Cultural Change in Technology

As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has unleashed. For someone like me who saw the power of connection build a vibrant, technologically meshed ecosystem distinguished by peace, love, and understanding, the polarization and h...

 Examples of Games in the Context of Their Civilization

Games hold a mirror to civilization. In the Afghan game of buzkashi, groups of fierce horsemen contend in a no-holds-barred struggle for possession of a beheaded calf. The object is to carry off the slippery carcass, defending it against all challengers, and bring it around the field to the goal. As Jacob Bronowski explains in The Ascent of Man, 'The tactics are pure Mongol, a discipline of shock... what seems a wild scrimmage is in fact full of manoeuvre, and dissolves suddenly with the winn...

 The Information Age has Increased Abstract Intelligence

Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first confronted with digital interfaces in the 1970s, like videocassette recorders and ticket machines in new subway systems, they were baffled. It was a running joke of the 1980s that mo...

 There is No "Pokemon Gap"

While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the o...

 How the Civil War Changed Southern Evangelicalism

There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery. Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South were not ...

 Imaginative Play Creates Ownership

Ultimately, the child as creator exercises a whole range of capacities that set the Stage for original thinking. We find the imprint of creative practice in the blending of experiences and ideas, the classifications of real and imagined things, the organization of systemic patterns and narrative sequences, the modeling of worlds, the generation of artifacts, and the synthesizing of all that is known and felt into one grand design. The creating self "owns" the processes and products of make-...

 Old CRPGs are Unplayable for Modern Gamers

They had five days to play (Ultima IV), and I asked them to make as much progress as they could in that time. When we gathered to debrief in class, a few students explained how they’d overcome some of their difficulties, but the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” After removing the arrow from my chest, I asked them to explain why. It mostly came dow...

 Bit chin Society Emissary

And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that...

 Constructivism

Jean Piaget’s work is the origin of Constructivism, which is the foundation of learning-centered classrooms (Bogost, 2007). Constructivism is a broad theory of learning that argues (quite unlike Essentialism) that what matters in learning is not the accumulation of facts, paradigms, and theories but rather the meaning making that comes from taking these disparate notions and integrating them to form new knowledge. What matters is not the received wisdom handed down from generation to genera...

 Distopian View Praising Second-Hand Knowledge

The first of these was the abolition of respirator. Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered. So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the ter...