endnotes

1. Many toys cannot be clearly coded masculinist; these feature female protagonists, inter-species interactions, mother-characters (interestingly, no fathers), and do not image 'death' (though there are many contests and battles, the outcomes of which are 'fainting'). These games include the Pokémon and Kirby series'. I mention these not to elide the obvious boy-bent features and target-marketing of gaming culture, but to point out that it's reductive to paint gaming imagery entirely in absence of female agency. It would take another paper to analyze the history, structures and desires (including desire for battle) of interactive gaming.

2. In "Model for a Prose Algorithm" (Only Paper Today, 1980) I pointed to the provisional, embodied character of networks with their frequent breakdowns and unreliability as key tropes for non-linear fiction. In the mid-1980's when the new portable 'Mac Classic' was our beloved toy, my colleague David McIntosh and I played a game called 'dictation' : one person spoke while the other banged away on the computer. The typist was not obligated to transcribe what the 'dictator' was saying. Some clever ideas for scripts came up this way.

3. Arcades in urban centres include a sampling of macro-interface toys (simulation cars, wide-screened shooting galleries, rock-climbing faces, electric guitars); these fuller or full-body interfaces are expensive novelties, situating the gaming experience in public space. Data projection gear is more widespread and affordable now, providing new opportunities for digital projects in public space.

4. My daughter's and my sense of being 'good' with small technology, of being fluent with the contact space between interfaces and our own bodies, has enhanced my father's sense of agency and comfort with the feeding machines and biochemical requirements of his life now. Though his motility is somewhat restricted, his capacity to work on research, on a record collection, on occasional yard-sailing and crate diving, as well as the intimacies of conversation and touch, are unabated.

5. Here, the thought pops into my mind, uninvited, of Foucault's 'curdled milk' game between the little girl and the country man, the 'innocent bucolic pleasures' we would call pedophilia. An innuendo of (girl)child sexuality infuses my discussion of cliteracy, weighted down by a Freudian undertow of onanistic taboos. The interesting topic of autoeroticism, fetish and technology coded female is outside the scope of the paper.

6. For ideas on coalition, I'm indebted to Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy, U. of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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