Play’s Republic

FYI: It is my goal to review your papers, etc., and submit your grades by 10AM Tuesday May 15th. (Faculty must provide grades for non-graduating grad students by Noon, May 21st.)

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(Updated)
Tomorrow’s conversation will be about games, public policy, political discourse, and so on. One of the interesting, motivating tensions I see here returns us to Huizinga and Caillois, and has all sorts of interesting echoes: If, per Caillois, we may read a culture by reading its games, then what are we to make […]

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I’ve not gotten Sicart’s paper yet, but I did have a copy of his dissertation (he’s a 2006-minted PhD, and still smells like New Car). I should point out before the link that I’ve not had time to read these, so I don’t know what to expect.
Here is Miguel Sicart’s dissertation on Video Games, […]

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I’ve several posts forthcoming, as well as responses to some of your posts. For the moment, I wanted to direct you to a (very accessible, non-theoretical) article from Forbes about Von Neumann’s ‘game theory,’ to which I had alluded on Tuesday.
If we’ve not yet discussed your research paper/project, please contact me ASAP or come […]

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Here’s the powerpoint file that Hilary and I used earlier. Unfortunately, you missed the last 2 or 3 slides of the ‘criticism’ part because we didn’t have enough time to actually finish the presentation that day. If you want, you can just simply click here and check our presentation ideas again. I recommend you to download […]

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As he lays out his argument for video games as semiotic domains of active learning and fluid subjectivities, James Paul Gee, in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, makes frequent reference to Pikmin, a 2001 release for the Gamecube from Nintendo, designed by the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto.
The following Youtube clips […]

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Apparently dazed from a 24–hour Moonlighting marathon, I forgot to include the endnotes and bibliography to the Kline et al. reading for this week.  I’ve posted it in the additional readings section; you can download it here, too:  Footnotes and Bibliography, Kline.

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We’re snowed out.  No class:  The University has closed as of 4PM.
If you’re looking for something to do during the course time, here’s a quick-and-dirty version of the assignment I was going to give you this PM: 
(1) Take a photo of a “magic circle” in the real world; ideally, the photo will hint at boundaries, […]

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The journal Space and Culture, “the International Journal of Social Spaces,” has a call for papers for an upcoming issue centered on the theme of “the function of place in virtual spaces.” The issue, they explain, “will examine how individuals, communities and institutions form identities in relation to sims. And it will interrogate the […]

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