After being asked to teach the History and Culture of Games course in 2017, Rebecca found the history materials in the course were basic and canonical (a chess-to-Pong-to-Mario narrative) and the only cultural discussion in the course was instruction on how to fit into the games industry’s culture, with assignments like how to make an effective elevator pitch for your game idea

Rensselaer

there is very little discussion about the dangers of media that seek to persuade or simplify arguments or histories, or produce clear calls to action. It would be refreshing to see an analysis of these types of games and their professed design techniques that takes into account the particular cultural moment we are living through. In a golden age of propaganda, the current mediascape is rife with insular communities that intensify uncritical perspectives across the political spectrum, and games are participating here as well

Sweeping claims are made for games, similar to those made about electricity when it was new (Marvin 1988) or other technology in early phases (Sconce 2000): games are democratising, foster empathy, are good for your health, are good for learning, and so forth. Of course, many of these claims are made for important practical reasons: to achieve funding; to bring games into the academy as its own discipline; to communicate the value of academic study in games to the games industry. However, this powerful rhetoric of love for the object of study is a double-edged sword and also contributes to a narrowing or insularity in the field around what constitutes an acceptable topic of study in games (i.e. don’t publish anything too critical of games; always be making the case for games as good), and who we imagine as a games scholar (i.e. the games scholar is a gamer)

While games education has evolved over the past fifteen years to efficiently teach students the nuts-and-bolts of building games and achieving job placements in the industry, the pedagogy in the field has engaged less fully with contemporary approaches such as critical theory and cultural studies

Political theorist Langdon Winner once asked whether artifacts can have politics. They can and AI systems are no exception. They encode assumptions about what counts as intelligence and whose labor counts as valuable. The more we rely on algorithms, the more we normalize their values: automation, prediction, standardization, and corporate dependency. Eventually these priorities fade from view and come to seem natural—“just the way things are.”

As a reviewer, Paré has noted the tenacity of school genres in novice scholarly work: It is rarely difficult to identify the authors as doctoral students. The topics are far too broad for short papers, the research methodologies are extensive and longitudinal, the theoretical terminology is impenetrable, the parentheses are crammed with citations, and the reference list is half as long as the paper itself. In other words, the submissions are reasonable facsimiles of student or school genres, but ineffective journal articles. They display knowledge--the chief rhetorical goal of school discourse--but fail to address an actual dialogue among working scholars.

scholarly writing is troublesome because it can conflict with prior knowledge of academic writing done in school settings, which may impede learning of scholarly writing conventions. The audience for school genres is typically a professor or advisor, rather than the scholarly community as a whole (Lee and Norton). The rhetorical devices used in such papers are therefore designed to demonstrate knowledge rather than to add to the construction of knowledge. Ultimately, PhD holders build upon the knowledge they demonstrate in their degree programs to make original contributions to their fields, but the rhetorical strategies they must employ to do that are often not explicitly addressed

Title IX

Members of GSAC can play a role in professors' formal reviews

Seminar Paper

Poster presentation

Reading list

socialist government structures would be constructed to assure equal representation from all nationalities in the United States

Realisation can therefore not be creative since reality is not capable of adding anything to possibility due to the false problem of the ‘less’ in the nature of possibility

philosophy has tended to make a mistake in analysing the nature of possibility by assuming that there is ‘less’ in the notion of the possible than the real

“The virtual object is never past in relation to a new present, any more than it is past in relation to a present which it was. It is past as the contemporary of the present” (DR, 132)

leads Deleuze to claim that the introduction of ‘pure memory’ implies something beyond subjective psychology; it implies “a ‘past in general’ that is not the particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that is eternal and for all time” (B, 56)

Bergson is claiming that pure memory is not merely of the same kind as other human actions like perception which are reliant on sensation and matter, it refers to an impersonal realm of memory which has not been lived by the experiencing subject and therefore exists beyond the limits of psychological recollection

environmental toxins

Although redlining officially ended with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, its impact is seen today in the social geography of cities. Residential segregation formed a platform for broad social disinvestment, especially in neighborhood infrastructure (e.g., green space, housing stock, and roads), services (e.g., transport, schools, and garbage collection), and employment.

Perusall Annotation

Class Schedule

Syllabus

he lives worst who commits the greatest crimes, and who, being the most unjust of men, succeeds in escaping rebuke or correction or punishment; and this, as you say, has been accomplished by Archelaus and other tyrants and rhetoricians and potentates? (Compare Republic.) POLUS: True. SOCRATES: May not their way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of the pain of being burned or cut:—Is not that a parallel case?

now I have told you my notion of rhetoric, which is, in relation to the soul, what cookery is to the body. I may have been inconsistent in making a long speech, when I would not allow you to discourse at length. But I think that I may be excused, because you did not understand me, and could make no use of my answer when I spoke shortly, and therefore I had to enter into an explanation. And if I show an equal inability to make use of yours, I hope that you will speak at equal length; but if I am able to understand you, let me have the benefit of your brevity, as is only fair

Now I want you, Gorgias, to imagine that this question is asked of you by them and by me; What is that which, as you say, is the greatest good of man, and of which you are the creator? Answer us.

This perpetual Disposition to shorten our Words, by retrenching the Vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended, and whose Languages labour all under the same Defect. For it is worthy our Observation, that the Spaniard, the French, and the Italians, although derived from the same Northern Ancestors with our selves, are, with the utmost Difficulty, taught to pronounce our Words, which the Suedes and Danes, as well as the Germans and the Dutch, attain to with Ease, because our Syllables resemble theirs in the Roughness and Frequency of Consonants

Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

The Roman Language arrived at great Perfection before it began to decay: And the French for these last Fifty Years hath been polishing as much as it will bear, and appears to be declining by the natural Inconstancy of that People, and the Affection of some late Authors to introduce and multiply Cant Words, which is the most ruinous Corruption in any Language. La Bruyere, a late celebrated Writer among them, makes use of many hundred new Terms, which are not to be found in any of the common Dictionaries before his Time. But the English Tongue is not arrived to such a Degree of Perfection, as to make us apprehend any Thoughts of its Decay; and if it were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be Ways found out to fix it for ever; or at least till we are invaded and made a Conquest by some other State; and even then our best Writings might probably be preserved with Care, and grow into Esteem, and the Authors have a Chance of Immortality.

It will be among the distinguishing Marks of your Ministry, My Lord, that you had the Genius above all such Regards, and that no reasonable Proposal for the Honour, the Advantage, or the Ornament of Your Country, however foreign to Your immediate Office was ever neglected by You

very judicious Persons

o the Most Honourable ROBERT

President Trump unleashed