Agenda Item Week 10

From A Cyborg Manifesto:
In the manifesto, Haraway argues that the cyborg - a fusion of animal and machine - trashes the big oppositions between nature and culture, self and world that run through so much of our thought. Why is this important? In conversation, when people describe something as natural, they're saying that it's just how the world is; we can't change it. For example, women for generations were told that they were "naturally" weak, submissive, and overemotional. That it was "in their nature" to be mothers rather than corporate raiders, to prefer parlor games to particle physics. If all these things are natural, they're unchangeable.

On the other hand, if women (and men) aren't natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed. Everything is up for grabs, from who does the dishes to who frames the constitution. Basic assumptions suddenly come into question, such as whether it's natural to have a society based on violence and the domination of one group by another. In this way, "the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century" (Haraway 149).

From The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat:
"The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government" (Introduction Morningstar and Farmer). Habitat people are not clearly differentiating the levels of technology. They mean to say that human interaction is at the core of the game, but at the same time they imply that there is a level of the technology that shapes what goes on in the social space. The rules shape what occurs between social interaction in the game. This becomes unclear because the reading does not clearly define the two technologies in which ideas are separate but are interconnected.

Wiki Proj Check-in

The first time i put up this wiki post, it was requested for speedy deletion. 3mins. after this request, another person from the community declined the speedy and claimed that it has sufficient context to identify the subject of the article. Someone added a notability tag to the article and i made changes to it by adding references and expanded it by adding an explanation of the rhyme. A while later the community talked to me about fixing the links to disambiguation pages using AWB. Two minor edits and a section edit was made to my page by the community: 1) robot-assisted fix links to dismbiguation page French, 2) fixing links to disambiguation pages using AWB (the "user stamp" was deleted), and 3) section edit to the references section. I added another background section but that got deleted because someone claimed that it was not relevant to the post. So far, it looks very much like the original post because my newer revisions didn't last on the post other than the three minor edits that have been made by the community.

In doing this wikipedia project I learned how fascinating it can be for a community to come together through a single search engine. It's amazing how quickly edits are made and people flag posts. I find it interesting how there are certain criterias that wiki people go by, but then from seeing the notability flag on my own page I discoverd that everyone has their own point of view with what should and can be posted. For example, one person flagged my page for speedy deletion but then someone else stood up for the post saying that there is sufficient information.

Overall, I feel like wikipedia cannot be a reliable source because there are so many different views and you can never really know which is right or wrong (unless you research the sources for yourself). Before this project, I felt that wikipedia was reliable and I took everything at face value; I figured everything on the page must be correct and reliable to reference. Wikipedia is easily accessible and obtains so much information--it's really neat. Yet, after doing this project myself, I now realize that there can be amateurs like myself who are creating new pages and such with very basic knowledge. Unless you really know what you're doing, how do you know who's ideas can be trusted and who's cannot? I now understand why professors are not in favor of using Wikipedia as a source for writing a research paper.

Agenda Item Week 9

On Papert's Mindstorms

In looking at learning it is not enough to look at "learning how to learn" (ie. concentrate on the learner) but we need to study the basic structure of the subject itself.

Computers will not create an educational revolution. Forget about computers (for a minute!); culture is central to change! Papert is not a mechanical technological determinist. He is more on about reconceptualising traditional subject domains and using, in this instance, the computer as a tool to help do this. Since culture is central to change then it follows that a teacher ought to aspire to be an anthropologist. The computer is merely one important recent addition to the cultural landscape. The question that the anthropologist/teacher ought to focus on is rather than figuring out what we want for the culture, Papert states we need to figure out what it is in the culture that can change and which cultural materials are relevant to intellectual development.

The computer will not replace the teacher. On the contrary, teachers will have to become more skilled to incorporate the new technology into the overall educational context.

With claiming that the teacher ought to be an anthropologist, Papert contrast with the phrase New Math (420).

Papert politicises the educational debate in a highly practical way.

Agenda Item Week 8

From the reading: Gameflow: A Model for Evaluating Player Enjoyment in Games- Sweester & Wyeth

Flow is an experience “so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous” [Csikszentmihalyi 1990]. This implies that people play games for the experience itself, and for no external reward. Futhermore, "every flow activity provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of being transported into a new reality (a familiar sensation for game players)" (3). Also, the criteria were used to develop a concrete understanding of what constitutes good design and player enjoyment in real-time strategy games. The GameFlow model serves as a starting point for academics and game developers to understand enjoyment in games and to conduct further research into understanding, evaluating and designing enjoyable games (24).

Flow experiences consist of eight elements, as follows:
(1) a task that can be completed;
(2) the ability to concentrate on the task;
(3) that concentration is possible because the task has clear goals;
(4) that concentration is possible because the task provides immediate feedback;
(5) the ability to exercise a sense of control over actions;
(6) a deep but effortless involvement that removes awareness of the frustrations of
everyday life;
(7) concern for self disappears, but sense of self emerges stronger afterwards; and
(8) the sense of the duration of time is altered.
Eight core elements that relate to flow: concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social.

Are there games where this model wouldn't work?

Agenda Item Week 7

In Jonathan Belman's reading, "game reviews", he states "we believe that design decisions affect the range of plausible values interpretations for a game in a roughly systematic way" (2).

"The exact make-up of a particular player's values experience is likely to depend on the idiosyncratic combination of personal, cultural and situational factors that he or she brings to the game" (1). Each person's experience with the game is different. Thus, game values offer personal values of the makers/designers of the game. In a sense, this suggests that games are beginning to resemble more and more like reality.

Examples:
Left Behind: Eternal Forces--
Either this is just poorly balanced game play, or it does suggest something about he relative values of prayer and the lives of non-believers in the designers’ ethos.

Crackdown--
So, while Crackdown can be regarded an intolerant game regarding issues of ethnic origin and gender, it might also be considered tolerant, diverse and inclusive regarding issues of race.

Ico--
The designers of Ico challenge this paradigm that has a religious aspect in it, shifting the focus from violent rescue to caring and protective in-game behaviors.

Agenda Item Week 6

Among the readings, we've learned that games have a deeper meaning in its making, such meanings can be politically or socially. Ultimately, however, I agree with the idea that games function to provide "intrinsic pleasures they provide" despite the particular function it has such as through learning about a topic, playing for fun, hanging out, etc.
Nonetheless, Zimmerman suggests that games have a deeper more complex meaning and function. Design begins with research and through iterative design, games are adjusted through playtesting. In significance, the process of iteration is important and benefits game designers/players because you "discover answers to questions you didn't even know were there" (Zimmerman).

Why do we need play-testing? Key to media is getting the right kind of feedback at the right moment.

Agenda Item Week 5

Ian Bogust, the author a book on the games and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, claims that (young) people are more likely to learn about big theories of society by playing games and teaching themselves than to read it in the paper ("Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time" by Clive Thompson). Although I do agree that putting societal issues in a game is a creative approach in spreading knowledge across populations, I also feel that people are selective about the games they play. In this way, how effective are games in reaching the people?

Just as Ben Sawyer, co-founder of the Serious Games Initiative, claims that designing fun and politically nuanced games is really tough--I agree. Games are, in fact, seen as an artistic expression and "by understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements" ("Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy by Ian Bogust).

In questioning whether games are or are not effective in imposing societal issues, just being able to discuss it in this way is already a change.