scholarly journals What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Stone
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Humanism

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

scholarly journals Versions of the Natural

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-456
Author(s):  
Sarah Kay ◽  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Science History ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of

This volume explores new ways of understanding medieval and early modern conceptualizations of nature in light of current developments in critical animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, as well as our expanding knowledge of premodern philosophy, medicine, and encyclopedism. The articles engage numerous disciplines, including philosophy, history of science, history of ideas, and Anglo-Saxon, French, and English literary studies; their approaches represent a broad range of Anglophone and Continental European academic traditions. Collectively, the volume brings to light tensions and contradictions in premodern ideas of “nature” and “the natural.” The “versions of the natural” that emerge are more ecological and less anthropocentric than in much previous work in this area, their emphases correspondingly more philosophical, scientific, even secular, than religious or theological. All contributions combine the detailed study of specific texts and problems with wider historical, theoretical, or philosophical inquiry.

Plundered Hearts

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-92
Author(s):  
Anastasia Salter
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Simulation Games ◽  
Role Playing Games ◽  
History Of

The game genres that typically dominate the discourse of game studies, from role-playing games with their questing heroes to simulation games with their emphasis on settler and/or military aggression, are associated with masculinity. Romance, when it exists at all, is a footnote that follows the same rules of conquest and victory as other models of masculine play: princesses are rescued, lovers are “won.” This article argues that the very decision to design romantic play is an act of feminist game design. Its examination of Plundered Hearts, released by Infocom in 1987 and designed by Amy Briggs, positions the contributions of romantic play as an essential part of the history of feminist games. It traces Briggs's contributions as a feminist designer, including her design of playable women characters and her engagement with nontraditional methods of play in Plundered Hearts,and contrasts her work with that of her peers.

Lupus tonalis

2020 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Ellen Lockhart
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music

There are two kinds of thing called the wolf: one is acoustic and music adjacent; the other is biomaterial. Together, they are an instance of what Donna Haraway called “figures”: that is, “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another.” This essay begins by observing these wolves in London, ca. 1806, where both conjured anxious musings on the human relationship to nature. From there, the perspective widens geographically and historically, to situate the figure of the wolf within a wider history of repressed animalia in Western art music.

Kiwi chicken advocate talks with Californian dog companion

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Potts ◽  
Donna Haraway
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Laboratory Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Companion Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The University

An influential feminist scholar in the field of human-animal studies, Donna Haraway (Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz) has over the past couple of decades provided ground-breaking critiques of such subjects as twentieth century primatology (and its links to race, gender and first-world/third-world politics), the place of nonhuman animals in laboratory science, and the phenomenon of pedigree dog breeding. Her most recent work focuses on our relationships with ‘companion species’, a term Haraway employs in her analysis of the diverse forms of human-animal interactions and exchanges that are part of everyday life. Drawing from ecological developmental biology, she suggests that companion species are the fruit of ‘multispecies reciprocal inductions’. In the following interview with Annie Potts (Co-Director, the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies), Donna Haraway discusses her views on, amongst other things, feminism and multispecies issues, human exceptionalism and posthumanism, and the pleasures of ‘becoming with’ our companion species.

Theodor W. Adorno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).

The World after the End of the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
End Of The World

In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan's poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.

Med. Dr. Adalbert Wraný (1836–1902) – doctor of medicine, mineral collector and donor to the National Museum in Prague

2019 ◽  
Vol 188 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-146
Author(s):  
Martin Bohatý ◽  
Dalibor Velebil
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Industrial Chemistry ◽  
Pediatric Pathology ◽  
Geological Institute ◽  
History Of ◽  
Precious Stones

Adalbert Wraný (*1836, †1902) was a doctor of medicine, with his primary specialization in pediatric pathology, and was also one of the founders of microscopic and chemical diagnostics. He was interested in natural sciences, chemistry, botany, paleontology and above all mineralogy. He wrote two books, one on the development of mineralogical research in Bohemia (1896), and the other on the history of industrial chemistry in Bohemia (1902). Wraný also assembled several natural science collections. During his lifetime, he gave to the National Museum large collections of rocks, a collection of cut precious stones and his library. He donated a collection of fossils to the Geological Institute of the Czech University (now Charles University). He was an inspector of the mineralogical collection of the National Museum. After his death, he bequeathed to the National Museum his collection of minerals and the rest of the gemstone collection. He donated paintings to the Prague City Museum, and other property to the Klar Institute of the Blind in Prague. The National Museum’s collection currently contains 4 325 samples of minerals, as well as 21 meteorites and several hundred cut precious stones from Wraný’s collection.

La ética del Otro: una introducción al pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First Philosophy

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

Policy analysis and complexity – a non-equilibrium approach for integrated water management

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 301-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govert D. Geldof
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Control System ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Integrated Water Management ◽  
Equilibrium Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Groundwater Policy ◽  
Non Equilibrium

In integrated water management, the issues are often complex by nature, they are capable of subjective interpretation, are difficult to express in standards and exhibit many uncertainties. For such issues, an equilibrium approach is not appropriate. A non-equilibrium approach has to be applied. This implies that the processes to which the integrated issue pertains, are regarded as “alive”’. Instead of applying a control system as the model for tackling the issue, a network is used as the model. In this network, several “agents”’ are involved in the modification, revision and rearrangement of structures. It is therefore an on-going renewal process (perpetual novelty). In the planning process for the development of a groundwater policy for the municipality of Amsterdam, a non-equilibrium approach was adopted. In order to do justice to the integrated character of groundwater management, an approach was taken, containing the following features: (1) working from global to detailed, (2) taking account of the history of the system, (3) giving attention to communication, (4) building flexibility into the establishing of standards, and (5) combining reason and emotions. A middle course was sought, between static, rigid but reliable on the one hand; dynamic, flexible but vague on the other hand.

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