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Krista S

Internet Use and Child Development - 0 views

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - No Cached
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    In the context of middle class families, elements in the techno-subsystem (e.g., Internet access) may not necessarily facilitate child cognitive development; effective use of those elements, highly dependent upon parent behavior, may promote development. For example, Cho and Cheon (2005) surveyed families and found that parents' perceived control, obtained through shared web activities and family cohesion, reduced children's exposure to negative Internet content. Using the Internet at home to learn was reported in 65 cases, to play was reported in 57 cases, to browse in 35 cases, and to communicate in 27 cases. Fuchs and Wößmann (2005) inferred, having controlled for socioeconomic status, "a negative relationship between home computer availability and academic achievement, but a positive relationship between home computer use for Internet communication" (p. 581). DeBell and Chapman (2006) concluded that Internet use promotes cognitive development in children, "specifically in the area of visual intelligence, where certain computer activities -- particularly games -- may enhance the ability to monitor several visual stimuli at once, to read diagrams, recognize icons, and visualize spatial relationships" (p. 3). Van Deventer and White (2002) observed proficient 10- and 11-year-old video gamers and noted extremely high levels of self-monitoring, pattern recognition, and visual memory. In a comprehensive review of the literature of the time (when interactive digital games were relatively unsophisticated), Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, and Gross (2000) concluded that "children who play computer games can improve their visual intelligence" (p. 128). It should be noted, however, that playing video games has also been linked to childhood distractibility, over-arousal, hostility, and aggression (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Funk, Chan, Brouwer, & Curtiss, 2006).
Krista S

Project Massive : The Social and Psychological Impact of Online Gaming - 0 views

  • Further, the re- sults indicate that participation in online gaming can lead to decreased isolation and en- hanced social integration for those players who use online gaming as a medium in which to spend time and interact with real life friends and relatives.
  • The average adult spends 4 hours per day (or 28 hours weekly) watching television (A.C. Neilsen, 2001). Average weekly video game play is estimated at 7.6 hours (ESA, 2004). It is reported that people who play massively multi- player online games do so for an average of 15 hours per week; however, weekly usage of 30 hours or more is not uncommon
  • It is assumed that 10% of online game players are addicted to the activ- ity, an extrapolation from the ABCNEWS.com survey finding that 10% of all users of the internet are addicted to it
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  • Killers are characterized by what Bartle refers to as a desire to impose themselves on the play experience of others. Most often this is done by killing other players for the joy of
  • “knowing that a real person, somewhere, is very upset by what you've just done, yet can themselves do nothing about it.” Killers are commonly referred to as “griefers” and their actions as “grief play” given their orientation toward annoying and aggravating others.
Krista S

6 Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games - 1 views

  • Women in many MMOs perceive the game culture rather than the game mechanics to be the primary deterrent to poten-­ tial female gamers
  • On average, respondents spend twenty-­two hours each week in an MMO. The median was twenty hours per week—the equivalent of half a workweek. There were no significant gender or age differences in usage patterns; players over the age of forty play on average just as much as players under the age of twenty
  • While about 27 percent of female players were introduced to the game by a romantic partner, only 1 percent of male players were introduced in this way.
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  • Overall, about 25 percent of players play an MMO with their romantic partner. Female players are more likely to be playing with a romantic partner than male players (see figure 6.1). About two-­ thirds of female gamers are playing with a romantic partner, while less than one-­fifth of male gamers are
  • Men are allowed relatively free access to online games, but a woman’s presence in an online game is seen as legitimate only if it occurs via a relationship with a man.
  • It isn’t the case that women play only for socializing or that men play only to kill monsters. On the other hand, there are gender differences in these self-­identified motivations. Male players score higher in the Advancement, Mechanics, and Competition motivations, while female players score higher in the Relationship and Customization motivations. There were very small or no gender differences in the other five motivations—Socializing, Teamwork, Discovery, Role-­Playing, and Escapism.
  • In a recent survey, I asked female gamers about what they saw as potential deterrents to female gamers in the MMO they played. Almost every respondent cited the proportions and clothing options of the female avatars as problematic.
  • To a certain extent, this encourages players to think about women as token spectacles rather than actual players.
  • More important, many female players have learned that it is danger-­ ous to reveal your real-­life gender in MMOs because they will be branded as incompetent and constantly propositioned; In other words, they must either accept the male-­subject position silently, or risk constant discrimination and harassment if they reveal that they are female
  • Also, there are very few other places (in physical or virtual worlds) where high-­school students are collaborating with professors, retired war veterans, and stay-­at-­home moms
Ben Wagner

The Great Gatsby NES Game - 3 views

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    This is the game I talked about in class
jardinejn

Stuart Moulthrop - You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media - Pos... - 0 views

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  • Stoll excoriates "cyberpunks," virtual vandals who abuse the openness of scientific computing environments. Their unsportsmanlike conduct spoils the information game, necessitating cumbersome restrictions on the free flow of data.
  • Orthodox McLuhanite doctrine holds that "every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics" (Laws of Media viii).
  • Who decides what information "belongs" to whom? Stoll's "popular elite" is restricted to academic scientists, a version of "the people" as nomenklatura, those whose need to know is defined by their professional affiliation.
  • The telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in its true sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited by a relentless disintegration of global authority. Since information is now virtually an equivalent of capital, and since textuality is our most powerful way of shaping information, it follows that Xanadu might indeed change the world.
  • Electronic information, as Stoll sees it, lies in strict analogy with material and private property.
  •   "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" (Gibson 51).
  • The vision of Xanadu as cyberspatial New Jerusalem is conceivable and perhaps eligible, but by no stretch of the imagination is it inevitable.
  • But it seems equally possible that our engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution
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    Pros and Cons of the newly evolving concept of networking information back in the early 90s
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    Some interesting questions and speculations about potential controls on media from an early 90s perspective
Gideon Burton

My avatar, my self: identity in ... - Google Books - 2 views

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    Good background on identity and its application to new media in chapter two.
Krista S

The Importance of Internet Activity Choices to Salient Relationships - 0 views

  • Multiple regression analyses indicated that Internet activity choice influenced later relationship quality in both best friendships and romantic relationships. Using instant messaging (ICQ) was positively associated with most aspects of romantic relationship and best friendship quality. In contrast, visiting chat rooms was negatively related to best friendship quality. Using the Internet to play games and for general entertainment predicted decreases in relationship quality with best friends and with romantic partners. These findings reflect the important and complex functions of online socialization for the development and maintenance of relationships in adolescence.
Krista S

Motivations for Play in Online Games - 0 views

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    While these results seem to confirm stereotypical assumptions of gendered play styles, the variation in the achievement component is in fact better explained by age than gender. Also worth noting is that there is a gender difference in the relationship subcomponent but not in the socializing subcomponent, although these two subcomponents are highly related. In other words, male players socialize just as much as female players, but are looking for very different things in those relationships.
Krista S

Report: Mafia Wars, Farmville Creator Scammed Player - 1 views

  • The man who created some of the most popular social networking games on Facebook is admitting he "did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues," according to Consumerist.com.
  • Some of the spam ends up as malware and adware installed on your computer that can be impossible to remove. Others leave players with a monthly $9.99 credit card charge that they may not even be aware they subscribed to.
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
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    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
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    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
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