Web Disability Simulator
This one is crappy, but I am sure you can find one where, I don't know, prior tab labels vanish (like oldies who don't know how to navigate, with nonsense symbols), and the mouse jitters, and text is small or low contrast and can't be read, or words jumbling around, would be a fun experience! And actually, you can check something here: https://www.disabilitysimulator.com/
Furthermore, having multiple hours of uninterrupted leisure time tospend is a luxury for many. Availability of leisure time interacts withgender, social status and other factors. An analysis by the Office ofNational Statistics (2018) showed that men in the UK enjoyed nearlyfive more hours of leisure time per week than women – a disparity thathas grown wider during the 2000’s. They also found that people wholived alone took more leisure time than people living with children.
Ooooh, but the game was not for them. I wonder how Nintendo does its testing...
Remote playtesting is a potential solution
I'll come so you don't have to.
pos-itivism
Note I skipped a large chunck of fairly unrelated history about sports, war, and measurement that predated videogames. Recently, there has been a large increase in data collection devices which is much more interesting.
The datafication from phones, car GPS, AI, and radar war vehicle detection is much more in-line with game interfaces and game positivist metrics, KPI, retention, etc. Some of these have been instrumentalised for gamification, or speedruns too, like deaths/coins per-level, or playtime/speed.
This is also inherited from inherited from Industrial school tests, IQ, Normality, Matrices, and the tabular accounting quantification of money, born in imperialist countries and urban gangs that tried to keep track of trading stocks.
Arguably, per Kropotkin, this could be a form of rationing and a way to promote worker-guild control, so as to avoid top-down impositions from cartel pricing... which goes to show how far we've branched from games, and how economics the Enlightment science, and quantification aren't the devil, rather they have been repurposed as such, mainly through the industrial education system pipeline, and illusion of explanatory depth specialisation (which is harder to disentangle with ellusive numeric objectivist abstractions).
There, you don't need to read those 15 pages.
Carol Shaw, who createdmany games in the 1970s and 1980s for Atari and Activision, includingVCS Checkers, Qubic, and River Raid (See Fig. 6)
Procedural generation games. Roguelikes, if you wish.
Inthis context, increasingly complex rules or codes of behavior were de-veloped for sport hunting, including rules based in normative ethicssuch as, a hunter who wounds an animal must kill it as an act of mercy;killing a sitting duck is unfair; or hiding out to ambush a creature at asalt lick or watering hole is considered unsportsmanlike. The popular-ity of the sport hunting movement and commercial hunting led to ter-rible over-hunting, which eventually sparked the conservation move-ment
A similar thing happened with fishing, you can see the book "Animals in Video Games and Humanity".
While today game cul-ture, or more specifically ‘gamer culture’ refers to particular sub-set ofplayers of videogames, during the early 1800s game culture referredto people involved in the hobby of hunting for sport (Reynolds, McAl-lister & Ruggill, 2016). Part of what supported the rise of sport huntingas a popular pastime was the development of gun technology
As different from football or other popular sports this is meant as a "private" and "individual" passtime, initially only for the burgeoise (then gun culture spread to all America).
1936 Olympic Games
What follows is only partly new, but mainly no. Sports as at the work level are hardly games. People there don't play, they train, they work, they compete. Sports as competition is football, basketball, you may know more ancient forms of them... and they have rules, referees, time, and metrics like assists, goals, even dating very far back.
The olympics of wrestling, of lifting, or ball throwing. They had metrics in the past, in Greece, in Rome. This ain't new, come on.
Some researchers look at someone creating analternative history in a game, like a small country conquering the world,and see it that way. But my argument is that these types of alternativehistory creation, or counter-play, is essentially just replicating the logicof colonialism. You just happen to be the colonizer. Like, let me go con-quer England in the game – it’s still colonialism, right?
The point being, there is exogenous, or what is forced from outside, and endogenous, or what is forced from inside. UK, France, Spain, etc. were and are colonialists countries that forced upon others their empire, and they still do, but in a more palatable less visibly violent fashion.
They opress, homogenise, silence, displace, much like the US, Mainland China, India, or Mexico. Their internal dissidents, varied ideologies, immigrants, subcultures, languages, natives, are squished, minoritised, colonised.
It’s literallyabout the colonisation of an entire galaxy. Those types of elements areso prevalent.But then there’s the more obvious ones like Age of Empires. Or, Em-pire: Total War. How these games work, and how they are meant to beplayed, there’s an unavoidable code there.
Yes, arguably that is the game's goal, but as I see it, most of the game's players are actually very far from being mindless colonialists. They are not warmongers either. Instead, I see historians, economists, people that may be white, sure, but that are also concerned with whiteness, that try to tackle it by explaining it. Strategy games demand systems thinking that is somewhat incompatible with reductionist us vs them narratives.
sages in their artifacts, viewers engage in a decoding process to in-terpret these artifacts. Hall describes three broad types of decodingthat viewers may participate in, even shifting between modes at times.
Hall's dominant/hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional is like Castell's legitimizing identity, resistance, and project, which is basically a rehashed virtue ethics by another name. You will deny it, but it maps onto right-wrong with a middle ground in between, or a conservatist-progressivist axis whereby one seeks perpetuation and another one seeks disruption, similar to Nietzsche and Camus in this sense.
Are you the rebel, or the empire? Come on, this ain't new: Time in memorial has had preachers claim things need changing.
Two major camps of thought could bedescribed as the prejudice reduction model, and the collaborative so-cial action model. The scholarship on prejudice reduction dates fromthe post Second World War era and centres on individuals in societywho hold positions of power and prejudicial opinions about those theyoppress.
You must learn, and you must act. Both are needed for habit building and sustainable projects (community commitment to resist black swans).
Larocco writes: “[...]empathy is an orientation to the other, one thatattunes to some aspect of the other’s feelings or emotions or thoughts[...] yet which may not engage with the other’s otherness at all. [...]Toput the point succinctly: feeling-with is not the same as feeling-for. [...]Empathy, for ethical behavior, is a crucial intersubjective vocalizer, butby itself as an orientation it may not direct the better angels of ournature to direct action.” (Larocco 2018, 3). Larocco here underscoresthe uncertainty around the potential of this empathic positioning, asthere are many possibilities along a spectrum, all the way from authen-tic identification with another to selective empathy that seeks to mis-construe the other as similar to the self, or identifies only with aspectsof the other perceived as similar to the self.
This perspective on technology as an unproblematic labor saving de-vice fits well with so-called common-sense but wrongheaded ideasabout technologies as neutral tools (see Myth #1) that can smoothlyand easily take on the burden of labor from humans and increase ef-ficiency. This idea has been notably critiqued by Langdon Winner butalso many other scholars of Science and Technology Studies such asBruno Latour (1996) and Susan Leigh Star (1999)
In a way, like with energy, which is not spent or generated but continuously transferred, we should not think in close yes-no, action-result. The event is part of a system, it's on the move, and efficiency doesn't emerge from nothing, it requires other work. I am not talking about zero-sum competition, we can most win with tech, but transformations like eye glasses or leg prosthetics need of workers on the other end, but by automatising them, we are just making them less visible, we are moving them from the artisan workshop to the factory or the mine. We'll have to wait a lot until this manual labour gets replaced by robotics, because once again, the trade-off is not "efficient" right now.
The idea of using an immersive, interactive entertainmenttechnology such as a game or VR experience to ‘change minds’ via em-pathy (which is here understood as an almost involuntary, emotionalresponse) plays into a fantasy that neatly aligns with a privileged posi-tionality, seeking quick, easy, and relatively painless methods of mitiga-tion that fall far short of actual change. Worse yet, these projects aresometime tokenised and held up in hyper visible ways, that signal toothers that change has been achieved, when it has not
Okay, I get it, snake oil vendors are the people who get popular and get government grants to do next to nothing, because the instruction is only a part of the process. Beyond unlearning and learning there must be a change of habits, and no single play session or workshop can achieve that.
Yes, they can nudge toward visibility, but do they re-distribute? They can pinpoint and landmarks to look, and provide ways to not missbehave, but if they then need to be applied, and moral courage is not at its peak, as violence looms on the other side of the spectrum, these products can be almost a self-cleansing sterilisation tool, to merely perform predisposition to change, and to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of not doing so.
The reason-ing may go something like this: if only we can use interactive or immer-sive technology to unlearn prejudice and inspire action, then the hard,painful work of the emotional and intellectual labor of coming to termswith prejudicial beliefs and attitudes could be made easier.
Sounds feasible to me, let's see where this goes.
for possession [...] If representational visibility equals power, then al-most-naked young white women should be running Western culture.
Actually, that's the claim the manosphere makes.
UnReal engine(2018), he examines the ways in which the the engine itself communi-cates embedded politics, which it also forces (or at least strongly en-courages) onto designers who work with it.
The example is pretty shitty, but it's true that when you work in a commercial game company and you can flip assets and code, Unreal becomes very easy to use with first person shooting and enemies: It's purposelly built, like Fortnite UEFN.
scanner found at airports today (see Figure 1). This example is dis-cussed in more recent scholarship from Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020),in which they identify the narrow ways the scanner conceptualises the‘normal’ and ‘safe’ human body, marking and penalising those with bod-ies deemed ‘different’ as dangerous, such as trans and disabled people.The capabilities of the core technology of the scanner, electromag-netic waves that bounce off of and detect the surface of the body, areonly meaningful for airport security purposes when put in relation to acomparative set of data marked as “normative” (and therefore “safe”)— and herein lie the embedded politics of the technology.
I knew about the scanners, but I hadn't thought about the actual process! Upon lifting the veil, it makes sense that its usage as a visual sensory extension-augmentation is only tangible insofar as we used the data comparatively, like a medic would with Breast cancer or other illness - issue being here data gaps, and non-updating practicioners that do not know about minority illnesses.
Winner analyses multipleexamples and ends up concluding that while it may be true that notall technologies have embedded politics, most do, and the question ismore one of degree. One example he looks at is the technology of theatom bomb
What technology lacks politics? A food bowl? A door hinge? Even these have, to a low degree. A paramount example of politics in tech is the printing press, initially barred and then used religiously to spread the cath Bible.
One could argue, like Byung Chul, that phones are religious. Capitalistically religious, therefore, political. Say, they could be sourced differently, yes, and in that sense they are not as political as our context and usage has weaponised them to be, which could be the counterargument.
Reproduced from Corley and Gioia (2004).
What about this one, do they mix?
a collection of n soft-ware agents. The minimum size of n required toauthentically represent an actual group of real peopleusing software is a very relevant question, but we will notgo into further detail here
Oh, okay!
In summary, based on these observations, we believethat artificial societies with their representations of individ-uals, social networks, and the situated environment are themost promising paradigm to support policymaking when itcomes to modeling human behavior in a social contact.
In summary? You didn't compare these to any alternative!
agent-directed simulation that isapplied as a decision support system.
Agent-directed, eh...
To argue,one speaker in the Russian State Duma compared the lawagainst 'LGBT propaganda' with a “victory on a battlefield”(Meduza, 2022b). In this way, the government erases theOther (the queers) from video game culture by censoring itscontent. And then, it tries to fill the gap with propagandamaterials such as the anti-Western Smuta, the militaristicSparta, private military company promotions, etc.
Equating videogames = vice, and war nationalism = virtue. One is framed as slacking while the other one is framed as serving your country.
esthetics (admittedly associated with computer gameculture) to convince fans to join, which, in essence, meansjoining the war in Ukraine.
Drone cams with joysticks and first person recordings are also becoming popular, and are game-like.
Although the proposed project was rejected, the caseindicates the state’s interest in specific advantages ofgames and play.
But also its dissinterest in games and play, as forms of culture. Culture is more often than not, anti-hegemonic, and Russian university students that aspire to design games could flip the purposes of this games engine. Anyhow, it's not like they couldn't use Open Source ones...
An innovative strategy which hesees, and I affirm, “elides the dualism between tech-makingand spiritual strivings”(ibid).Much of this theorization and ethos hold titles such as“Afrofuturism” (Everett, 2009) or “Soulcraft” (Royston,2022) and valorizes embodied knowledges (Daniel, 2005. qtfrom Royston, 2022) from marginalized or racializedminorities.
So, as I understand it, we should change ourselves to embrace more anti-consumerist anti-globalisation strategies (favouring more close "around the fireplace" gatherings) whilst we simultaneously create new spaces removing old ones, for migrating communities to arise (whilst simultaenously avoiding their uncritical reproduction that could lead to hegemonic fearmongering).
Rainbowism or “rainbow nationalism“ (Gqola: 2001,qf Slade 2015) is described as an ‘unintentional‘ act of“invoking the rainbow nation as means of silencingdissenting voices with regards to the status quo in thecountry...[...] and with regards to race and apartheid past“(Slade; 2015: 3). The concept of the rainbow nation;censorship
He's talking about self-censorship, burying the past, avoiding historical memory. The fears are in place, I'd argue, but simultaneously, for a society to really move on it must reconcile with its past and repair those who had been wronged, else the "survivors" remain silenced, displaced, existing but unseen... and this too can be the seed of radicalisation and accumulating hatred.
For me, the task at hand was beyond fighting embarrassment,but finding accommodating tactics to initiate what I called“Incoko” (Dialogue in IsiXhosa language) around the oftenunderplayed and hidden forms of racialized domination in theSA videogames industry. Instead of asking “Who is theoppressor?” I thought it is appropriate for everybody toassume that the scene is already racialized, therefore anygenuine discussion must root from there, as opposed to thedichotomous shaming and defense strategies that prevail inmost settings. This to me is inspired by Boaventura de SousaSantos’s transformative critical tenor that “We don’t needalternatives; we need rather alternative thinking ofalternatives” (2018, viii). That we’ve been asking samequestions, and subsequently proposing redundant andirrelevant solutions for years
Sure, infantilisation besets resentment... and skewed representations may co-opt/tokenise marginalised individuals as diversity hires... but don't we need to give visibility to them as a means to redistribute power? What is it we white males can do, if not taking a step back, staying in silence, and giving space?
I noticed a discomforting sense ofwhite fragility (DiAngelo, 2018); condescension; andinvisibilized power plays in the ensuing emails.
I wonder, did you share your strategy with them and explain why you thought it could be more effective?
(young) adults, ready to do any kind of work as a refugee,just to escape crippling oppression, thus ridding theoppressive regimes of their dissidents while at the sametime providing cheap workforce for the global supporters ofthose regimes as merely another resource they can exploitas modern colonists, while constantly bringing war to theMiddle East for decades, all in the name of bringingdemocracy – or a fetishized version of it that is advertisedas synonymous with all kinds of freedom and prosperity
Sure, sure... but, where are the references and how is this related to the article? I mean, I get the capitalist criticism, but this is vague and unexhaustive. Why import workers when you can outsource production and emissions as a whole, in less regulated places?
“Some peoplesay... I mean our producers...” which shows how media reflectthe opinions of the people who control them.
But that's terrible, don't you see! It leads to the generalisation that any journalist is untransparent, and that their reporting is missguided. How can watchdog independent journalism survive like this when it is tagged of ad-hoc political targetting?
game gave theplayer “the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasiesof middle-class youths,” and he also explained that “thereis a sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and awithdrawal from any commitment to political or collectivesocial agency that runs throughout the game.”
Can you engage in activism, in farming, in policy reunions, teaching, cleaning, or other volunteering? No, you but you can go to shops of any kind!
then-senator Hillary Clinton(2005) claimed that violent games made children violent(Tassi, 2016), and then-president Donald Trump blamedvideogames as one of the causes of school shootings
This is a classical decoy that has just recently reversed!
Interestingly, in GTA IV,an article on the in-game Internet says, “Long-termhealthcare can put a tremendous strain on finances,” whichreminds us that America might be the land of opportunity butonly until people get sick. In addition, when Roman, Niko’scousin, asks him if he likes America, he says it is allabout advertising, and the opportunities are not realbecause people get in debt for those opportunities and becomea slave for the rest of their lives. Moreover, thedescription of the game on the publisher’s websiteexplicitly states that Liberty City is a nightmare for thepeople who do not have money or status (Rockstar Games,n.d.).
But you know what will happen right? This is anecdotal, often optional content, and its subtext goes unoticed for the main attraction which is actually following a materialist gaze: Guns, cars, mansions, designer clothes, prostitutes, riches of any kinds: Luxury, and being above law because you are an oligarch.
(A) Mentoring and psychological support;
Honestly, I kinda disagree with this one. Women shouldn't have to just "cope". That's the male playbook. We should strictly get rid of accusations, of insults, of "you are only there because of X male"... psych support entails giving in to meritocracy's zero sum game. Competition for the gain, at any cost. No. Players shouldn't feel burned out period.
I guess from an outsider’s perspective, when you look forsome materials on women in esports, for work, you havevery few of them.
As for history!
Most guys, when they see a girl, instantly conclude thatshe plays badly. Even if she’s actually a good player,it’s not enough for guys. If a guy and a girl of an equalskill make a mistake in-game, it’s okay for the guy, ithappens, but in case with the girl, she would do it “be-cause she’s a girl”, and not because even top tier playerssometimes make mistakes. Youtube has lots of fail montagesfrom female tournaments. Why point it out specifically,if any tournament has tons of mistakes.
Indeed! Reminds me of cherry picked Islamophobic assault compilations. Ragebait. Polarisation devices. This can also lead perhaps not too trauma, but to imposter syndrome, to loss of confidence, to de-motivation, and burnout. Surely, males experience these too, but less frequently, and notably, on their own. Not sharing and taking a stoic toxic masculinity stance then builds up to projection, hate, impotency, outward attacks not so much as inner pitying (it's others who are wrong, and I must defend myself). There is a certain dread and anguish I feel sorry males have to go through, much unhealthier than fems.
The attitude to mixed teams among ourinterviewees was also mixed: some highlighted the importanceof training together with men, and playing against men,
It's harder to train hard without communal motivation, without relatives to play with. It's hard to improve without someone to best, without being allowed to play with people with high technical knowledge, communicative skills, and professional trainers + diet (enhancements) behind. It's even more complicated if basic game layers, like communication, chat, friends, are systematically barred for you. If doing so risks being insulted, harassed.
Now they are just at different levels.It’s not realistic for women, they just won’t survive. Ifyou remove it now, they just won’t make it at the prolevel, no way.
This. There is a layer of inheritance already in place. Past streamers were male, many of whom pro-players. They go on to train male teams, have male friends, they played more, and they can change games if needed. This is market saturation. Women will get no place because future places are occupated in advance. Who gets the early trial, previews, beta sponsored invitations (think Apex)? It's not her.
Most male pros can quit university and dedicate themselvesto their gaming career, while females can not afford this.
Wouldn't say "most", but sure! Sports too is very, very skewed male, which additionally gives them access to special grants and scholarships which women just don't get (particularly in Ivy US Universitites).
distribution of players in CS:GO was roughly 78% men and 22%
I don't doubt these results, but how much time do women versus men play? Probably much less.
women in competitive CS:GO. Their skills are almost nevermatched with equal popularity and, consequently, economicgains, in the established economy of attention. Thiscorresponds to the deficiencies in meritocratic valuationfound in society in general, especially in the USA
Yet, this is the case exactly why? It doesn't just happen. It's because of the way the streamers talk, the examples they give, the banter they use, and the difference of having a masculine idol for male viewers, and a feminine one. I'd argue boys don't choose female celebrities as reference period.
Due largely to unwelcoming public reception, all-femaleteams rarely compete with all-male teams in public, and whenthey do, they usually demonstrate lower results. However,if one looks at the average scores of female and male playerswho competed in roughly equivalent tournaments, it becomesmuch more difficult to justify the difference between prizepools. According to in-game statistics, professional femaleplayers are only 7% behind professional male players interms of skill-related metrics
To be fair, there are many less women players, but still 7% is a notable difference at least in high leagues. Wouldn't say noticeable for most viewers, though.
neither be bored nor overwhelmed
For a long time! But they do need to be bored and overhwelmed at certain times, to expand their autonomy space, to make them reflect, to make them fail. Learning should not be linear.
Table 1: VUCA, BANI, and RAAT
Honestly, this sounds like unexhaustive gibberish.
Accordingto an understanding of violence based on social systemstheory, the concept is neither physically nor structurallypredetermined. Instead, it focusses on the communication ofinevitability when attributing to action.
In other words, violence as imposition.
The result of this mechanic is one which allows players tofeel as if their selections have narrative and ingameconsequences, while subtly rewarding them for makingdecisions which lead to positive outcomes for characters.We defined ‘positive’ here as cessation of engagement withthe slave trade or awareness of their own culpability
So, two routes that lead to the same ethical outcome. The way may be different, but the takeaway message remains, I dig it!
Domsch suggests that for game choices to feel as if theypossess meaning, they must rely on three guiding principles:they must feel meaningful 1) by being difficult to achieve;2) by making their relevance ambiguous; and 3) by notproviding full gameplay information to the player, and onlysometimes providing full gameplay information. By presentingchoices with incomplete information, the player cannot applya mechanistic decision-making process to get the idealoutcome, and thus the choice feels more meaningful. Thisforces the player to rely on the game’s narrative structureand its broader fiction.
Scarcity, Novelty, and Unpredictableness to build a dramatic arc with ups and downs.
Meaningfully engaging with a recreated historical space isa very different experience from willingly believing in afantastic or futuristic alternative world. Questions ofhistorical authenticity, accuracy and meaning all arise,particularly with such a sensitive topic as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ensuring that every choice issupported by research also leads to a need for design choiceswhich explicitly support player engagement and embodimentin much the same way as a living museum might.
Think of Assassin's Creed.
We anticipate that this writing process willcontinue for some time, as our team has committed to ensuringthat communities in Sierra Leone approve of ourrepresentation of what is their cultural heritage andhistory. This is time-consuming but an important act ofanticolonial narrative collaboration.
Perhaps, but so are many more. Not relativising a minority, I am arguing people still have problems, and there are more efficient ways to bridge them, or bring awareness. I believe this should be a key consideration when creating for impact, because the team composition and motivation can flail when projects become too long and there is no economic backup or money return for the time spent. Volunteering can lead to burnout too.
Tomba and an unnamed woman weredescribed as being leaders of an abortive slave revolt aboardthe slave vessel Robert, captained by a Robert Harding fromEngland. While their attempt was unsuccessful, our teamagreed that it represented African resistance, and shouldbe the key central narrative. We decided that the unnamedwoman should be the same individual as the Temne narrativeguide, who has been reborn and wishes her story to be told.This is consistent with Temne traditions and spirituality
Respect given to the participants, who are not objects, but subjects!
The initial intention behind Bunce Island: Through theMirror was only to produce a high fidelity immersive digitalenvironment
(and it ended as that, I've checked, unavailable, as it is common with these kinds of university-based games)
majority Temne and Mende peoples, and the smaller indigenouscultures such as the Limba, Loko and Kuranko. What we seein effect is a complex and varied tapestry of cultures andpeoples into which the European travellers and traderssailed and then settled. Those newcomers intermarried withmany coastal families, and from those unions arose Afro-European families which grew to dominate the coastal trade
Don't homogenise a culture (like Asia, or China), there is internal colonisation too (interstate nations, flags), with diverse traditions (which, btw, some of the locals may not follow or be accord with).
In part, this aspirational aspect was due to the financialsituation of the London-based Royal Africa Company (RAC)early on; those responsible for the fort were chronicallyunderfunded and typically owed money, as seen through anextensive correspondence by the chief factor, RobertPlunkett, requesting supplies in the early eighteenthcentury.3 Those who worked at Bunce were isolated by distanceand the time period from close oversight by their companyofficials.
About communication delay, which now is much uncommon, but still happens in some rural areas.
Just 502.9 metres by 106.7 metres (1650 feet by 350 feet),the island is small, which made it attractive to the slavetraders intending to build a fort there. Local accountsdescribe how Tasso was the first site considered for a slavefort, but proved unsuitable due to the breadth of terraininto which an escaped slave could flee. Bunce was thereforedeemed a better site and had the advantage of lying justbefore the point where the river grows too shallow for deep-water vessels to navigate.
Chokepoints, vigilancy guard towers, straits. Kinda reminds me of The Witness architectural analysis (https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020552/The-Art-of-The).
literature on this complex relationship andsystem
Accuracy requires economic, cultural, political, and scientific research (reading books/articles), to convey a coherent system without plot holes.
Webegan to ask questions like in what type of homes thesepeople might live in. Would their homes be made of stone orof wood? What kinds of stone would they have chosen? Howmight they dress?These questions, distinctly practical, sparked others, andthe close re-reading of traveler accounts began to shedlight on new ideas and problems. Anna Maria Falconbridgedescribed orange trees at Bunce Island in the 1790s; werethese planted deliberately to address scurvy on board slaveships? Falconbridge describes seeing these trees growingnaturally along the shores of the rivers she and her husbandtraversed in the estuary, indicating that these oranges werea native variety.
Adapt to the geography, or adapt the geography. Foot voting is a myth, we are born unequally because of material distribution. Also note, getting into most of these details may be not feasible, so focusing on a few, and explaining how they are interconnected and have ripple effects to now (takeaway) is a must for learning.
Students should ask one simple question more frequently in classrooms: Why are we doing this?
And one of themost outstanding examples for this kind of interaction isQAnon, an alternate reality game if you will.
Ouch, absolutely scary.
that things could have taken a different courseand characters are not determined by fate.38 He wanted toencourage the audience to occasionally leave the flow inorder to think about its origins, its direction and theimplication of this specific path.It appears reasonable to argue, that games do just that: Inorder to play them successfully, we need to be capable ofthinking about rules
But we don't stop to think! That is, except in puzzle games.
Videogames do notjust fit into Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, they alsomatch what Augé describes as non-places: places of far-reaching anonymity that largely ignore social hierarchies
In a way, they portray the ideal of blank state perfect justice. All speedrunners have the same starting point, all competitive shooters have a fixed "egalitarian" "non-discriminatory" spawn. In a game you are not the nerd, you are the hero, you perform a new person and aren't scrutinised by it, you are given a second chance to start again.
Games are fair. No, they are not. They rely on your setup, on whether you can communicate with teammates, on who in your friend groups plays them, what free offer is given, and what characters which may represent you are found therein. Yet the myth continues, it's pervasive, it's the free will made-up CEO Enterpreneur mindset.
The modern ideal of human exceptionality accelerated by thecapitalist creed of individual responsibility and multipliedby the supermodern excess of options for individual growthhave led to widespread mental overload and feelings ofinsufficiency.28 Videogames offer relief by providing spacesdetached from the power structures of the everyday that makeit a lot easier to live up to the expectations.
Indeed, so many myths to unpack in one sentence. We are not an exceptional species. We do not have free will. Options are mostly noise, choice is manufactured. Infinite growth is not a thing. Yet, we take this for granted. We assume them. I currently do, in a way, even if I acknowledge their mythology... and in doing it, I am given a burden on myself, an expectation, I am placed in a race, a competition against others with these goals. Survival is obscured, it's about thriving.
Thinking about, as well as workingon, the individuals we want to become is taking up increasingparts of our everyday lives. Nothing ever seems to suffice.Nothing seems final.
As argued in the show The Good Place, life is more complicated now that is has ever been. We have so many options! Choice overload incoming.
excess of space, an excess of time and an excess ofindividuality.Summed up very briefly, Augé depicts a social reality inwhich advanced means of communication and travel haveenabled us to physically travel around the world in a fewhours and to virtually be present at the other side of theplanet within seconds.
Bauman and Castell's globalisation.
It seems reasonable to argue, that it was this focus on theindividual, that provided the soil for capitalism and, evenmore obviously, for present-day technology-drivenneoliberalism that has aptly been called surveillancecapitalism9 or cognitive capitalism10.
I accept the argument, but understand that many other mediums also seek this. Perchance shopping, series, podcasts, etc. might not, but while doing sports competitively, or while being an artisti publicly, or particularly while showing yourself on social media and selling yourself on OnlyFans, as a product... you are the protagonist! So it is not only games, but arguably, games are a significant masculine reduct that has replaced, say, war, factory working, and revolutions (which provided less individuality anyhow, but at least promised social belonging and a sense of working toward a future).
Digital games emphasize the relevance of the playingindividual. They place us, the playing subjects, in thecenter of the experience.
Multiplayer games may dilute it a bit, and story games may have their protagonists, but who's in control of the vessel is us.
Many heterosexual men, on the other hand, utilize digitalgames and the communication spaces that surround them, fora specific form of doing gender, trying to live up to anidealized image of masculinity that has seen a decline ofacceptance due to feminist criticism in many other spacesof their everyday lives.
That's actually really interesting... if we posit the idea that prefaces relativist rationalisation that we "ought to be unique and maximise our very own specific set of goals" (for identity formation), then having less idiosyncratic or atypical or group-coded goals can make it harder to differentiate (am I a male or a female type of dissociation/confusion), which is arguably a frustrating experience.
"the playersare free because they continue to play (or were free becausethey stopped playing)".
So freedom as in J Raz's tripartite practical autonomy, NOT as in absolute uncoditional free will.
the idea of agency as a non-essential attribute toplayers, or even human beings, is more problematic.
We need agency to play, apparently, but we don't have it, most likely!
Now, if combined these lessons with Wittgenstein’s idea inthe Philosophical Investigations to abandon the logical formof the proposition (analytical definitions), we will arriveat a holistic notion of the normative space of all games,begging the question it would clash with the idea of beingable to give a conceptual delimitation to the game as a unitof analysis. However, the possibility of avoiding thisconclusion lies in reflecting on Wittgenstein's intentionin establishing this diffuse condition of games.A non-analytic notion of games would therefore have to bepresented on the base experience of play.
Playthrough, or autoethnographic, or therapeutic self-writing reflections. It becomes true for you. It is your lived experience.
for it assumes a causallink between volitions and acts, which the samevolitions can’t possess between each other otherwiseit would lead to an infinite regress
Translated to non-gibberish lingo: I can't chose what I desire. If this wasn't the case, it would create an endless loop of having ability to chose everything, an infinite amount of time back, and then having an ability to chose what to chose, and what are objects of desire in the first place, etc.
evaluation to be possible the rules must be objective inthemselves (1982; p. 110-111)3.
Yes, we must assume. But this is playing pretend. We also assume that patterns exist and can be measured, and that doing science makes sense. These are the foundations of a study.
someone who tells how living with an impaired body is donein practice.
That's the doctors job, I assume, to give advice.
In Mr. Trevers's case, a wound that doesn't heal is said to be a sign thatpoints toward diabetes and atherosclerosis of the leg arteries. But this isn't nec-essarily so: this is a meaning that has been attributed. Such attributions have ahistory, and they are culturally specific
Okay, but there is likeliness, that's how predictions work?
As a complement to this, social scientists have made it their trade to listen forfeelings when they interview patients. And they have persistently and severelycriticized doctors for neglecting psychosocial matters, for being ever so con-cerned about keeping wounds clean while they hardly ever ask their patientswhat being wounded means to them.
It's slowly becoming less the case, though.
See (asmentioned in countless interviews) Meat Boy isn’t made of animalmeat, he’s simply a boy without skin whose name is Meat Boy.”
Bro, how is that? This deflection attempt is so gibberish it's laughable. To be frank, Peta does pick up at games that have little to do with its cause, when they could be, idk, mocking any game that has actual fishing or hunting on it... but the response seems very inmature to me. Perhaps they could have collaborated!
The food bar can be replenished by eating anyof the game’s many varieties of food, of which more than half con-sist of some kind of animal flesh. Supernatural foods aside, the mostnourishing items, alongside salmon, are all cooked red meats: mut-ton, pork chop, and, of course, steak. Most of the vegetables appearon the tier below, whilst fruit sits yet further down the hierarchy,alongside raw meats and just one step up from cakes and cookies,raw fish, and rotten flesh.
And... there's surprisingly little green food variety. There are cakes but no rice? No legumes? There are no tomatoes!
“hierar-chy of foods” in which meat dominates at the top,
I am afraid not... this is a very Western, UK-US centric belief.
That gargantuan hunk of meat, dominating the meagrefruit and vegetable matter beneath, leaves us in no doubt as to theprincipal part of this meal.
The second icon, yes, it reminds me of Minecraft hunger bars, which were not represented by energy, but rather by chicken wings.
play like a loser. At the end of Into the Dead, when you lose, your com-panion is killed, too
Reminds me of the infatigable environment of Rain World, Death Stranding, and Frostpunk. Death looms.
The act ofreading, Bull argues, always engages the emotions of readers, and thesuccess of any text will depend to a large extent on a reader’s sym-pathetic involvement with it. This includes identification with thegoals and objectives of the text’s characters or types. Those charac-ters or types may well be very different from the reader in terms ofage, or race, or gender, or class, but the goals and objectives, suchas escaping death or achieving personal fulfillment, for instance,are most often ones that can be shared by every reader, in that theyreflect rational self-interest. When we read, Bull suggests, we are“reading for victory.”
Not just reading, though, we do things instrumentally, as we are biological machines. Reading is tough, so we scrutinise it severly. Watching TV isn't tough, so the usefulness dilutes and becomes not so present.
you will always die
Reminds me of Sandbox games: Minecraft Hardcore and Project Zomboid make it patently clear.
Tom Nook
How is Tom Nook an animal now? This being is an anthropomorphised capitalist. Are Mae from Night in the Woods or Beck from Beacon Pines animals? What about The Longest Road on Earth, or Tails Noir? Endling has a real animal, not Baba is You or Goat Simulator.
Donkey Kong
Now that's gibberish. Are Goombas, Bowser, or Yoshi animals? You know what's a real chimpanzee/baboon? Ape Out, or Gibbon: Beyond the Trees.
Sonic the Hedgehog
Bro, this is not an animal, it's like saying Kirby is an animal.
Tamagotchi (Bandai, 1996), surely the best known of virtual pets(though they are, strictly speaking, extraterrestrial rather than earthlyanimals)
Similar to Pokémons, these types of entities displace the actual debates of animal welfare. They are mascots, competitive/trained playthings, not entities that can live on their own. Animals like this get systematically infantilised, made dependent from a white saviour gaze.
In mostcases, civilians can be killed—players can murder or incidentally attack the wrongperson during a gunfight—but this causes players to lose a life or fail a mission.
This also implicitly means that killing "others" is allowed. They might be playing the war game, yes, but maybe their country unlisted them unwillingly, how are they different from civilians?
g rape and pedophilia, it is rare to findgames in which these (especially the latter) are possible. Developers might notalways intend to forbid these actions, but they are forbidden all the same if playersare unable to simulate them. Games therefore establish a kind of moral architec-ture as boundaries are created, all without labeling actions or the need for explicitmoralizing.
Then these go unoticed, invisibilised. Much like prostitution is. Much like porn... yet his author seems to frame it as positive?
Kearney considered the girly aesthetic of what shecalls “sparklefication” and its capacity to dissolve effeminophobia.66 Girl andqueer communities that embrace “sparklefication,” Kearney writes, are “cham-pioning femininity for the various pleasures it elicits and the subversive potentialit offers within patriarchal heteronormative societies.”67 Kearney acknowledgeselsewhere, however, that “[p]ink’s signifying power has been so cemented overthe past half century that it is very difficult to associate it with anything otherthan females and femininity,” making it challenging to disentangle the colourfrom its use in upholding rigid gender stereotypes.
In the West! Please, consider this.
One of the most comprehensive of these studies isKearney’s Girls Make Media. Kearney’s book charts a history of girls’ cultural pro-duction in North America, rewriting misogynistic assumptions that position girlsand women as consumers and boys and men as producers. Kearney goes as farback as the domestic crafting activities of the Victorian era to the scrapbookingby fans of classic Hollywood cinema. By the late twentieth century these practiceshad expanded to photography, music, filmmaking, zine making, and web design.
Think who is an art teacher? Who went goes to through master?
In 2019,it attracted crowds of 5,500 at two outdoor events on Halloween night, with other eventsinvolving smaller numbers, e.g. 60 older citizens attended an afternoon tea party and 780people participated in a Dracula themed fun run.Enacting hospitality as welcome and as social controlThe data suggest that both festivals are actively fostering hospitality through their practices.
What data? I don't see a single demographic here beyond mentioning the overall diversity of the area at 50% non-irish. Who attended this? I don't know.
enhance integration
Integration is NOT inclusion.
In festival and eventsettings where people gather, e.g. to hear a favourite musician or learn about a shared interest,there is clear potential for people to set aside differences and find common ground in taste andleisure preferences (Gilroy 2004)
Wow, don't you see the problem here? Curb your privilege.
This understanding highlights that hospitality is not just aboutunrequited giving but always involves an exchange. For their part, the host offers a welcome,friendliness and safety. In the narrowly defined service encounter, the reciprocation expectedof the guest involves economics, as well as a tacit agreement to respect the host’s rules andregulations.
I am a stranger in this adultcentric capitalist world, I haven't signed a social contract to obey your crappy laws.
Clear-cut distinctions between hosts and guests areno longer tenable now (Larsen 2008), given that mobility is such a prominent feature ofcontemporary living (Morley 2002).
Nonsense
outlets like the-Score eSports presented Korean player salaries as disproportionately low,46characterizing Korean players as supreme talents exploited by corporatesponsors paying them minimal wages.47 Even as many Korean players leftfor China, the discourse evolved to see Korean players as good neoliberalsubjects due to their ease of exploitation by corporate interest.
That's true for most esports and regions, yes. It's a very precarised field, in a way, like culture. There's one Taylor Switft (survivorship bias, the myth of self-made hard-worker).
South Korean esports ecosystem
Not just esports, think K-pop boybands. And arguably, some of these may surely find themselves in different origins, like sports clubs and training camps (think La Masia from FCB). Also, this is missing an intersectional approach considering how gender and disability fit into this MASCULINE landscape.
people almostoverwork themselves, and they feel this compulsion and duty to the degreethat sometimes I think they sometimes ruin their lives.
Oh, don't turn this around. This is true. It is true for pianists in Spain, for athletic swimmers in Oklahoma, and for football players in Argentina. Child exploitation is a thing. Perhaps not self-overwork, but this is what society asks of them.
There's this thing in progressivism, where we should be more rested and have more leisure. I sorta agree insofar as it is sustainable, but if the right-wing politicians exploit themselves, we must keep up too. We can't fight a tank with a sunflower for now, I think. We can't fight populism with 3 hour talks.
So no, I deny there exists, at least more than anecdotically, this fog of mystery surrounding Korean players. Indeed, many lower ranks, may admire and find a new interest in their culture thanks to popular figures like that.
League of Legends (LoL)
Stop this essentialisation. There's more than football in Europe, more than NBA and NFL in USA, and more than LoL in Asia. Surely, most people consume these. But you are making a kids these days scarecrow. Asia doesn't dominate Rocket League, Dota, CS:GO, Valorant, Overwatch, PUBG, or Fortnite.
Curiously, it dominates in MOBAs, like Arena of Valor, that have their headquarters on China. I am implying it has to do with marketing (and yes, also govern endorsements). Don't blame the players, blame the power.
Here: https://www.esportsearnings.com/games / https://escharts.com/
Allen Guttmann explains how modern sports differ from the games foundin ancient society. He ascribes seven distinct features (two values and fiveprocesses) to modern sports that distinguish it from ancient games: secu-larism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quan-tification, and record
Modern sports are usually jobs. Such a pipeline is inherently speculative, not because you shouldn't make a living with art or fitness, but because in doing so, you are the product, and people will rate you.
Christine Yano builds on Iwabu-chi’s work and thinks through what she calls the commodity “whiteface” ofHello Kitty. 31 Remarking on Japanese companies’ desires to create globallycompatible consumer products in the 1970s by mimicking Euro-Americanstandards, Yano underscores the ambiguity of the international appeal ofHello Kitty, especially her cute white face. 32 Yano links mukokuseki to mo-dernity, whiteness, and global acceptance and adeptly points out the Japanesecompanies’ willingness to self-erase for the sake of global marketability.
Representation in toys, similar than in games. You consume stereotypes for Carnival: What do the boys wear, tactical and police gear. What about girls? Flying assistants or dressed princesses. Do you see many doctors during carnival? No.
To me, most festivals are grotesque self-fetishisations plagued by nationalistic discriminatory pride. Yes, they can be an acknowledgement of diverse oft-excluded identities (furries), and a visibilisation and acceptance of them, but they rarely are: Most of the times, they look like a parody of the parody, a cartoonish simulation of army/school uniforms, and an objectification via (female) sexualised dresses.
TzarinaPrater and Catherine Fung argue that for the Asian body’s labor to be recog-nized, it must be converted from “the foreign threat to the assimilated modelminority.”
Reminder: Exclusion, Segregation, Integration, and Inclusion. Assimilation is homogenised inclusion, which dissolves any inclusion, because there is no other to include as there is no identity diversity.
Thinking through Hutchinson’s and Moore’s perspectives, we could arguethat Kojima’s strategy of using racial ambiguity to cater to both the Japaneseand the Western audience permits him to embody Japaneseness without anyhistorical baggage.
Furthermore, can you stop to think what budget the game may have?
Noting the racially ambiguous design of the mgs series’ protagonist Snake,Hutchinson argues that the white-passing body welcomes Western playersto empathize with its message.
I know that this is colonising, you don't have to shove it upon me... but isn't it a justified concession? Isn't the inherent peace-cooperation argument embeded in the game akin to the reparatory non-repetition argument that underlies historical memory?
For me, it is not, and I say this having played a large chunk of the game while focusing on utilitarianist EA ethics. It is not, because it may avoid tokenisation, sure, but Sam Porter is not a slave, he is a hero. Not only that, with although it prefaces the quest of reaching white people with anti-war logics, the game has war, the game has fights, and its sequel does too. These are surrounded with mysticism and fantastic events which cloud the statements and leave them open to interpretation in a way that most players are sure to miss them. It's not provocative, it's a eco-tourism chore. The cutscences and events are a McGuffin to visit places and trek through them to feel epic.
To influence a mass of players, and not just get critical acclaim it would have needed to be more straightforward.
lhewodd,whichhadbeenfifledwifl1reds,pinks,bhies,andpastelyellows,isnowblackandwhite,exceptforherhair,whichisgreen.Herdress,whichwasredandvolunfinous,isnowblackandgray,hanginglimplyoverherlumchedbody.Nothavecontrol.IuseflicThmnbstickstotryandmovehcrtotheriglfl;butshcsh1mblesandfalls.3
Wow... it amazes me how Fullerton cannot see through privilege and stereotypes on this representation. Elitist art. Gibberish clichés. Come on, are you marvelling at the "metaphorical" representation of sadness with just a reclined posture and a black and white palette?
Often enough riot is understood to haveno politics at all
Torre Pacheco, Asalto al Capitolio, Portugal Lula de Silva. Milei is famously anarcho-capitalist. Alt right is presenting itself as anti-bureaucracy, anti-state.
The opposition of strike and riot thus comes to stand, viaveiled syllogism, for the opposition of Marxism
Does it?
Benjamin explains that the sociotechnical imaginary is not just about revealing “how the technical andsocial components of design are intertwined, but also imagines how they might be configureddifferently.”
Design is also practice, it's a step in-between theory and application. It's about understanding logistics from the inside without causing real havoc or backfire. It's about learning to predict, to see the holes and gaps that may arise before they do. Design, at the end, is about bridging the theory-application divide. It helps solidfy theories while seeing their limitations in a safe space, dispelling the myth of sudden talent (from an illusion of explanatory depth), and warning against creeping normality by remaining revisionist (iterating) through the practice.
that inviting nonexperts or amateurs from diverse fields to solveproblems could contribute to more effective solutions and outcomes thankeeping a problem closed and away from the public.
Could, may, underexplored... come on. I am stopping reading here.
Cell Slider par-ticipants evaluate potentially cancerous cells, helping scientists to getbetter at diagnosing cancer in future patients. Similarly, in Biogames,players help to properly diagnose malaria in cells.
Just thought I'd appreciate that the so-called "indispensable" and complex medicine sciences seem to rely on non-expert crowd information quite regularly!
If you can’t do that, someone else can.” She cited the 2022IGDA Developer Satisfaction survey in addressing the games industry retention problem:“Diverse talent tends to leave the industry at about twice the rate as white men. So, if webroaden the funnel and we bring more diverse talent in, all we’re doing is losing morepeople, and that’s not an acceptable action plan. It’s not going to make the kind of lastingchange we need to see in our industry.” Regarding retention of diverse talent, MacLeanrecommended actions for leaders and colleagues that foster an inclusive environment:charter team agreements to define core hours of work, hold team members accountable toensure they use their vacation days, accommodate remote work, create shared definitionsfor flex time schedules, develop clear promotion paths, and demonstrate care foremployees as humans. All of these were presented as ways to retain talent, especially forcaregivers. “People are willing to make these tradeoffs,” speaking of work/life balanceand caregiving in particular, “regardless of gender, regardless of family status if they seethere is a path forward.”From my perspective, intentionality and action to create positive sustainablecultures accommodating the needs of marginalized individuals signposts that the gamesindustry has acknowledged a need for correction and is beginning to support diversityand representation in a meaningful way.
Concerning! He's bought the brand washing attempts of big corps... am I being, rash? Is there no way out for Microsoft? Yes there is: One that doesn't include buying Activision despite being rotten? Profiting from endless games like CoD and Candy Crush? One that doesn't invest in data centers for AI that crush the global South? One that doesn't invest heavily in AAA titles like Halo, including its marketing, only to make a fraction of the investment sponsoring indies (and then laying them off)?
Then, no. I am not being rash. Microsoft owns a greedy ecosystem that includes Word and Excel. It asks people to pay for Windows licenses at 200€. Tried to do a Netflix with Xbox Game Pass. A big problem is that almost everyone knows Microsoft. Who knows Annapurna?
A third and very central way in which UE’s design supported player empowerment was the manner in which the game facilitated the forming of a social network among its players. This was done through the narrative of the game, which told players that social innovation requires teamwork; through the complexity of the missions, which led players to collaborate; and by facilitating player communication via the discussion forum and players’ personal pages. As the game developed and players started to befriend each other, a network emerged that was transferrable to the physical world and enabled them to share ideas, knowledge, and other resources.
Reminds me of the school of moral ambition - https://www.moralambition.org/