Semisensical ramblings by David W. Rick
“Like other forms of media, computer games can work to build up, maintain, or reject what players (among others) believe about a wide range of subjects, from the constitution of truth and goodness to understandings of social mores and global politics. Like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, computer games can work work to maintain the […]
“The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems . There are no feasible algorithms for doing this kind of work. Since everything is up for grabs, one chooses one’s fixed points with due caution.” –Daniel C. Dennett […]
“What is fun? If you dig into the origins of the word, it comes either from ‘fonne,’ which is ‘fool’ in Middle English, or from ‘fonn,’ which means ‘pleasure’ in Gaelic. Either way, fun is defined as ‘a source of enjoyment.’ This can happen via physical stimuli, aesthetic appreciation, or direct chemical manipulation.” — Raph […]
First of all, I must note that this is not in fact a text about archives. Rather, it is a text concerning the study of video games and how that study might be applied pedagogically, and as my current project involves working with an archive of video games, this seemed like a very appropriate piece […]
Update: Since the release of the film, I have re-examined this book and have additional thoughts to share: “Revisiting Ready Player One.” For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, there has finally come a novel to light our darkest hour: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. In a world devastated by ecological and environmental […]
I recently read A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, a text that aptly fields, as advertised, a theory of the nature of fun as a cognitive phenomenon. Koster may be most notably recognized by those of my age group as the lead designer for Ultima Online and is now, from what […]