify with science fiction to identify with Starcraft before the game is even considered. As a connection is formed by linking the player’s love of science fiction to the games framing, not the actual game. Another game nearly identical but being decoded as pure fantasy will appeal to a completely different social group or, in business terms to a different market to exploit for sales. It is the additive effect of historically conservative imagery that is traditionally seen as science fiction, prevalent though out the entire Starcraft product, that forms this connection to science fiction fans. A connection communicated, understood and decoded through semiotic language as the signified message: Starcraft is a science fiction game.

References

• Starcraft 2 – Loading Screens. (2010, July 29th). Retrieved March 15th, 2012, from Giant Bomb (Game News): http://www.giantbomb.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty/61-20674/loading-screens/52-465061/sc2_2010_07_29_22_11_34_79/51-1452847/
• Aguirre, P. (2011). Semiotic Ghosts: Science Fiction and Historicism. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 28, p124-134.
• Briggs, C. L., & Bautnan, R. (1992). Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Linquistic Anthropology, Vol 2: P131-172.
• Browder, D. (2010, July 27th). Starcraft II. Starcraft II – Wings of Liberty. Blizzard Entertainment.
• Bukatman, S. (1993). Terminal identity: the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction. United States of America: Duke University Press.
• Glane, R. (2009). Starcraft – Mothership. Retrieved 03 15th, 2012, from Sons of the Storm: http://www.sonsofthestorm.com/viewer.php?artist=raneman&cat=starcraft&art=15
• Okada, J. (2005). Dissertation- Observations on Collective Cultural Action. History and memory: Asian American film and video in its institutional contexts.
• Pardo, R. (2003, July 3rd). Warcraft III. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. Blizzard Entertainment.

It was kind of interesting getting a basic understanding of how algorithms work, but it seams to me that YES to be a good programmer I would need these skills, but the road it will take for me to move past the existing functions is a long one. Like I am not going to come up with a improved version of quicksort3 any time soon. Sure one day I may want to look into procedural map creation or something like that, or even procedural animation (a very cool thing) but that is a very complex subject and one I would have to be a much better programmer to tackle, and during my raiser to that level my experience would grow and i would be better able to absorb this information of this section of the unit. I could probably write a bubblesort from memory.. but why would I when c++ has a version of quicksort just sitting there… I know it is not the “best” quicksort but it is pretty darn good. If I need something better, then I would be in a position to make something better. I just felt that I could have been concentrating on more interesting and useful things that will be practical, like I solved the hero sorting thing in about 2 seconds flat using vectors .. why the fuck do I have to spend hours trying to get cstring working for it.. and the code when finished is near unreadabe compared to the vector solution.. I mean these were invented and added to c++ for a reason.

I think the most interesting thing in this week was the calculation of irrational numbers in c++. The data can only be stored in various forms and they loose accuracy at higher levels of precision. So I was calculating the Fibonacci values for example, but I (as I do) went over the scope of the lecture to experiment and discovered the real problem.

Binet’s Fibonacci Number Formula reads as follows…

what is interesting about this is that it returns a integer even though it is using irrational number. The idea is that you can calculate with out having to go though the entire sequence… pretty cool stuff.

The problem came when calculating higher values due to the physical containers in C++ not being able to store the information. I thought all my math was wrong but after some experimenting, you can not even accurately represent 100 using a flaot or a int if you increase the precision to a high value. This raised all these wired questions.. like how can you ever compare a float or a double with a sign? How DO people so higher maths on computers?

Well it turns out that a cleaver use of < and > is used instead of ==. It is just assumed if the difference is small enough it is as close to == as matters. I didn’t test it though, but a I also found a non standard library that is designed just for use in higher level maths. GMP High Precision Library and High-Precision Software Directory

All in all really interesting stuff. I find number theory quite fascinating.
You can look at my “working” application here.. I do not normally post it but it is kind cool… This app calculates using the Binet Formula, it dose a few static values then you can pump in your own numbers to see the error level go crazy. I have also increased the perversion of the console output so you can see the error in the numbers even as normally they truncate when printing out to console.

_working – Factorial N – Binet.exe

Also there was a lot of focus on recursion and algorithms in general these lead to pretty boring programs but I did spend a tiny bit of time making my Towers of Hanoi solution work in a more pleasing way to the eye.

Here is the solution for this week!
DEV103 – Object Oriented Programming – Week 04 – Solution.rar

Here is the apps!! Pretty dull this time.

01 – Factorial N – Procedural.exe
02 – Factorial N – Recursive.exe
03 – Fibonacci Prodecural.exe
04 – Fibonacci Recursive.exe
05 – The Towers of Hanoi.exe
06 – Arrays – Initialise in Function.exe
07 – Bubble Sort.exe
07-1 – Random Ins in range in array – All Unique.exe
08 – String Functions.exe
09 Print out the ASCII set.exe
10 – Convert Lower to Upper.exe
11 – Sort a list of Heroes in Alpha Order.exe
12 – Array Sort 2D.exe
_working – Factorial N – Binet.exe

Well I have a exam on this stuff this week and a assessment hand in for Des102

Have fun.. see ya latter!

I’m glad I did though as I was having a strange problem with working out the volume of a sphere retuning the wrong value. Turned out my math was all correct (amazingly) and it was a error in my C++. 4/3 is a float, not a int. So when doing the math you need to type 4.0f/3.0f or 4/3f or something to tell the compiler that it is a float not a int. I prefer the full way (1st way) of writing as when you read it is very clear what is going on.

Anyway… here is the solution for Week 03!!
DEV103 – Object Oriented Programming – Week 03 – Solution.rar

Here are my exe’s for Week 03 (PC Only)

01 – Calling Functions
02 – Pie.exe
03 – Box Vol.exe
04 – Sphere Vol.exe
Game: Craps.exe

I’m very happy with the Craps Game. It is a “real” game I guess in a way. Give it a go!! I put in small ASCII gfx for dice and set up some random responses so it felt less static.. nothing crazy, but 5 random “rolling” comments and 5 random “result” comments.. but the code is there I could have added 100s if I had time or the inclination. Also I spent some time trying to make the code readable and compartmentalised. The entire thing is done in functions, I think the main loop is like 8 lines or something.

All in all I am very happy with it. Only thing that sucked is that class went over time so my teacher never got to see it!! He gives us 20% of our final grade based on tutorial participation.. witch is MASSIVE. So him not getting to see the final app was a disappointment. Plus I am kind of a attention whore and wanted a pat on the head.

Anyway, give this a go and tell me what you think!
Game: Craps