Intellectual Game Research Articles

Editorial: What Matters?

Editorial: What Matters?

The use of sexual controversy in South African advertising: A pragmatic analysis

This article is based on an investigation of printed South African advertisements in which sexual controversy is deliberately used as a strategy to draw attention. The dataset is a collection of Afrikaans- and English-medium advertisements selected from popular South African magazines published between 2000 and 2010. The purpose of the research is to offer an insight into the nature of controversy as a mechanism in the South African media and to categorise the dataset primarily by means of a pragmatic analysis to identify the implied marketing message. Controversy in the advertisements was associated with themes related to sex, such as nudity, sexism, health and safety issues, and indecent language usage. The research investigated the exploitation of pragmatic instruments, in order to evoke controversy in advertisements, such as the transgression of the conditions governing conversation according to Grice's (1989) Co-operative Principle and the maxims of conversation. A study of controversial advertising may offer a deeper understanding of modern society. As expected, the results indicate that sex still sells and that sexual controversy is by no means fixed or age and culturally bound. Moreover, the character of the advertisements is nowadays very often an intellectual game which requires the target market's cognitive involvement and inter-textual knowledge.

A mente e a máquina: desempenho, design de jogos e humanidades

This article argues in favor of teaching video game design as a humanistic discipline. In The Art of Videogames (2009), Grant Tavinor defines video games as a form of fiction and art. Based on some of the ideas that Tavinor highlights, Chris Crawford’s standpoint on game designers’ preparation in Chris Crawford on Game Design (2003), and Huizinga’s description of the functions of play in Homo Ludens (1964), I will reason for the approach of housing the undergraduate game studies and design in the faculty of humanities as one discipline. The rationale of why the art and technology of games should meet in humanities emerges from the present state of games’ content in the mainstream games; that is, what they show and what they tell. This is of course a case for intellectual, enlightened, inspired, and thought-provoking game stories, and how this could be achieved in the humanities.

"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way"

Clyde Hertzman's sudden and untimely death was a terrible blow to those who knew him. It was also a major loss to health research and policy in canada and well beyond. He was an outstanding public academic, at the top of his intellectual game. here i attempt a highly selective and personal account of how he developed the conceptual framework that he called "the whole enchilada," of the social context influencing both biological and behavioural development from earliest infancy. From these roots spring our life trajectories, evolving social gradients of more--or less--successful experience at each life stage. the international performance of a society reflects the sum of these trajectories. Canada could do much better, but not in Harperland.

A Type Index for Children's Games

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am indebted to Jean-Pierre Rossie, Cleo Gougoulis, and Celia and Peter Skrine, not only for help with the translation of material from Flemish, French, Greek and German sources, but also for many discussions on the subject of games and their classification, over the years. Notes [1] These observations would not be materially affected by bringing to the comparison another book of the same period, F. M. Böhme's Deutsches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel (1897) which has the following mixed bag of main headings for its games: Amusements without rules Circle and dance games Running, jumping and catching games Hopping games Throwing, kicking and aiming games Gymnastics (for fun) Combat games Searching and guessing games Quiet indoor pursuits for winter Social and forfeit games Riddles (Böhme 1897 Böhme, Franz Magnus. 1897. Deutsches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Haertel. [Google Scholar], iii and iv). Although, unlike the previous lists, there is an implicit developmental theme discernable in these categories, from the games without rules of very young children, the non-competitive circle games, the physical exertion games of older children, to the more sport-like pursuits of youths, and through to the social and intellectual games shared with adults.

Design and Realization of Desktop Balance Reflection Ball System

At present, no intellectual games beneficial to both human left and right brain development simultaneously can be observed within China, oriented to which a design of desktop balance reflection ball system is realized in this thesis. Several main contents can be noticed. Firstly, with the participants' manual push torsion as the power source the direction of the handle control and the one of the game table swing movement of the system are made reverse on the principle that the cam swing exerted by the push and pull movement of the link rod is driven by the swing of the tee iron; thus, the control direction of the ball is made reverse with the one of human thinking inertia. Secondly, the game platform is made into a structure freely adjustable labyrinth pattern, and for convenience of operators of different heights the support unit is equipped with a height-adjustable triangle bracket. Thirdly, several softwares such as AUTOCAD is applied to this system design in the establishment of the 3D stereo model, through which the efficiency and quantity of the design are improved and the development circle of the system prototype is thus shortened.

“Throw[ing] the Longest Shadows”: The Significance of the Bogus Quotation for Arcadia by Jim Crace

Preceding his Arcadia with a non-existing quotation, Jim Crace proves to be no Arcadian innocent: challenging the shrewdness of his readers, the contemporary novelist seems to take pleasure in inviting them to an intellectual game which begins before the novel unfolds. The highly evocative title and the bogus quotation are bound to evoke associations which become the subject of minute examination in the novel. Its result turns out to be as astounding as the uncommon aphoristic trap laid for the readers. This article examines the significance of the bogus quotation as a part of the novel’s message and a key to its interpretation.

Is This the Death of the University? Knowledge Production and Distribution in the Disintermediation Era

In the 21st Century, an increasing number of citizens have access to Higher Education. However, the imbalance between free contents available on the Internet and expensive enrollment fees, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon universities, could cause long term problems for the Higher Education system. If the on-line experience is reasonably similar in activities and quality to the teaching provided in the classroom, why not consider a disintermediation of Higher Education, as has occurred in other business models such as the culture industry. What would happen if citizens and governments rejected university degrees that certify these institutions as a unique source of learning and professional legitimation? It is well known that there is currently an active debate in the European Union about recognition and validation of informal learning (Council of the European Union, 2009). The aim of this debate is to design new accreditation methods that are not limited by the constraints imposed by formal education institutions. In this context the analysis of and reflection on disintermediation practices in Higher Education is more an academic necessity than an intellectual game. All the communication and cultural industries have already debated this phenomenon: Why should Higher Education avoid the discussion on disintermediation? This article explores questions such as: To what extent is this phenomenon reshaping the traditional role of the university? Will it cause a crisis in the educational institutions? Will this disintermediation of education evolve towards the disappearance of institutions like schools and universities? In the following pages we reflect on these topics and propose new categories for understanding them.

Media Pembelajaran tentang Pola Makan Seimbang Bagi Anak-Anak Usia 4–6 Tahun Melalui Permainan

Today, junk food has become the staple food favored by children. Therefore research is needed in the creation of media aids that provide information and explanation of a balanced diet for children, so children can understand about healthy and unhealthy food for their growth and bodies. This research used observational methods, interviews, and descriptive qualitative analyses. The study started from the media analysis of good learning, child psychology, intellectual games, and the importance of image. Appropriate learning media strategy for children is acquired from the results of the analysis. The delivery of messages is done using a 3-dimensional board game where there are several problems in the game which aims to remind and provide further explanation to children.

Noologia radykalnej bezbożności (o Logice sensu Deleuze’a)

Nietzsche’s critique of theistic thinking seems to be one of the major sources of Deleuze’s philosophy. The notion of becoming godless might cast light upon what the French philosopher intended to achieve through his “noology” and critique of the “traditional image of thought”, i.e. a paradigm of reflection that makes any idea “pious” or even God’s own idea, supposing hidden theology behind anthropology, as well as making truth “absolute”. Against such a priestly philosophy searching for the Truth, Deleuze proposed his own unorthodox view the “invention of truths”, a creative undermining of the strict true/false distinction. Furthermore, it led him to question the notion of the sense as theomorphic structure whereby it is akin to the “soul” of the object. To postulate a “reversal of Platonism” is to change sense into the “body” of an object. Although Deleuze’s effort to reinterpret the sense of sense might seem too experimental, we should see it more as his navigation through an intellectual game rather than his “beliefs” – only then can we unfold their subversive power of inspiration.

Experiments in Dialogic Poetics: J. V. Foix and Joan Ponç's La Pell de la Pell (1970)

La pell de la pell started out as poetic prose written by J. V. Foix in 1968, presented as an open letter to the Dau al Set artist Joan Ponc. The painter's response to the letter was to collaborate with the poet in this artist's book, La pell de la pell (1970), where illustrations share the pages with the text, which is then followed by a series of 22 etchings signed by the artist. This innovative and exciting exercise would be replicated by most of the members of the group in multiple collaborative combinations, producing masterpieces such as the Nocturn matinal (1970) and Poems from the Catalan (1973) by Joan Brossa and Antoni Tapies, 97 notes sobre ficcions poncianes (1974) by J. V. Foix and Joan Ponc, and Exploracio de l'ombra (1974) by Joan Fuster and Joan Ponc, to name just a few. This article studies the dual experimental nature of this book: Foix's poetic prose and the intriguing effect that the addition of Ponc's images makes to the work as a whole. It will also address the treatment that they both make of the theme of roughness (both literal and figurative), identified by Foix in his earlier collection Sol i de dol (1936) as a meaningful and innovative element in his poetry, and the use of texture in Ponc's work. Foix's text will also be compared to D. H. Lawrence's Snake to discuss the sexual associations explored by both the poet and the artist in this book. The work will be evaluated in terms of its reproduction of repeated patterns and their mesmeric effect, and linked to the attributes historically associated to the snake ever since the mediaeval Bestiaries but also to Barthes' Pleasure of Consumption. The method of analysis will involve the study of La pell de la pell from a Bakhtinian perspective, as a single hybrid text where the two media dialogue with each other, and attempt to decipher a common visual and linguistic symbolism. This will allow for the interpretation of this work as one that incites the reader to join in an intellectual game closely linked to Barthes' concept of Jouissance.

The Debate in Love's Labour Lost

The Debate in Love's Labour Lost Abstract Woo-Soo Park The debate between spring and winter in Shakespeare's early ‘lyrical’ comedy, Love's Labour Lost, is a unifying theme and structure; it is not attached for the musicians at the time of rehearsal of the play, written on a separate paper. The dialogue or debate of spring and winter reflects the traditional medieval literary form representing two irreconcilable opposing values or attitudes of life, as shown in such works as The Owl and the Nightingale(c.1250) and The Debate and Stryfe Between Somer and Wynter(c.1530). The Shakespearean debate, which was originally planned as the end of the pageant play, “the Nine Worthies”, is replaced as an epilogue to the main play. Through this technical replacement in the play of the dialogue between spring and winter, Shakespeare critiques the artificiality of the traditional debate form as a kind of aristocratic and intellectual game or war of wits. As a language game, the debate form seems to Shakespeare's eyes unnatural in separating the intermingled yarns of life; rather his vision of life is comprehensive and dialectical. The vigorous and energetic sexuality of the spring time is also found in the ice-cold winter when the owl hoots to the greasy Joan to make it. As in the cuckoo's song of love is overheard the undertone of infidelity and betrayal, the two opposite seasons of spring and winter are mutable in the cyclic space of life. By his critical and ironical appropriation of the inherited debate form, Shakespeare is satirical of the humorous young aristocrats in their speech and behavior. If the anti-comic ending of the play is in itself the Shakespearean experiment on the comic genre of courtship and marriage, the debate form in the play works as his ‘living art.’ However, this re-appropriation of the literary form in Shakespeare does not mean the final triumph of Apollonian song over the Mercurian eloquence and letters. The songs are written. The Shakespearean authority in the theatre as a playwright lies somewhere between the borderland of speech as a breath and textual letters. The theatrical representation is both a voice and a letter at once.

Sophisticated sabotage: The intellectual games used to subvert responsible regulation by Thomas McGarity, Sidney Shapiro and David Bollier

Sophisticated sabotage: The intellectual games used to subvert responsible regulation by Thomas McGarity, Sidney Shapiro and David Bollier

Semiotics as the Semantic Organizer of Global Human Sciences –Semiotic Theory: Western Philosophy-centered Approach Vs. Global Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract There are two identities of semiotics: reality and ideal. We semioticians should keep the double identity in our mind to get rid of the limitation of the existing professional semiotic operation. Theoretical semiotics should at first more deeply learn from philosophy and secondly further tum to the interdisciplinary theoretical creation. Only a more effective semiotic theoretical baste could make semiotics stronger to guide the epistemological modernization of the global human sciences in the New Century. The postmodernist trends, however, tend to make semiotics be the mere intellectual games leading to losing its original scientific power. Originated by Sausäure, Pierce, Husseri, semiotics should defend its traditional rationalism against the scientific-dogmatist and the artistic-commercialized fashions alike. Globalization of semiotics will strongly promote its healthy development along the line of a global multiple-rationalization.

Textured World

Textured World Garry Craig Powell (bio) Anatolia and Other Stories. Anis Shivani. Black Lawrence Press. http://blacklawrencepress.com. 266 pages; paper, $16.00. It is a truth universally acknowledged—well, very nearly—that the American short story has become homogenous, predictable, boring; and literary curmudgeons point their fingers at MFA programs, those fictioneer factories whose workshops turn out tales which, if they were cars, would be Toyotas and Hondas, reliable but bland. And the grumblers have a point. Contemporary American writing is often insular, self-indulgent, and solipsistic: think, on the one hand, of the myriad stories and novels about marriages unraveling in the Midwest; or, on the other, of the arid intellectual games and wordplay of Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem, the emperors who wear no clothes (though we dare not admit it). So it is a relief to plunge into the richly textured world of Anis Shivani, a world that is complex and multicultural, where rich Malaysians in Houston may navigate local society more successfully than their native Texan childminder, where a Chinese American conservator steals a Jean-Antoine Watteau painting from her own museum to protect it from overzealous restorers, and the past finally catches up with an illegal Indian worker in Dubai. Shivani displays an astonishingly broad and deep knowledge of cultures as multifarious as Hungarian gypsies in the Midwest, Baha'is in Iran, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth century. And not only does he write about globalization with authority, verve, and intelligence, but with originality, too. In "Go Sell It On the Mountain," the weakest story, a young writer affirms his belief that "real writers, real artists, didn't join academic programs: they were naturally forged from the flux and flow of normal stressful life." One cannot help suspecting that this is thinly disguised autobiography, and this is the author's own credo. At any rate, I hazard a guess that Shivani is not a graduate of any MFA program. This has advantages and drawbacks. On the plus side, he doesn't sound like anyone else writing nowadays. He frequently ignores the workshop commandment to show, not tell; this makes for less drama, but greater depth. He also ignores F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum, that character is action, instead giving us detailed, and penetrating portraits, in the style of Henry James or Edith Wharton—and yes, his sentences can be as ponderous and plodding as theirs. And like a nineteenth-century novelist, too, some of his stories have an omniscient point of view, which is hard to pull off in short fiction, and yet he manages it. Indeed, for all his probably willful ignorance of the canons of contemporary taste—no traces here of Raymond Carver or Robert Coover, of John Cheever or Flannery O'Connor—this is clearly the work of a "real writer." Indeed, the collection has garnered lavish pre-publication praise from eminent editors Sven Birkerts, Jay Parini, and Richard Burgin—the latter admiring Shivani's "extraordinary intelligence…his intensely empathetic feelings for his characters and for the endlessly mysterious experience of existence itself," which sums up the author's gifts well. I also concur with Eric Miles Williamson, who points out that the echoes in these stories "harken back to the masters." This is particularly true in the best stories in the collection, "Dubai," "Conservation," "Anatolia" (an astonishing evocation of a vanished empire), "Independence" (set in Pondicherry, India, just as it gains independence from the French in the early 1950s), and "Tehran," a story about a suicide bomber that reveals an insider's knowledge of contemporary Iran. All the same, gifted as Shivani undoubtedly is, his writing is not without flaws. He has a tin ear, like Theodore Dreiser and Vladimir Nabokov. Shivani is capable of penning what Hamlet would have called "a vile phrase" like this one: "On his short height, he strode as magisterially as he could down the corridor…"; or, worse still, "my clunky car speared higher and higher along Route 125 in the dissipating early August fog, the stately rows of sugar maples bestowing paradisial shade on my bohemian carriage." One wishes a Max Perkins or a Gordon Lish had...

Rational Addiction Theory: A Survey of Opinions

This paper reports on results from a survey of views on the theory of rational addiction among academics who have contributed to this research. The topic is important because if the literature is viewed by its participants as an intellectual game, then policy makers should be aware of this so as not to derive actual policy from misleading models. A majority of the respondents believe the literature is a success story that demonstrates the power of economic reasoning. At the same time, they also believe the empirical evidence to be weak, and they disagree both on the type of evidence that would validate the theory and the policy implications. These results shed light on how many economists think about model building, evidence requirements and the policy relevance of their work.

La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660) (review)

Reviewed by: La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660) Deborah N. Losse (bio) Michel Jeanneret. La Muse lascive. Anthologie de la poésie érotique et pornographique française (1560–1660). Paris: José Corti, 2007. 383 pages. ISBN: 978-2-7143-0942-6. Michel Jeanneret offers a comprehensive overview and sampling of erotic and pornographic poetry at the end of the Renaissance and in the first half of the grand siècle. Readers may ask why the author has bridged the two periods. He explains that it is important to trace the transition from a time when poems, in the Renaissance, expressed a joyous sensuality to the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV, when dissident voices and divergent styles began to be stifled. For Jeanneret, poets rebelled against orthodoxy in all its manifestations: belief, language, genres. With the onset of the seventeenth century, what had been a joyful expression of eroticism took on a subversive meaning. During the Renaissance, erotic poetry evokes pleasure, the harmony between the lovers and the world itself. The stress on the impetuous spirit of desire, Jeanneret notes, gives a fullness of expression unprecedented in love poetry in French literary history. When eroticism passes into pornography, the communion of the pair with nature turns to focus on transgressive acts and organs described not as a graceful whole but member by member in a disjointed and grotesque manner. For Jeanneret, there is an aspect of unbridled sexuality in Renaissance eroticism which stops short of pornography. Ronsard and his contemporaries were sometimes unkind and brutal in their descriptions of old prostitutes or young prudes who sought relief from sexual tension through auto-erotic measures, but there is a pervading spirit of freedom and fun in the intellectual game of composing erotic poetry. By 1620, pornography overturns the lyrical eroticism of the Pléiade. Jeanneret offers the example of Mathurin Regnier: “Rose, de qui le Con a de roses les bords,/où je voudrois fourrer les couïlles et le corps . . .” (Jeanneret 140). Using standard sonnet form for pornographic images creates a shock value that underscores the subversive, transgressive aspect of this poetry, written, as Jeanneret suggests, in protest against the religious and literary atmosphere of restriction and orthodoxy at the French court. Jeanneret defines pornography as : “la représentation du corps humain qui focalise le regard sur les organes sexuels” (Jeanneret 13). The author takes us back to the Greek root of the word: pornè or prostitute. Eroticism evokes the emotions of both individuals, pornography reduces all to [End Page 947] the specialized erogenous zones. There is an emphasis on deviant practices—masturbation, autoerotic practices, and sodomy, practices that do not lead to procreation. Sigogne represents the extreme misogyny of this pornographic trend. His manner of evoking the misery of the old prostitutes is particularly cruel. He targets the sodomites in the court of France: ”Prenez la robbe d’une femme, / Puisque vous en avez le coeur” (Jeanneret 281). Readers may wonder why the anthology stops at 1660. Jeanneret offers a logical explanation for the increase in censure of pornographic poetry. With the prosecution of Théophile de Viau for reason of impiety, blasphemy, and debauchery, the proliferation of scandalous poetry begins to slow down just after abundant printings of cheap collections of pornographic verse. With the arrival of Richelieu, the censure of such verse is reinforced But it is the execution of Claude Le Petit for his publication of Le Bordel des Muses ou les neuf Pucelles putains that rings the death knell for the outpouring of obscene poetry. Claude Le Petit with Sigogne are the masters of the genre. Jeanneret’s anthology is organized in thematic groupings. The first is an invitation “au bordel de ces Muses lubriques”—to read, to be aroused. It is a kind of verbal seduction of the readers. The second section speaks of “Sensualité, volupté.” Here the focus is on the physical and communal pleasure of love making. The third section, “Étreintes champêtres, nature en rut,” evokes the harmony of nature and young love, where pastoral setting and youth take center stage. It is in the fourth section, “Conquérant et...

More than a metaphor: the education of Joseph Knecht

Education is a key theme in Hermann Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game. The book begins with a narrator’s introduction, in which the Glass Bead Game is described as a way of playing with the total contents of culture – of drawing connections between disciplines, knowledge and values. The main part of the novel is devoted to the life of Joseph Knecht, who grows up in Castalia, a ‘pedagogical province’ of the future. Knecht excels as a student, joins the Order of the Glass Bead Game and is eventually appointed to the supreme position of Magister Ludi (Master of the Game). Despite his success, Knecht becomes increasingly uneasy with the separation of Castalia from the rest of the world. He makes the extraordinary decision to resign his position as Magister Ludi and takes on the humble task of tutoring the son of a friend he has known for decades. His new pedagogical journey barely begins, however, when he dies suddenly while swimming in an icy mountain lake. Those who have examined the book from an educational point of view have tended to concentrate on the Glass Bead Game as metaphor, relying heavily on the narrator’s account of the Game in the first part of the book. Martin Anderson sees a parallel between the Glass Bead Game and the forms of intellectual game playing typical of contemporary academics; Michael Peters relates the idea of the Glass Bead Game to the modernist dream of a universal language and the university in cyberspace; and James Sears depicts the field of curriculum studies as a form of Glass Bead Game in operation. This paper, while acknowledging the value of these contributions, argues that if the fuller educational significance of the novel is to be grasped we must go beyond the Glass Bead Game as metaphor and examine the life of Joseph Knecht. As the book progresses, a profound process of educational transformation becomes evident. Knecht’s thoughts, actions and relationships with others allow a more complex picture of the pedagogical province to emerge. Knecht’s life prompts us to question the portrait of Castalian ideals painted by the narrator in his introduction and to critique both the intellectual game playing discussed by Anderson and Sears and the universalising modernist discourse problematised by Peters.

Can Philosophers Be Patriots?

Can Philosophers Be Patriots? Annette Baier (bio) Richard Rorty challenged the profession of philosophy to examine its own activities, to avoid false consciousness of what it is that we do. We are not, he claimed, scientists of the mind, nor discerners of eternal moral truths. Ours is not a view sub specie aeternitatis, but a view from a given culture at a given time. This challenge is salutary, and has been influential, but largely outside philosophy. The Princeton philosophy department is still doing the sorts of things they were doing when Rorty left and turned his back on the analytic philosophy he had practiced up until then.1 I attended a graduate seminar he gave on the philosophy of mind as a visitor in Pittsburgh shortly before he left Princeton, and I was a member of the APA board on the memorable occasion when he quarreled with his old friend Ruth Marcus and wept with the anguish of it. I myself came in for some flak from defenders of analytic philosophy for my championing of "pluralists," so felt for Rorty in this confrontation. And I, too, had raised the question of what our professional ethics were for our own profession, what made us think public moneys should support us in our intellectual games. Yet I stayed in a philosophy department, while Rorty ended with only an honorary place in Stanford's. Why did I stay? Largely because I felt that teaching ethics in the way I was doing, and teaching the history of philosophy, was increasing understanding and reflectiveness in my students. Rorty had not been an analytic moral philosopher, and it is interesting to speculate on what arc his thought might have taken had he begun, not with potentiality and the mind-body problem, but with the moral potential of American democracy, and good reasons in ethics. For he ended as a social and political philosopher, indeed as a patriot philosopher, defending the U.S. ideal of democracy, which he took to have an egalitarian component, believing in moral progress, and looking for the right version of human solidarity. He was very much a patriot, but also a globetrotter, speaking in Teheran and Beijing as well as Frankfurt and Paris. Rorty raised the question of whether any claim about what does and does not exist can be raised independently of our current cultural and social goals. We interpret what we find to be the facts in terms of their [End Page 121] bearing on our hopes and our fears. To say that we currently face dangers from climate change, and from violence from disaffected groups, is certainly to make factual claims and also to make value judgments. I see social philosophers as having a duty to think about clear and present dangers, and I think that study of such philosophers as Grotius, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Rawls can help us to do so. At any rate I shall hope that I am doing the sort of philosophy Rorty would have approved of, in what follows, when I consider two grave dangers currently facing all of us. My tone, however, will scarcely be ironical, since I know of no alternative debunking vocabulary for describing these dangers, so I fail Rorty's criteria for an ironist.2 It is difficult to recontextualize climate change, unless we go back to Noah, and the only way I know to recontextualize terrorism is to attempt to see it from the terrorist's point of view.3 I shall be speaking as a critical citizen both of my native country, New Zealand, and of the country where I spent most of my working life, the U.S. I shall also be speaking as a committed cosmopolitan (who spent over three years in Britain, one in Berlin, and every summer for three decades in Austria), trying to advance the cause of what David Hume called "the party of humankind, against vice and disorder."4 Travel helps the would-be world citizen, and my double citizenship also gives me, I like to think, an advantage, in that I can see each of my two countries from the standpoint of the other. Just as learning another language instructs...

A HISTORICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTELLECTUAL PLAY IN THE JAPANESE ART OF INCENSE BLENDING: THE BANMONO BOARD PLAY

Ludic culture is a key element in the Japanese ethnic identity. Based on existing classifi cations and concepts, a typology of this phenomenon is attempted. Particular focus is made on intellectual contests of skills, knowledge, and wisdom, inherent in the Oriental mentality. Certain types of intellectual games, rites, and recreations based on the traditional art of koudou (incense blending) are described. The history of this art is outlined, and its relationship with various aspects of Japanese written and ludic culture is discussed.