Mere Game Research Articles

The politics of interaction and spect-actors in world rescue, eco, and plasticity: a Boalian perspective on digital environmental games

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore the politics of engagement in environmental games from a political theatre theory perspective. Specifically, I focus on digital environmental games developed with classrooms in mind, and examine player interaction as politicized through the lens of Boalian theatre. To this end, I overview gaming as an intervention tool in the form of serious, environmental games. Next, I introduce the poetics of Boal’s TO, and connect its aim to restore theatre as a popular form of conversation and discussion to the aspiration of digital environmental games to develop an eco-friendly outlook. I build upon a rule-based approach to computer game rhetoric, and analyze how environmental games use rules as a rhetorical tool to create a pro-environmental statement. Lastly, I suggest that players in environmental games are not mere game players but rather ‘spect-actors’.

Liabilities of virtual world developers as intermediary service providers: the case of Second Life

Through a review of the EU and the US regulation and case law, this article discusses the extent to which virtual world developers can be held liable as intermediary service providers with regard to potentially infringing user-created and user-uploaded virtual items. Among many virtual worlds, this study focuses on Second Life, developed by Linden, as it allows user-created and uploaded contents, and offers services such as the Marketplace and LindeX exchange, which enable users and the developer to financially benefit from these contents. The article argues that, beyond mere game developers, virtual world developers such as Linden are intermediary service providers and may be liable with regards to user-created and uploaded content on their services. Within the scope of the EU regime, Linden is too active to benefit from the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbors. However, it should not be considered as an online content-sharing service provider within the scope of the DSM Directive because Second Life does not compete with other online content services for the same audiences. According to the comprehensive protection brought by the DMCA in the US, Linden can benefit from the safe harbors if it takes the necessary steps after becoming aware of specific infringing activity and fulfills the procedural measures listed in the act.

CULTURAL FACETS OF COCKFIGHTING

Cultural Education, as it discovers the different manifestations of culture, has its ultimate goal of providing an insight on the cycle, or for some, whirlwind that engulfs the society. With a geographical landscape as unique as the Philippines, the diversity of cultural heritage that is definitive of its national cultural identity is a fortress. This study is an in-depth investigatory paper on the cultural facets of the age-old gaming of the Filipino alpha: “sabong” or cockfighting. Through generations, the Filipino men have been patronizing, if not, addicted to this game. But for it to sustain through hundreds of years, one must ask; is it a mere game or gambling, or is it a culture shaped by whose lives were affected during its continuance?

Why Medieval Allegory?

Why Medieval Allegory?

Auction winning, social dynamics and non-compliance in a payment for ecosystem services scheme in Indonesia

Conservation auctions for payment for ecosystem services (PES) are useful to identify the levels of incentives that will cover the opportunity costs of farmers supplying ecosystem services. Although auctions are increasingly used for allocation in PES schemes, the factors that lead to their successful implementation and eventual environmental outcomes are poorly understood in developing countries. We investigated the socio-economic and institutional contexts that led to smallholders' auction winning and eventual compliance using linear mixed-effects models, and post-auction and post-contract surveys. We employed a case study of a conservation contract preceded by a sealed-bid, multiple round, uniform price auction for watershed services from coffee farmers in Lampung, Indonesia. The auction participants presented low education levels, low asset endowments and small plot sizes. The study obtained evidence that farmers with larger plot areas were more likely to win the contracts, suggesting economies of scale. Most farmers considered the auction a fair self-selection mechanism to allocate contracts where allocation was not influenced by power or social rank. Non-compliance was associated with labor availability constraints, short duration of land ownership and existence of previous conservation applications, suggesting lax of capability to invest in applying conservation agriculture. Final bids were however not good predictors of compliance, among other factors, calling into question the potential of auctions to elicit the actual incentive from the farmers. Ensuring that farmers understand the purposes of auctions for effective contract allocation beyond a mere game and identifying farmers that might encounter difficulties fulfilling the contract could increase the likelihood that such a PES scheme would be successful.

Abel Cahen's Open City: A Theoretical Inquiry into Urban Complexity and the Limits of Control

Abel Cahen's graduation project (University of Delft, 1970) envisioned an alternative approach to urban design that proposed to engage with complexity and uncertainty as primary foundations of the architect's task. Inspired by the 1960s revisionist attitude, Cahen worked with a series of abstract activity diagrams that appear chaotic but are based on highly coherent geometric structures. This essay endeavors to rescue Cahen's project, which has been disregarded by scholars as a mere formal game, from historical oblivion and present it as a radical theoretical manifesto that reflects upon the architects' available tools to handle complexity, while recognizing the risks and limitations of strictly rational design processes.

De-sportizing physical activity: From sport-for-development to play-for-development

Although many initiatives use sport as a tool to blur boundaries and foster social mixing, the way physical activity is organised and displayed for such purposes suggests critical reflections about the potential of sport in terms of social inclusivity. When used for social purposes, mainstream sports often need to be adapted and partially de-structured by downplaying their competitive dimension, blurring categorisations through mixed-gender, mixed-age, mixed-ethnic, or mixed-ability teams, and reducing the distinction between players and spectators. Therefore, while the process of sportization has re-shaped old forms of play and games, re-framing them as sports, when it comes to using physical activity to foster sociability the tendency seems to be the other way around, meaning that sports are re-shaped (or de-shaped) into mere games and even less structured forms of play. Drawing on both fieldwork carried out by the author and the main literature in the field, the paper provides a theoretical and analytical exploration of such a de-sportizing trend.

Die pseudo-homerische Batrachomyomachia und ihre Transformation im Croacus des Elisius Calentius

The pseudo Homeric mock-epic poem Batrachomyomachia and one of its numerous transformations, the Croacus of the Italian humanist Elisius Calentius, are open to critical, satirical or didactic readings, but they never express these levels explicitly. This does not mean that they should be undervalued as harmless mere literary games: We find strong poetical implications and reflections how modern literature should be. Elisius Calentius merits a new evaluation in the history of the Batrachomyomachia, because his Croacus is unique in preserving this meta-poetic quality of its Greek precedent, changing virtuously the Hellenistic play with Homer into a play with Roman epic poets.

South African Sports History and the Archive

The history of sport in South Africa is about more than mere games. Within the preface to his study ofThe Games Ethic and Imperialism,J.A. Mangan expressed the wish that he:Would not like [the] study of cultural diffusion to be naively and erroneously catalogued under “Games”. It is concerned with much more: with ethnocentricity, hegemony and patronage, with ideals and idealism, with educational values and aspirations, with cultural assimilation and adaptation and, most fascinating of all, with the dissemination throughout the Empire of a hugely influential moralistic ideology.Arguably, nowhere more than in South Africa have such processes been played out through sport. This makes the country an ideal case study for sports historians. Based on experiences from my Masters and PhD studies, this paper will provide a contemporary perspective of studying South African sports history as well as form part of the discussion at the June 2011 SCOLMA conference, ‘Sport in Africa: History, Politics and the Archive’.

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.

A Temporal Proof System for General Game Playing

A general game player is a system that understands the rules of unknown games and learns to play these games well without human intervention. A major challenge for research in General Game Playing is to endow a player with the ability to extract and prove game-specific knowledge from the mere game rules. We define a formal language to express temporally extended — yet local — properties of games. We also develop a provably correct proof theory for this language using the paradigm of Answer Set Programming, and we report on experiments with a practical implementation of this proof system in combination with a successful general game player.

Consumer Use and Business Potential of Virtual Worlds: The Case of “Second Life”

Several months ago, the virtual social world “Second Life” (SL) received considerable interest in both the popular and business press. Based on a series of 29 qualitative, in-depth interviews, this article investigates what types of behaviors consumers show within this environment and what business opportunities it offers for companies. The results indicate that users do not consider SL as a mere computer game but as an extension of their real lives. This has implications for how marketing managers can use this online application that go beyond those known from traditional computer or online games.

Spectacular Interventions of Second Life: Goon Culture, Griefing, and Disruption in Virtual Spaces

Employing game theory and cultural studies in order to make a much needed distinction between grief play (which is a type of game play) and griefing (as a disruptive cultural activity), I argue that griefers in Second Life, who engage in potentially subversive practices which residents recognize as characterizing the activities of subcultures, construct cultural formations, a term developed by Raymond Williams in his book The Sociology of Culture to describe groups that embody looser structures. Claiming that they are causing turmoil for the lulz (or laughs), they treat their activities as mere game play. However, underneath the rhetoric of game play based on targeting those who take the “Internet as serious business,” there exists a cultural phenomenon with serious effects. They not only jam the world’s signification system and subvert the bourgeois taste by spamming the environment with offensive objects (such as penises, swastikas, and communist symbols), but also attack the capitalistic ideology by crashing sims and significant media events, and regularly launching raids in-world which result in causing in-world businesses to lose money, thereby hurting the virtual economy at large.

More than mere games: a review of card and board games for medical education

During recent years, attempts have been made to complement more classical concepts of medical teaching by introducing card and board games on medical topics. These teaching tools cover every age and education group, and many different medical topics. In this article we have reviewed all card and board games for medical education purpose listed in NCBI PubMed database and Internet game databases (n = 29). It summarizes games that might be useful to medical teaching staff. To categorize these games, a new schema for medical games categorization, based on the game mechanism and theories on experiential learning circles, is proposed and discussed. Additionally we have a view on card and board games with medical topics for entertainment (n = 22).

'Time Passes' — Virginia Woolf's Virgilian Passage to the Future Past Masterpieces: A la recherche du temps perdu and To the Lighthouse

'Time Passes' - Virginia Woolf's Virgilian Passage to the Future Past Masterpieces:A la recherche du temps perdu and To the Lighthouse Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (bio) 1 'When we speak of literary filiation [...] it is not so much the mere game of tracing influences which is involved as the implied definition of the artist's status'1 'see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come'2 In 'How Should One Read a Book?', an essay that she drafted as she worked on To the Lighthouse in 1925–1926, Virginia Woolf recommends that readers juxtapose and compare texts from different historical moments, that, for instance, they read Shakespeare's King Lear and Aeschylus's Agamemnon side by side.3 As writer as well as reader she had made this very comparison – of King Lear and Agamemnon – in another essay, entitled 'On Not Knowing Greek' (1925), in which she also juxtaposes Sophocles, first with Jane Austen, then with Marcel Proust.4 Jane Austen is in turn described, in yet another piece from this period, as a writer who 'would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust', had she lived longer.5 As in this instance, such comparative juxtapositions serve 'to bring out' a 'common quality', as she puts it in 'How Should One Read', and so to affirm what she calls, in 'How It Strikes a Contemporary' (1925), the 'continuity and calm' that remain despite the 'storm' – the literary and cultural as well as socio-political turbulences that accompany the passage of time.6 Woolf's practice of such comparative reading was encouraged by daily habits of reading and writing. A 'work list' in her journal entry for January 7, 1923, for instance, starts with the writing of Mrs Dalloway, a review article and 'the Greek chapter' (for The Common Reader), [End Page 291] then goes on to name the Greek authors that she plans to read for this chapter, which she juxtaposes with 'perhaps, another vol of Proust' – a juxtaposition which translates into the comparison of Sophocles and Proust in the chapter 'On Not Knowing Greek'.7 In this essay I want to explore how what I call, following Richard Aldington, literary filiations to 'the old and the new' are juxtaposed in To the Lighthouse.8 Specifically, the figure of 'the greatest modern novelist', as Woolf describes Marcel Proust in April 1927,9 the year of the publication of To the Lighthouse, is juxtaposed with a figure of ancient classical culture, though this is not a Greek author, as in the essays and journal entries cited above, but the Latin author Virgil. There are distinctive features to these filiations that I will look at from within an overview of Woolf's relation to each figure, principally because of these features, but also because critical discussion of these relations is either non-existent (Virgil) or restricted in scope (Proust).10 The filiations are, however, also connected, in particular through the figure of the contemplative poet and reader Augustus Carmichael who, at the opening of the second part of To the Lighthouse, 'Time Passes', is 'reading Virgil', while, in the third part, 'The Lighthouse', he is 'reading a French novel'.11 Whether or not the novel is Proust's, readers are invited to recall the earlier evocation of the contemporary French masterpiece at the close of the first part, 'The Window' (discussed below). Virgil and Proust are, moreover, brought together at the conclusion of the novel by a trope of comparison that also includes To the Lighthouse itself. For Carmichael's 'French novel' is here compared to a 'trident', a figure which alludes not only, self-consciously, to the tripartite form of Woolf's novel, as Randall Stevenson has suggested,12 but more generally to an aesthetic form or 'shape' (to use Woolf's preferred word) which is shared by the new and the old. As we shall see, it is likely that Woolf knew of the original tripartite conception of Proust's novel, as of course she knew of the tripartite structure of James Joyce's Ulysses (which she was reading as she started Proust in 1922). Her own tripartite...

Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight

This reading alerts us that Americans hold no monopoly on popular culture. Geertz relates both the various events surrounding and the deeper cultural meaning of an example of popular culture, cockfighting on a South Pacific island. He contrasts his interpretation of engaging in “deep play” (extremely high stakes activities) with Jeremy Bentham’s famous earlier characterization of irrational behavior. For Geertz, cockfighting in Bali engages central cultural values such as honor, dignity, and respect. Thus, rather than seeing Balinese men betting unreasonable amounts of money on a mere game, Geertz portrays what appears as play to be a deadly serious struggle over relative status.

Why Do We Care So Much About Mere Games? (And Is This Ethically Defensible?)

Human beings devote extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and attention to activities that, on their own, do not produce anything substantial. Yet we live in a world full of poverty, political injustice, AIDS, starvation, war, and any number of other pressing issues. This raises interesting ethical questions about the human tendency to care so much about mere games, rather like fi ddling with soccer while the world burns. This tendency to fi nd and play games, however, has roots deep in our evolutionary history. I claim that we grew up as a species with games as a constant companion. While the serious moral demands of life require that we keep games in some kind of reasonable perspective, work imperatives do not provide all that is needed for the good life. Our ancestors gravitated to the artifi cial problems provided by games, and so do we. Our passion for games is both very human and entirely understandable.

Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture Peter Carino (bio) David McGimpsey . Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 194 pp. Cloth, $29.95. David McGimpsey's Imagining Baseball proposes "to initiate a discussion of how representations of baseball make problematic the sport's place in a more extensive cultural argument" (p. 17). Despite his title's focus on popular culture, McGimpsey's "discussion" ranges over a wide variety of low-, middle-, and high-brow culture, from short stories by Hemingway, to popular films, to episodes of television programs that treat baseball. In this sense, the book attempts an inclusivity heretofore unknown in analyses of baseball fiction. Other artistic expressions of baseball—for example, painting, sculpture, poetry, and music—are not examined (though poetry is referenced from time to time), but to ask for more would be to ask too much since the book already constitutes an ambitious enterprise. As the publishing of the book by Indiana University Press would indicate, this is an academic study, written for those who read baseball as a metaphor for cultural values, good and bad. It will not appeal to those interested merely in statistics or chronicles of great teams or players. It will appeal to those interested in both the way baseball is appropriated as fictional subject matter to perpetuate and deflate myths of American experience and the way in which baseball as a business contributes to these myths while enacting the very commerce that they attempt to mask. McGimpsey organizes the book around various themes that serve the construction of baseball myth: to name a few, the lost Eden of the Black Sox scandal, the pastoral convention, the notion of the game as a reflection of democratic American values, and the game as a connection between generations, often expressed in the image of fathers playing catch with sons. Within [End Page 155] these motifs, he reads a variety of texts demonstrating how each is troubled by its antithesis: baseball has suffered corruption before and after the Black Sox; pastoralism is nostalgia for the values of a rural America that never existed, while the game has urban origins and is an urban business; the democracy of baseball long excluded minorities, and its American-ness has found fertile soil in other nations; and finally fathers and sons often have intensely complicated relations that a mere game of catch can neither articulate nor assuage. In this sense, the book is a deconstruction of literary celebrations of baseball; McGimpsey is not interested in showing how these myths serve intellectuals as temporary stays against confusion. Rather, he analyzes the reasons behind the need to create myths and how they serve the baseball business in perpetuating itself for intellectuals and fans who are willing to participate in the illusion. "Baseball fiction," McGimpsey reminds us, "also sells baseball" (p. 14). While McGimpsey punctures some of the intellectual pretensions informing baseball fiction—"it nominally marries a lowbrow, macho vigor to an intellectual and effeminate art form" (p. 111)—he himself cannot escape the intellectual activity that he deconstructs. This is, after all, a university press book, and the astute readings of literary baseball texts indicate the kind of elite critical training that makes it possible to intellectualize baseball in the first place, whatever one's origins or class allegiances may be. By including throwaway sitcom treatments of baseball next to writers of the canonical stature of Hemingway and Malamud, McGimpsey attempts to distance himself from the elitism he finds in intellectualizing baseball. While he admits that it is easy to recognize the difference between Moby Dick and the detritus of popular culture, he asserts that "developing certain systems of discrimination is impossible" (p. 26). This kind of antifoundationalism, currently pervading the academy in cultural studies programs, will annoy some readers in its reluctance to establish aesthetic criteria. On the other hand, McGimpsey takes pains to justify his view that all texts are important in assessing baseball's place in culture while commanding a style that underscores his democratic approach: "The erosion of baseball's television audiences after the players' strike of 1994 was not just the pique of cheesed-off fans...

A Labyrinth of Human Knowledge: Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum"

Umberto Eco is apparently fascinated by mazes. The medieval library he described in his first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a labyrinth designed to confuse any imprudent violator of the secrets of knowledge. It was also a punishment for those who, without being initiated, dared to pass the limit set for common men. Whoever violated the secrecy of the library without permission risked becoming lost forever. Similarly, we see in Foucault's Pendulum that whoever dares to pass the limits of human knowledge and intelligence appears to be destined to perdition. Is Eco implying that modern humanity seeks to become all-powerful, all-knowing, and in so doing steps out of the allowed limits, thus incurring punishment? Is this book a mere game for Eco, or is it a declaration of real dangers? Will our postmodern society be subject to deceit or will it ever resolve the dichotomies between truth and falsehood, assurance and doubt, trust and deception? Before reading Foucault's Pendulum for the first time, most readers had probably already read about it in numerous articles and reviews in literary and popular magazines. In fact, the novel was a literary case even before it appeared in bookstores, for a very elaborate publicity was orchestrated, with many critics whetting the public's appetite. In the meantime, Eco's silence on the subject contributed to the aura of mystery and interest around it. Soon after beginning the story, readers find themselves unprepared for the task, because it is

A Labyrinth of Human Knowledge: Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum

A Labyrinth of Human Knowledge: Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum Cinzia Donatelli Noble Brigham Young University Umberto Eco is apparently fascinated by mazes. The medieval library he described in his first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a labyrinth designed to confuse any imprudent violator of the secrets ofknowledge. It was also a punishment for those who, without being initiated, dared to pass the limit set for common men. Whoever violated the secrecy of the library without permission risked becoming lost forever. Similarly, we see in Foucault's Pendulum that whoever dares to pass the limits of human knowledge and intelligence appears to be destined to perdition. Is Eco implying that modern humanity seeks to become all-powerful, all-knowing, and in so doing steps out of the allowed limits, thus incurring punishment? Is this book a mere game for Eco, or is it a declaration of real dangers? Will our postmodern society be subject to deceit or will it ever resolve the dichotomies between truth and falsehood, assurance and doubt, trust and deception? Before reading Foucault's Pendulum for the first time, most readers had probably already read about it in numerous articles and reviews in literary and popular magazines. In fact, the novel was a literary case even before it appeared in bookstores, for a very elaborate publicity was orchestrated, with many critics whetting the public 's appetite. In the meantime, Eco's silence on the subject contributed to the aura ofmystery and interest around it. Soon after beginning the story, readers find themselves unprepared for the task, because it is an encyclopedical novel, encyclical in many ways, endowed with the highest number of either true or false historical , theological, mystical, cabalistic, literary, scientific, artistic, comic, cinematographical, antiquary, etc., information. Thus the novel is an enormous container of notions, and the reader is placed before the heap of this frightening and infinite erudition, much like a computer's "mineral and inanimate" memory. (Ganeri 139)1 The story of Foucault's Pendulum is extremely complex, for this encyclopedia -dictionary-novel appears to purport to contain all the 141 142Rocky Mountain Review books ever written. Some people see it as an excessively ostentatious effort on the author's part. It "even allows a partial reading, skipping pages, ... a panoramic and summary reading, and therefore a non-reading" (Ganeri 140); it metamorphoses with each reader's perspective. Many quotations disconcert readers, for the complexity of the text leads them to a point of confusion: they believe what is false, and doubt what is true. But this is not a book that must be liked; Eco may not have intended his readers to like the book. Yet it captures attention, because it involves our minds and thoughts completely . It also disturbs greatly. The reader is required to "shift" backwards, from reference to reference , from name to name, from concept to concept, without limits, along a journey that confuses the reader, making him/her "lost," immersed in the condition of "nothingness." (Degli-Esposti 186-87) As one makes one's difficult way through the chapters, there is a slow, rhythmical, progressive unveiling of knowledge, as during an initiation process where, when the more that is revealed, the more one wants to know. The characters in the novel share the search, until the desire for knowledge destroys those who are unable to stop or set limits to their curiosity.2 Casaubon,3 Belbo, and Diotallevi, the main characters of Foucault's Pendulum, begin this revelation with the analysis of a single text—any text would do—and then "prostitute " it, just as any other text can potentially be "prostituted," selling it as "the truth" to the best buyer. The danger is that in this case the buyer is from a generation spoiled by economic success who believes it is privileged in history, endowed with exceptional talents of mind and soul, and entitled to unlimited power and knowledge (Viano 152-53). In this process, the minds of Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi become completely entangled in a game of endless analogies, infinite interpretation of symbols, and continuous search for new evidence. They also become guilty of expanding reality, oftaking pride in their intellectual capabilities...