Posts Tagged ‘books’

• Videogames open a new domain for persuasion: procedural rhetoric, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”.
• “When we create videogames, we are making claims about processes in the human experience, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question.”
• “Videogame players develop procedural literacy though interacting with the abstract models of specific real or imagined processes presented in the games they play. Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism.”

The world as a gamespace:

• “There is no idle time in The Sims”.
• “Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
• “The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.

Algorithms:

• “What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.

• Five conceptual planes for the analysis of game spaces:
  • Rule-based (algorithm, hardware)
  • Mediated (what appears on the screen)
  • Fictional (what is in the head of the player)
  • Play (where the player is)
  • Social (other players).
• On narratives:
  • “A fundamental function of narrative is that of providing a way of comprehending space, time, and causality”.
  • “Narrative can be thought as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects and places”.

Citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):

• “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”

Here are the books that have been used to prepare the Dreams of Progress philosophical debate, centred around the themes of Utopia and Progress. Books and authors with an asterisk (*) can be borrowed for free at the Westminster Reference Library and other libraries of Westminster: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/libraries/.

• Utopia* by Thomas More*, 1518
• A house of memories* by Rev. Isaac Hartill*, 1900
• Brave New World* by Aldous Huxley*, 1932