Universality of Games

Just as the ancient and primitive religions of the world show profound similarities in their fertility rites and their sun and moon worship, many games appear to be common property to human beings everywhere. Indeed, the comparison is not at all farfetched: many games now thought to be mere children's pastimes are, in fact, relics of religious rituals, often dating back to the dawn of mankind. Tug of war, for example, is a dramatized struggle between natural forces; knucklebones were once par...

 Old Movies are SJW Too

When people say they just want 'good stories' and no politics or 'SJW' issues in their entertainment-what they are saying is that when they were kids, they completely missed the subtext of every story, movie, comic book, etc they took in. These stories have always been political. Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, X-Men, Wonder Woman, on and on and on- these are Political / 'SJW' stories. And the message, if you were paying attention at all is one of inclusion...

 Successful Prediction

Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “integrative c...

 Use of an Umpire to Hide Troop Movements in a War Game

Three maps should be provided, either in separate rooms or separated from each other by screens: one for each player, and one in the centre for the Umpire.* Each Commander and his subordinates will be allowed access only to their own map, the Umpire and his assistants moving from one side to the other. [...] Whenever any portion of OIK; of the opposing forces comes within the view of the other, the corresponding blocks of the former must be placed on the map of the latter and rice ver...

 Star Wars Nostalgia VS Star Trek Futurism

Also, Star Wars is set in a fantasy past that can look like anything, while Trek is supposed to be a projection of what we imagine our own future to look like. And Star Wars has always been an exercise in nostalgia from the start — nostalgia for ’30s movie serials and comic strips, for ’40s war movies, for ’50s hot rods and samurai movies, etc. It’s always, always been based on the past and set in the past. Star Trek looks to the future, and our idea of the future is always changing.

 How Literacy Impacts Reading and Gaming

For Ellie, that charade contributed to her waning interest in computer games and simulations fi-om its highpoint in middle childhood. Reasonably versed in computer technologies and a fan of emerging online forums such as Tumblr, she agreed to talk about her play in virtual worlds not as an enthusiast, but as something of a philistine. She enjoyed Second Life—but only up to a point. "The imaginative part stopped for me when I stopped designing my avatar," she told me. Further opportunities f...

 Cosplay as Empowerment

"Cosplay is a form of empowerment for all children and adults," says Stanford Carpenter, president and cofounder of the Institute for Comics Studies, who says that he used to be dismissive of cosplay. But after attending dozens of ComicCons, he witnessed the dress-up affair changing masked heroes indefinitely. "It's about empowerment. It's about the possibility of what you can be or what you can do. And when you see people in underrepresented groups, it takes on the empowerment fantasy of not...

 Life is Joy If We Use Our Time to Correct Our Faults

There is no evil. Life is a blessing. If it is not, then know that you are at fault. And you have been given time to correct your error, to have the joy (the highest blessing) of correcting your fault. That is the only reason for time. If you do not correct your fault, it will be corrected against your will — by death. Yes, life is a blessing. There is no evil. There are only our faults, faults in general and our personal ones, and we have been given the joy through time of correcting them. A...

 Outsourcing our Thinking to Algorithms and Those Who Engi...

...even as an algorithm mindlessly implements its procedures – and even as it learns to see new patterns in the data – it reflects the minds of its creators, the motives of its trainers. Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to make recommendations about books and films. (One-third of purchases on Amazon come from these recommendations.) These algorithms seek to understand our tastes, and the tastes of like-minded consumers of culture. Yet the algorithms make fundamentally different recommendatio...

 The Receiving Set

In radio and television, for instance, the Other Men were technically far ahead of us, but the use to which they put their astounding inventions was disastrous. In civilized countries everyone but the pariahs carried a pocket receiving set. As the Other Men had no music, this may seem odd; but since they lacked newspapers, radio was the only means by which the man in the street could learn the lottery and sporting results which were his staple mental diet. The place of music, moreover, was ta...