In Racing the Beam, Bogost and Montfort try to draw attention to an area of new media research that has been neglected - platform. Offering a description of the various levels of new media studies - reception/operation, interface, form/function, code, platform - they suggest that a platform is "a cultural artifact that is shaped by values and forces and which expresses views bout the world, ranging from 'games are typically played by two players who may be of different ages and skill levels' to 'the wireless service provider, not the owner of the phone, determines what programs may be run" (148). A study of platform is a study of what shapes and constrains the design and use of certain new media artifacts.
While Bogost and Montfort say that platform studies need not focus on hardware (as their study of the Atari 2600 does), we will be undertaking a platform study by way of hardware. While the software studies project focused on the code and form/function levels (along with some attention to reception/operation and interface), this project moves to platforms.
The class will be divided into two groups. One group will study the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the other will study the Macintosh Classic. Our focus is not only on these pieces of hardware (though, we will look at them closely) but also on the platforms out of which they emerged. We will study the NES console as a window into the NES platform and the Macintosh Classic as a window into the Macintosh platform.
One goal is to examine how "hardware and software platforms influences, facilitates, or constrains particular forms of computational expression" (Bogost and Montfort). While this is a focus on how platforms affect design and designers, we will also be interested in how that platform shapes the end user experience.
The aim is to use these two pieces of hardware to ask broader questions about the platforms out of which they emerged, and this approach is one more way of paying close attention to the "guts" of our various new media interfaces and infrastructures.
Just as we did with the software studies project, you will produce both a paper and an informal presentation. You will share your papers with me and classmates using Dropbox, but you can use Google Documents to collaboratively author those papers. In addition, you will have the opportunity to present your work in class. Again, this presentation will be a somewhat informal one, in which you will walk us through the system you are studying (both at the level of the particular piece of hardware and its platform).
When responding to these projects, here are the questions I'll be asking:
- Have you provided an accessible and accurate account of the technical details of your object of study and its platform?
- Does your study demonstrate how the platform shapes or constrains the activities of both designers and end users?
- Does your study shed light on the particularities of this platform, the cultures out of which it emerged, and its various idiosyncracies?
- Is your paper clearly written and generally free of grammatical errors?
- Does the project show evidence that the group has effectively collaborated on both the paper and the presentation?
