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...

 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...

 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...

 Good software is not copy-protected

Good software is not copy-protected. That's a somewhat controversial position on a highly controversial subject. Many manufacturers try to discourage "piracy" (wholesale copying) of their software by various protective devices. Fine. The problem is, if the users can't copy all or parts of the program easily within their own working environments, the tool is much less adaptable. Another vulnerability and another nuisance factor is added to a situation already chancy and problematic. Software ...

 History of the Concept of Art

Nowadays when someone speaks of "art" you probably think first of "fine arts" such as painting and sculpture, but before the twentieth century the word was generally used in quite a different sense. Since this older meaning of "art" still survives in many idioms, especially when we are contrasting art with science, I would like to spend the next few minutes talking about art in its classical sense. In medieval times, the first universities were established to teach the seven so-called "liber...

 Automation and Early Computation, Social Inequaltiy

Haldane did not foresee the computer, the most potent agent of social change during the last fifty years. He expected his Daedalus, destroyer of gods and of men, to be a biologist. Instead, the Daedalus of this century turned out to be John von Neumann, the mathematician who consciously pushed mankind into the era of computers. Von Neumann knew well what he was doing. Soon after the end of the second world war, he started the Princeton computer project. Like Haldane's Daedalus, he had dreams ...

 There is Too Much Art to Consume It All

So I have a counterclaim that exists today - Deviantart. Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that. On that, I'm already following nearly one thousa...

 Judge (DM) as Multiple Roles

So, what is a Judge? A Judge is the stage-setter, the tale-teller, the mediator, and the narrator. The Judge fills in the background, describes what the player characters see, and operates the non-player characters, ranging from ultimate menaces to the universe to small-time crooks to innocent bystanders to other heroes and forces of the law. The Judge decides if a character's action is successful or if a villain escapes. The Judge provides the challenges for the heroes and the information th...

 Eternitas: Transforming Data into Architecture

There is a little local exomemory that opens up while Isidore studies the structure. It describes Eternitas as an ‘experiment in transforming exomemory data directly into architecture and livable spaces.’ The Oubliette is full of similar art projects – indeed, many of Isidore’s fellow students work on considerably stranger things – but clearly there is something deeper here, something that is or has been important to the thief. On impulse, he takes out his magnifying glass. He gasps. When he...