scholarly journals Infrastructures of Play: Labor, Materiality, and Videogame Education

Author(s):  
Jeff Watson

Preparing students for the job market is not the limit of our responsibilities as videogame educators. We must also prepare them to be ethical actors within the industries they may join. This paper argues for augmenting player-centric videogame design education and game studies pedagogies with approaches that situate videogames in context as operational components of extractivist business models and the political and financial economies that support them. This approach entails teaching videogames as technical systems with complex and expansive upstream and downstream supports and impacts. These supports and impacts have real and frequently detrimental effects on the environment, communities, and individual human lives, and yet are relatively rarely discussed in the literature, especially in comparison to discussions that focus on representation and rhetoric. By looking beyond the frame of the individual videogame as an expressive artifact, educators can help learners to apprehend issues such as the growing material and environmental costs of computer-based entertainment and the many tiers of labor exploitation involved in producing videogames and the computing machinery that makes them possible, among other concerns. The paper concludes by suggesting that students equipped with these kinds of understandings will be able to make more informed ethical assessments, and thus wiser choices, as they percolate into the videogames industries and, in some cases, into positions of leadership.

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tami Ambury

In his 2011 book, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada, environmental journalist Chris Benjamin provides a new kind of roadmap to a more sustainable future.  In this work, Chris masterfully weaves the stories of 35 creative and dedicated individuals from the four Maritime Provinces who recognize the need to take action now. From more sustainable food, transportation, or housing choices, to new business models, to community-based social marketing and branding, to journalists and educators raising their voices for change, Chris outlines some of the many narratives for change. In so doing, he offers workable options that inspire pro-environment attitude and behaviour change, at the individual, organizational, and systemic levels.


Author(s):  
Bryan Howell ◽  
Curt Anderson ◽  
Nile Hatch ◽  
Chia-Chi TENG; ◽  
Neal Bangerter ◽  
...  

Over that last few decades there has been a significant rise in interest for design-led entrepreneurship and innovation. This has brought about the need to expand on the principles and methods of human-centred design by incorporating knowledge from multiple disciplines, such as management, business, and entrepreneurship studies. This expansion aids designers, engineers, and marketing practitioners who strive to create innovative, meaningful and relevant services, business models and experiences. More often than not, ventures operate under very limited resources, and practitioners are often required to fulfil several roles. The concept of ‘multidisciplinary teams’ widely spread in this sphere often bears little resonance in these contexts. Designers possess valuable competencies that can have a significant impact on the venture, especially driving user and context-centred strategy and processes for the introduction, legitimization and scaling-up stages. However, engaging with these areas of practice requires skills and capacities that overlap traditional disciplinary roles. In doing so, the boundaries between design and engineering, branding and communications, cultural and behavioural insight, marketing and management strategy are blurred. As educators in design innovation, how do we explore, define and balance interdisciplinary relationships between design, engineering, management, business and entrepreneurship theories, methods, language and models of education? The purpose of the entrepreneurship in design education track is to discuss methods, models, case studies, research, insights and unexpected knowledge in benefits and limitations of design entrepreneurship education. In particular, the three papers presented in this track demonstrate different approaches to entrepreneurship and design education.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 366-366
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen

Eddic poetry constitutes one of the most important genres in Old Norse or Scandinavian literature and has been studied since the earliest time of modern-day philology. The progress we have made in that field is impressive, considering the many excellent editions and translations, not to mention the countless critical studies in monographs and articles. Nevertheless, there is always a great need to revisit, to summarize, to review, and to digest the knowledge gained so far. The present handbook intends to address all those goals and does so, to spell it out right away, exceedingly well. But in contrast to traditional concepts, the individual contributions constitute fully developed critical article, each with a specialized topic elucidating it as comprehensively as possible, and concluding with a section of notes. Those are kept very brief, but the volume rounds it all off with an inclusive, comprehensive bibliography. And there is also a very useful index at the end. At the beginning, we find, following the table of contents, a list of the contributors, unfortunately without emails, a list of translations and abbreviations of the titles of Eddic poems in the Codex Regius and then elsewhere, and a very insightful and pleasant introduction by Carolyne Larrington. She briefly introduces the genre and then summarizes the essential points made by the individual authors. The entire volume is based on the Eddic Network established by the three editors in 2012, and on two workshops held at St. John’s College, Oxford in 2013 and 2014.


Author(s):  
Scott Marek ◽  
Joshua S. Siegel ◽  
Evan M. Gordon ◽  
Ryan V. Raut ◽  
Caterina Gratton ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

This chapter demonstrates how the organization of narrative information can shape a reader’s impression of what is represented. It focuses on two ways in which concrete objects are arranged in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: as specific members of general categories and as part of causally connected narrative structures. Dickens relies on these representational strategies to capture a scale of reality no longer suited to the individual human body. In doing so, he also reveals that the realist novel’s conventional commitment to individual experience at the scale of concrete particulars reflects constraints on the comprehension process.


Author(s):  
Benedetta Zavatta

Based on an analysis of the marginal markings and annotations Nietzsche made to the works of Emerson in his personal library, the book offers a philosophical interpretation of the impact on Nietzsche’s thought of his reading of these works, a reading that began when he was a schoolboy and extended to the final years of his conscious life. The many ideas and sources of inspiration that Nietzsche drew from Emerson can be organized in terms of two main lines of thought. The first line leads in the direction of the development of the individual personality, that is, the achievement of critical thinking, moral autonomy, and original self-expression. The second line of thought is the overcoming of individuality: that is to say, the need to transcend one’s own individual—and thus by definition limited—view of the world by continually confronting and engaging with visions different from one’s own and by putting into question and debating one’s own values and certainties. The image of the strong personality that Nietzsche forms thanks to his reading of Emerson ultimately takes on the appearance of a nomadic subject who is continually passing out of themselves—that is to say, abandoning their own positions and convictions—so as to undergo a constant process of evolution. In other words, the formation of the individual personality takes on the form of a regulative ideal: a goal that can never be said to have been definitively and once and for all attained.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Maxim Pyzh ◽  
Kevin Keiler ◽  
Simeon I. Mistakidis ◽  
Peter Schmelcher

We address the interplay of few lattice trapped bosons interacting with an impurity atom in a box potential. For the ground state, a classification is performed based on the fidelity allowing to quantify the susceptibility of the composite system to structural changes due to the intercomponent coupling. We analyze the overall response at the many-body level and contrast it to the single-particle level. By inspecting different entropy measures we capture the degree of entanglement and intraspecies correlations for a wide range of intra- and intercomponent interactions and lattice depths. We also spatially resolve the imprint of the entanglement on the one- and two-body density distributions showcasing that it accelerates the phase separation process or acts against spatial localization for repulsive and attractive intercomponent interactions, respectively. The many-body effects on the tunneling dynamics of the individual components, resulting from their counterflow, are also discussed. The tunneling period of the impurity is very sensitive to the value of the impurity-medium coupling due to its effective dressing by the few-body medium. Our work provides implications for engineering localized structures in correlated impurity settings using species selective optical potentials.


Author(s):  
Kim P. Roberts ◽  
Katherine R. Wood ◽  
Breanne E. Wylie

AbstractOne of the many sources of information easily available to children is the internet and the millions of websites providing accurate, and sometimes inaccurate, information. In the current investigation, we examined children’s ability to use credibility information about websites when learning about environmental sustainability. In two studies, children studied two different websites and were tested on what they had learned a week later using a multiple-choice test containing both website items and new distracters. Children were given either no information about the websites or were told that one of the websites (the noncredible website) contained errors and they should not use any information from that website to answer the test. In both studies, children aged 7- to 9-years reported information from the noncredible website even when instructed not to, whereas the 10- to 12-year-olds used the credibility warning to ‘edit out’ information that they had learned from the noncredible website. In Study 2, there was an indication that the older children spontaneously assessed the credibility of the website if credibility markers were made explicit. A plausible explanation is that, although children remembered information from the websites, they needed explicit instruction to bind the website content with the relevant source (the individual websites). The results have implications for children’s learning in an open-access, digital age where information comes from many sources, credible and noncredible. Education in credibility evaluation may enable children to be critical consumers of information thereby resisting misinformation provided through public sources.


2007 ◽  
Vol 362 (1486) ◽  
pp. 1841-1845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Rocheleau ◽  
Steen Rasmussen ◽  
Peter E Nielsen ◽  
Martin N Jacobi ◽  
Hans Ziock

Template-directed replication is known to obey a parabolic growth law due to product inhibition (Sievers & Von Kiedrowski 1994 Nature 369 , 221; Lee et al . 1996 Nature 382 , 525; Varga & Szathmáry 1997 Bull. Math. Biol . 59 , 1145). We investigate a template-directed replication with a coupled template catalysed lipid aggregate production as a model of a minimal protocell and show analytically that the autocatalytic template–container feedback ensures balanced exponential replication kinetics; both the genes and the container grow exponentially with the same exponent. The parabolic gene replication does not limit the protocellular growth, and a detailed stoichiometric control of the individual protocell components is not necessary to ensure a balanced gene–container growth as conjectured by various authors (Gánti 2004 Chemoton theory ). Our analysis also suggests that the exponential growth of most modern biological systems emerges from the inherent spatial quality of the container replication process as we show analytically how the internal gene and metabolic kinetics determine the cell population's generation time and not the growth law (Burdett & Kirkwood 1983 J. Theor. Biol . 103 , 11–20; Novak et al . 1998 Biophys. Chem . 72 , 185–200; Tyson et al . 2003 Curr. Opin. Cell Biol . 15 , 221–231). Previous extensive replication reaction kinetic studies have mainly focused on template replication and have not included a coupling to metabolic container dynamics (Stadler et al . 2000 Bull. Math. Biol . 62 , 1061–1086; Stadler & Stadler 2003 Adv. Comp. Syst . 6 , 47). The reported results extend these investigations. Finally, the coordinated exponential gene–container growth law stemming from catalysis is an encouraging circumstance for the many experimental groups currently engaged in assembling self-replicating minimal artificial cells (Szostak 2001 et al . Nature 409 , 387–390; Pohorille & Deamer 2002 Trends Biotech . 20 123–128; Rasmussen et al . 2004 Science 303 , 963–965; Szathmáry 2005 Nature 433 , 469–470; Luisi et al . 2006 Naturwissenschaften 93 , 1–13). 1


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bencherki ◽  
Alaric Bourgoin

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.


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