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Ed Webb

Oh No! Video Games!: Who's That Video Game?! » The Fascist Politics of the In... - 4 views

ohnovideogames.com/litics-of-the-infinite-respawn

video games games ideology politics

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 02 Jan 12
     
    Objectification of the other is not exclusive to fascism, by any means. Many other 'isms' do it - colonialism being a fine exemplar. But it is true that states use this consistently to mobilize their populations.
  • Bryan Alexander on 03 Jan 12
     
    Interesting argument re: dehumanization. The examples he picks involve voiced, named characters, rather than anonymous hordes. This is another fine teachable issue.
Ed Webb

M/C Journal: "Artificial Intelligence" - 0 views

journal.media-culture.org.au/...08-losh.php

bogost politics censorship USA Congress games rhetoric islamism jihad

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source.
  • The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists.
  • a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal.
  • The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property.
  • lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions.
  • To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses.
  • “oral tradition”
  • hroughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order.
  • The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era.
  • In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.”
  • The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries.
  • In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.”
  • Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see.
Ed Webb

Video games are the answer to the New Boring | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...video-games-versus-new-boring

gamification games gaming engagement television TV media opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • And then there's Saint's Row 3, an open-world crime shooter, that seems to have been concocted entirely by hyperactive 14-year-olds force fed on a diet of sherbet, Red Bull and Korean gangster movies. This is a game in which the player can, entirely at random, bludgeon passers-by with a giant dildo. To the best of my knowledge, Downton Abbey features nothing even remotely comparable – although, to be fair, I skipped most of season two, and may have missed a key scene in which Hugh Bonneville attacks his butler with some nightmarish Edwardian device intended for the cure of female hysteria.
  • Please, if you are a parent and you want something to do with your kids on a wet Sunday afternoon, don't rent the latest heavily marketed CGI bore-fest from a Hollywood studio more interested in selling you merchandise and the moral agenda of its self-serving financers, buy Zelda. Buy Zelda and share a genuinely thrilling, heart-warming escapist fantasy with your children. Certainly, it's not as 'good' as taking them to a museum or getting them to play footie in the park, but if the only alternative is Horrid Henry, it is spectacular – and they will never forget it.
  • Interactivity is a blunt but effective tool to ensure attention and alertness. And as such, video games have never sought to stultify or repress. Video games are not interested in teaching us to make the most out of our tired soft furnishings.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Forget mainstream TV, forget it. It's over – at least in terms of water cooler discussion. Apprentice and X-Factor may reliably trend on Twitter, but it's all ironic chatter mixed with barely-disguised collective embarrassment and culpability. There's nothing enriching there.
  • games demand immersion and investment. Traditionally, this has formed a stereotype of dead-eyed zombies slumped in front of monitors, but of course, through XBox Live and PSN, gamers now constantly communicate with each other, as well as share creative tasks in titles like Little Big Planet and Minecraft. New research from Michigan State University suggests that gamers are more imaginative story-tellers – the findings are far from conclusive, but they don't surprise me. The game worlds in Zelda, Uncharted and Dark Souls are rich and deep. They are cluttered with possibilities.
  • Games get to us on some primal level, they speak to the machine code of the human id – and that can be a good thing.
  • You have your doubts and so do I. But the very least mainstream games do is give us a platform to discuss amazing things. When you talk about Zelda or Uncharted 3, you can talk about beauty, art, mythology and adventure; when you talk about the forthcoming Bioshock: Infinite, you can cover architecture, paranoia and politics and it all makes perfect sense. These elements aren't hidden away, to be teased out by cultural studies students desperate to apply their knowledge of Derrida and Saussure. They're there in the very form, the very function of the games. Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are idiotic and politically suspect, but give them five minutes and they'll show you more about the computerised lunacy of contemporary conflict than most of those MOD-arranged shaky cam war reports beamed into your living rooms by over-stretched 24-hour news channels
Bryan Alexander

Simulection: How I'm testing the party's 2015 manifestos on the video game Democracy 3 - 2 views

www.newstatesman.com/...estos-video-game-democracy-3-0

simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 28 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 28 Apr 15
     
    "It's easy to promise something in a manifesto. After all, by the time we've elected that party, it's five long years before we can get rid of it. And the vast majority of the promises are broken within the first few months - or the first five minutes of coalition negotiation..."
  • Brett Boessen on 29 Apr 15
     
    Love it. I wonder what kind of legwork it would take to "port" this over to US politics....
Todd Bryant

2015 Games for Change Awards nominees announced | Games for Change - 5 views

www.gamesforchange.org/...ange-awards-nominees-announced

shared by Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15 - No Cached
Brett Boessen liked it
  • Todd Bryant on 06 Apr 15
     
    Drumroll, please! Here are your nominees for the Games for Change Awards, which celebrate the year's best social impact games. Come to the Festival to play and
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Apr 15
     
    Have you played any of these yet?
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    I did play Vi Hart's "playable blog post, "Parable of the Polygons," and found it a fascinating and innovative experiment in procedural learning. Reminded me of a series of mini-lectures on game design or game theory that were a combination of animated lecture and playable exercises...started with a version of Pong? I can't find it in my bookmarks at the moment, but they had a similar combination of commentary and interactivity as her Parable does.
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Apr 15
     
    OK - just tried "That's Your Right" too, and it's a fun little digital card game, like Blizzard's Hearthstone, that definitely had me more familiar with the five sub-clauses of the first amendment by the end of it than I was before my 15-minute play session. I'm curious what political science faculty in higher ed would think of it's cutesy interface and music, and of it's fairly straight-forward political content regarding the Bill of Rights, but I found it engaging enough during my first playthrough that I (re-)learned something.
  • Bryan Alexander on 07 Apr 15
     
    Thanks, Brett.
Bryan Alexander

Learning Games for Change | Mission to Learn - 0 views

www.missiontolearn.com/...learning-games-for-change

shared by Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09
     
    Nice catalogue of no-cost, accessible political activism games.
Bryan Alexander

Global Conflicts - 0 views

www.globalconflicts.eu

gaming

shared by Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Jul 09
     
    Several educational games, role-playing, based on the perspective of being an investigative journalist. One concerns Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, the other Latin American politics.
Todd Bryant

2011: Obama's Coup Fails Injects Politics Into Strategy Game | Underwire | Wired.com - 2 views

www.wired.com/...obamas-coup-fails

Politics Obama

shared by Todd Bryant on 11 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 11 Nov 09
     
    I wonder if we'll see anyone on campuses citing this story as a way of arguing that games are culturally unpleasant. Good catch, Todd.
Bryan Alexander

Rulers of Nations, "Geo-political Simulator 2" - 1 views

www.rulers-of-nations.com

simulation game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 24 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 24 Oct 11
     
    Extravagantly complex political sim for current Earth.
Bryan Alexander

Teaching a simulation at Stanford - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...the_fog_of_war_game

simulation pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13
     
    Nice sketch of a political simulation, plus good reason for teaching with sims.
Bryan Alexander

Statecraft sim - 2 views

www.statecraftsim.com

game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 02 Mar 13
     
    "Dr. Keller: I designed the simulation with two main goals in mind. First, it had to be an effective teaching tool. I wanted to take abstract concepts and theories that my students often had difficulty grasping, and make these vivid and clearly understandable. I wanted students to personally experience the challenges and complexities of world politics-to get off the sidelines and become players. Although the countries, domestic factions, and global issues in Statecraft are fictional, they have been carefully designed to provide maximum insight into parallel real-world dilemmas: as students grapple with the Orion slavery issue, the threat posed by the melting Ice Mountain, and the temptation to seize Sapphire Island's vast resources they come to understand the security dilemma, the collective action problem, two-level games, the challenges of cooperation under anarchy, and many other constructs not as theoretical concepts but as visceral truths that permeate their conversations with classmates, friends, and parents, and may even keep them up at night."
  • Ed Webb on 05 Mar 13
     
    I like the concept of Statecraft, and took an early look at them. But boy, I wish they would stop spamming up my inbox with invitations to lunch etc. Quite pushy.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Mar 13
     
    That's weird. Are they aggressively courting players for other purposes, or pushing ads?
Bryan Alexander

US Department of State launches educational game about 'American English' language and ... - 2 views

www.polygon.com/...al-game-about-american-culture

game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 09 May 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 May 13
     
    Interesting political/cultural game concept.
Bryan Alexander

Peacekeeping the Game - 6 views

www.peacekeepingthegame.com

games

shared by Bryan Alexander on 28 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 28 Feb 12
     
    Open source board game on political conflict.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Brett Boessen on 28 Feb 12
     
    How is it open-sourced? (If the answer is "read the site materials", I apologize in advance. ;)
  • Bryan Alexander on 28 Feb 12
     
    Read the site materials. :) Seriously, the rules, counters, and board are all printable there. Not an ambitious game.
  • Brett Boessen on 28 Feb 12
     
    Oh I see it now. I especially like the supporting materials -- goals, background article. Those wouldn't have to be seen by the players, but could really help the facilitator/teacher.
Ed Webb

10 Years Of Civilization II: 1700 Virtual Years Of Hell - 1 views

coilhouse.net/...-ii-1700-virtual-years-of-hell

games gaming civilization future simulation war politics

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 14 Jun 12
     
    I'm not only amused by the way the author of this post has taken the simulation so clearly as an accurate analog for what could happen in the real world, but am also intrigued at how widely this story is being re-posted and commented on. I've seen it everywhere: blogs in my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. I wonder if that is a function of how widely Civ has been played, how closely the analogy to RL adheres for readers, or something else?
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 Jun 12
     
    Good point, Brett. Perhaps it's a function of the game's horrible outlook, which resonates with our current stresses.
Bryan Alexander

Teaching international relations through popular games, culture and simulations (Part 1) - 4 views

paxsims.wordpress.com/...culture-and-simulations-part-1

gaming simulation pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 09 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 09 Sep 14
     
    PAXsims is pleased to feature a number of blog posts from David Romano (Missouri State University) on teaching International Relations through popular games, culture and simulations. Today he introduces the topic. Stay tuned for parts two, three, four, and five in the near future. * * * Introduction Politics as "the struggle for power" surrounds us.
  • Todd Bryant on 10 Sep 14
     
    Nice, just sent the general paxsims site to Mike Fratanuano last week.
Ed Webb

Affective or Effective? War Child's Gamefication of Conflict Experience | Duck of Minerva - 6 views

duckofminerva.com/...on-of-conflict-experience.html

war charity gamification conflict children advertising politics

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 13 Aug 15
     
    I'd like to use this to teach gaming to faculty. There would be blow-back, which could be useful.
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