4-10-13 Refocusing and Refining Research Through Writing and Conversation
Over the past few months my proposed research has not only been shaped by what I have been reading, but has become much stronger by talking about new ideas as well as by writing, editing, and...
View Article11-10-2013 Strategies in the Game of Cultural Prizes: The Rhetoric of...
This week I feel that I have no choice but to continue my discussion of cultural prizes. Not only have I spent the week with my nose buried deep in the pages of James English’s The Economy of Prestige,...
View Article26-10-2013 Pop Culture: Presenting on Cohen and Teaching Twilight
This week was a busy one. Yesterday, I presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference. The conference was held at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. My presentation, “Like...
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Wage Earners: Minecraft housing a Corporation
Over the last week and some, I have explored the idea of play-labour, of social-investment, and how these might affect the amount of “fun” a player perceives they are having. The term itself comes...
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What happens when you take the “fun” out of a game?
What happens when you take the “fun” out of a game? What is “fun” and can it become work? In Homo Ludens, Huizinga explains that, “all play is a voluntary activity” (7) “it is never imposed by...
View ArticleWidening the Commons
A month has passed since we started construction in Minecraft, and now, at the end of the line – our project reach it’s end, I find myself going back through my week notes. With the BFC practically...
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La maison des poules
the #BigFriedChicken Roaster that Marie and the others expertly put together When I built my hen house, I had two objectives in mind. Build a chicken coop that doesn’t look like a utilitarian box of...
View ArticleBuilding Online Community Despite The Gamers
This week, instead of a weeknote focused on #BigFriedChickenCompany and the work my comrades Marie Christine, Sean and Saeed have been contributing to, I’d like to devote some thought to a greater...
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A Squirrel Is Stuck Between An Ocean And A Hard Place
Approaches to AI in virtual systems and Minecraft Yesterday, while wandering around the mLab and procrastinating between deciding to go to bed at a reasonable hour or stay up and work on midterms, I...
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The Hermeneutics of Code
The opening screen of Passage Co-authored Abstract for DiGRA 2015: William Robinson, Dylan Lederle-Ensign and Michael Mateas Procedural Deformation and the Close Playing/Reading of Code: An Analysis...
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Big Fried Chicken Post-Mortem
Note: A project post-mortem is a process through which a group (or in this case, an individual) reviews qualitative and quantitative data after the completion of a project. As the practical aspect of...
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A Case for Teamwork
I’m no stranger to The Hunger Games, let alone Hungercraft. I’ve been playing it on and off since I first started playing Minecraft last semester. It’s one of the things that interested me about...
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The Nature of Conflict; A Conflict of Nature
Going into this new project, I’m excited about a number of things: having a chance to flex my creative and critical thinking skills, to dip my feet into the familiar worlds of ideological frameworks...
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When Arenas Attack
This week, I tried playing on a different server from my usual – you know, keeping things fresh, and all. My normal server plays like a pretty typical Hunger Games server; there’s a cornucopia, limited...
View ArticleThe #HungerGames Function
Hunger. Games. A game about survival for food. A game of high consequences. In 2008, Suzanne Collins released a book titled “Hunger Games” that followed a young adult female protagonist who volunteers...
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Place for a “real” Hunger Games server?
This week I plan to share my ideas for how to create a more authentic portrayal of the novel “Hunger Games” in Minecraft. What seems to be the crucial element in the realization of a “Hunger Games”...
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Hunger Game Design 1
For our first design, Saeed and I choose to create an elevated cornucopia with twelve towers. Participants would “spawn” in one of the twelve towers and would have the option of jumping onto the lower...
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