scholarly journals Crafting minds and communities with Minecraft

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 2339
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Riordan ◽  
Damian Scarf
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Autistic Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective

Minecraft is a first-person perspective video game in which players roam freely in a large three-dimensional environment. Players mine the landscape for minerals and use these minerals to create structures (e.g., houses) and mould the landscape. But can Minecraft be used to craft communities and minds? In this opinion piece, we highlight the enormous potential of Minecraft for fostering social connectedness, collaboration, and its potential as an educational tool. We highlight the recent use of Minecraft to aid socialization in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and promote civic engagement via the United Nations Human Settlement Program. We further discuss the potential for the recently released Minecraft: Education Edition and provide novel links between Minecraft and recent on work on the role of social cures and community empowerment in enhancing mental health, wellbeing, and resilience.

scholarly journals Crafting minds and communities with Minecraft

F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 2339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Riordan ◽  
Damian Scarf
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Autistic Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective

Minecraft is a first-person perspective video game in which players roam freely in a large three-dimensional environment. Players mine the landscape for minerals and use these minerals to create structures (e.g., houses) and mould the landscape. But can Minecraft be used to craft communities and minds? In this opinion piece, we highlight the enormous potential of Minecraft for fostering social connectedness, collaboration, and its potential as an educational tool. We highlight the recent use of Minecraft to aid socialization in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and promote civic engagement via the United Nations Human Settlement Program. We further provide novel links between Minecraft and recent on work on the role of social cures and community empowerment in enhancing mental health, wellbeing, and resilience.

scholarly journals Human Enhancements and Voting: Towards a Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities of Beings

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
S. J. Blodgett-Ford
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
To Come ◽  
Additional Option

The phenomenon and ethics of “voting” will be explored in the context of human enhancements. “Voting” will be examined for enhanced humans with moderate and extreme enhancements. Existing patterns of discrimination in voting around the globe could continue substantially “as is” for those with moderate enhancements. For extreme enhancements, voting rights could be challenged if the very humanity of the enhanced was in doubt. Humans who were not enhanced could also be disenfranchised if certain enhancements become prevalent. Voting will be examined using a theory of engagement articulated by Professor Sophie Loidolt that emphasizes the importance of legitimization and justification by “facing the appeal of the other” to determine what is “right” from a phenomenological first-person perspective. Seeking inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948, voting rights and responsibilities will be re-framed from a foundational working hypothesis that all enhanced and non-enhanced humans should have a right to vote directly. Representative voting will be considered as an admittedly imperfect alternative or additional option. The framework in which voting occurs, as well as the processes, temporal cadence, and role of voting, requires the participation from as diverse a group of humans as possible. Voting rights delivered by fiat to enhanced or non-enhanced humans who were excluded from participation in the design and ratification of the governance structure is not legitimate. Applying and extending Loidolt’s framework, we must recognize the urgency that demands the impossible, with openness to that universality in progress (or universality to come) that keeps being constituted from the outside.

Narrative, Cognition, and the Flow of Mirror’s Edge

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ciccoricco
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Main Stage ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective

Faith, the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, marks an empowered female character that is not hypersexualized, and the decision to employ a first-person perspective (thereby subverting any gaze offered by a third-person view) supports this design objective through gameplay. But despite Faith’s welcome debut on the main stage of commercial gaming, the game raises more significant questions through its engagement with the multifarious concept of “fluidity” or “flow,” which is integral to both the gameplay of Mirror’s Edge and the themes in it. Is Faith’s flow—in line with radical critical moves in literary history and cultural theory of the late 20th century to gender this trope—essentially or inevitably feminine, or for that matter, feminist? Does the game ultimately avoid, perpetuate, or contest the gendered discourses that it evokes? What can its simulations of a fictional mind in action tell us about our own? This article draws on cognitive, feminist, and narrative theoretical frameworks to question what the concept of fluidity means for a video game that mobilizes it through both narrative design and gameplay.

scholarly journals On the nature and role of Consciousness: is it time to move towards a metaphilosophical and metascientific approach?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
ENRICO FACCO ◽  
Fabio Fracas ◽  
Silvano Tagliagambe ◽  
Patrizio Tressoldi
Keyword(s):  
Anthropic Principle ◽  
First Person ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Common ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Common Field

The main aim of this paper is to support a metaphilosophical and metascientific approach to the study of Consciousness.After a brief historical resume of the debate between the mind-brain-body relationship, we discuss how the apparently irreducible contention between a physicalist and an anti-physicalist interpretation of Consciousness can be overcome by a metaphilosophic and metascientific approach in the attempt to overcome ethnocentric cultural filters and constraints yielded by the Weltanschauung and the Zeitgeist one belongs to. IN fact, a metaphilosophical perspective can help to recognize key concepts and meanings common to different philosophies beyond their formal differences and different modes of theorization, where the common field of reflection is aimed to find the problem’s unity in the multiplicity of forms. Likewise, the metascientific approach, such as the anthropic principle adopted in astrophysics, helps overcoming the problems of indecidability of single axiomatic disciplines.A metaphilosophical and metascientific approach seems appropriate in the study of consciousness and subjective phenomena, since the first-person perspective and the meaning of the experience are the condition sine qua non for their proper understanding.

Knowledge from the Outside

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-79
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith
Keyword(s):  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Obvious Source

Knowledge may be examined from the third-person perspective, as psychologists and sociologists do, or it may be examined from the first-person perspective, as each of us does when we reflect on what we ought to believe. This chapter takes the third-person perspective. One obvious source of knowledge is perception, and some general features of how our perceptual systems are able to pick up information about the world around us are highlighted. The role of the study of visual illusions in this research is an important focus of the chapter. Our ability to draw out the consequences of things we know by way of inference is another important source of knowledge, and some general features of how inference achieves its successes are discussed. Structural similarities between the ways in which perception works and the ways in which inference works are highlighted.

“Much Might Be Said on Both Sides”

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Hilary Teynor Donatini
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
English Society ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
Justice Of The Peace

Sir Roger de Coverley, representative of the landed gentry in The Spectator, is typically read as a lovable, old-fashioned eccentric and comic object. Closer attention to the series of essays set in and around Sir Roger’s Worcestershire estate — especially numbers 117, 122, and 130 — reveals that the baronet’s work as a justice of the peace stimulates Mr. Spectator’s moral development. Sir Roger’s intimate relationships with his inferiors and his quasi-familial approach to problem-solving challenge Mr. Spectator’s worldview, allowing Addison and Steele to express their ideas through an interplay of voices. Mr. Spectator’s evolving first-person perspective, animated by the loose, ad hoc structures of the justice’s work, where determining the beginning and ending of a legal action is often difficult, clarifies Sir Roger’s exemplary functions in the text. This essay argues that The Spectator functions as a provocative inquiry into ideology rather than a vehicle for Whiggish politics through a narrative point of view that responds to the characters and settings it encounters, most significantly the figure of the country magistrate. The Spectator’s adoption of the magistrate’s structures of judgment elucidates the role of the rural justice of the peace in eighteenth-century English society and law.

scholarly journals Experiencing The Space: Visiting Cemeteries On All Saints’ Day and an Ordinary Day

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Konecki
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
The Mind

This paper is a description of collaborative research that was done together with students during the class “Contemplative Sociology. Experiencing Self, No-Self and the Lifeworld.” The goal of the research was to introduce the students to the contemplative methods that could be used to research lived experiences and the vision of the lifeworld through contemplation of the mind, bodily sensations, and emotions. A project was started on experiencing the cemetery space. The space for experiencing was chosen to sensitize the students to concerns (such as death, religious holidays, everyday life, suffering, etc.) that could be investigated from the first-person perspective by using contemplation as an alternative to survey-sociological methods, psychological methods and ethnography. The students learned the contemplative techniques of meditation, body awareness, self- observation, and self-description to face their concerns, including the ultimate ones. However, the main concern was the role of the mind, body and emotions in cognition and creating the mood.

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