Russell Kirk on Colleges

Mort Weissinger on Brainiac

Kurt Squire: "[G]ames have mostly overlooked by educational technologists because... they privilege functional knowledge over declarative knowledge."

From "Educating the Fighter: Buttonmashing, Seeing, Being" by Kurt Squire

"[G]ames have mostly overlooked by educational technologists because... they privilege functional knowledge over declarative knowledge." [36]

"Expertise in fighting games arises through a rough progression of (yet also interaction among) four phases:

(1) learning to “read” the game as a semiotic system

(2) learning, mastering, and understanding the effects of the range of } possible moves,

(3) understanding the higher order interactions among these rules and the emergent properties of the game system

(4) and a continuous monitoring and reflecting on goals and sub-goals.

"To those used to studying knowledge in formal school settings, which privi- lege declarative knowledge, such embodied, situated gaming “knowledge” may seem foreign. Whereas schools privilege declarative knowledge, (particularly definitions or verbal representations of a “correct” answer), games privilege what it is that the player can actually do. No commercial game (save, per- haps, Full Spectrum Warrior) cares whether or not the player can articulate knowledge of the game world; instead knowledge becomes embodied in per- formance, although this knowledge can be later broken out into declarative statements. [38-39]

"When we look at game playing as an activity system which includes all of the fan writing, reading, analysis, and discussion it produces, it is clear that game playing usually becomes the subject of gamers’ own critical and reflec- tive analysis." [36]

Antonio José Planells de la Maza: [G]ames are considered complex fictional worlds

From POSSIBLE WORLDS IN VIDEO GAMES
From Classic Narrative to Meaningful Actions
by Antonio José Planells de la Maza
Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press Pittsburgh, PA, 2017 http://press.etc.cmu.edu/

[G]ames are considered complex fictional worlds that participate, as cultural objects, in inserted relationships within current social, economic, and political frameworks. And so we wonder “How do these objects bring out the laughter and anger of children and adults?” Or, in other words, “What type of structures and systems of meaning do video games establish from the perspective of fictional worlds designed to create ludic experiences?”

Han, Byung-Chul: Solitary Tiredness

From:  Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society, Stanford University Press, 2015.

Tiredness in achievement society is solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect. Peter Handke, in “Essay on Tiredness,” calls it “divisive tiredness”: “already the two . . . were irre- sistibly recoiling, each into . . . private tiredness, not ours, but mine over here and yours over there” (8). 

Tiredness of this kind proves violent because it destroys all that is common or shared, all proximity, and even language itself: “Doomed to remain speechless, that sort of tiredness drove us to violence. A violence that may have expressed itself only in our manner of seeing, which distorted the other” (9). 

[L]udofictional worlds may be studied from a Macrostructural Static Dimension, a Microstructural Dynamic Dimension and a Metaleptic Dimension

From POSSIBLE WORLDS IN VIDEO GAMES
From Classic Narrative to Meaningful Actions
by Antonio José Planells de la Maza
Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press Pittsburgh, PA, 2017 http://press.etc.cmu.edu/

[L]udofictional worlds may be studied from a Macrostructural Static Dimension, a Microstructural Dynamic Dimension and a Metaleptic Dimension. 

The Macrostructural Static Dimension involves understanding the ludofictional world as a formal system of linking together possible worlds. It considers a perspective that addresses the element of predestination in the game as a closed world in which the player has different ways of exploring according to possible and/or necessary actions taken at any given time. Thus, it becomes especially useful to analyze the global structure of each video game and the use of narrative worlds (cutscenes) and ingame scenes in the structure of the ludic experience. [6]

On the other hand, the Microstructural Dynamic Dimension analyses how the movement and modification of the characters’ inter-world identities develop throughout the course of the game. To do so, different theoretical categories are based on fictional features defined by characters’ possible and/or necessary actions, their psychological sub-worlds – what they fear, desire and/or imagine, etc. – and the relationships created between them. In this way, this dimension emphasizes the idea that ludofictional worlds are predetermined spaces for action and relationships with other fictional beings that may sometimes become the central axis of the ludic experience. 

The final level of meaning, the Metaleptic Dimension, replaces the idea of interactivity by proposing the narratological concept of metalepsis as the connection between the fictional world and the external user who is provided with certain mechanisms to participate in it. Thus, this perspective studies the physical and symbolic systems between the player and the world and vice versa, the internal leaps between different fictional levels and the sporadic and extraordinary disruptions to fictional boundaries that some characters may undergo. [7]

Value of Simulations

From "Simulation insubordination: How simulation games are revolutionising elearning" by Siobhan Thomas

"If you were given the task of hiring someone to monitor the reactor at your nuclear power station (we’re speaking hypothetically, of course) you’d probably ensure that they’d had hands on training in a simulator (among a whole host of other things) before they assumed their post. A nuclear disaster is, after all, something we’d all like to avoid. The irony is that while we can readily see the benefit of using simulations to train people who deal in matters of life and death—doctors, pilots, bomb disposal experts—we are less able to see the benefit of using simulations to teach content that has traditionally been classroom fare." [92]

"[D]esign gems include such concepts as sim- ulations shouldn’t feature a single system, but a series of subsystems. Simula- tions should leverage the power of modularity. Simulations shouldn’t be slaves to reality, but, instead, be realistic interpretations of the world we live in." [97]

"Worlds are simulated by allowing different systems to interact. As Warren Spector, producer of the massively successful Deus Ex, pointed out in a con- versation with Aldrich: “What you want to do is create a game that’s built on a set of consistently applied rules that players can exploit however they want.... In other words, rather than crafting single-solution puzzles, create rules that describe how objects interact with one another (for example, water puts out fire...) and turn players loose—you want to simulate a world rather than emu- late specific experiences.” (97).

"In order to create these types of situations, you have to make systems that can talk to each other."  [97]

"The perpetual question asked of simulations is “How accurate do they have to be able to teach effectively?” This is referred to as the “issue of fidelity.” The overriding assumption is the more realistic simulations are the better the learn- ing experience will be. In other words, we assume that a high level of fidelity is needed to allow learning transfer to occur. Game designers are incorporating increasingly complex levels of realism into their art forms, continually experi- menting with graphical techniques that ensure, for instance, virtual grass looks like real, live grass. The difficulty with realism though is that the closer you get to “actuality,” the easier it is for players to see the flaws. Players are more than familiar with the nuances of the world around them. Immersion—the holy grail educational designers and commercial game designers alike strive for—is easily disrupted by lighting or shadows that don’t look quite right or discor- dant frame rates.

"Simulations work better when they interpret reality. This requires designers to analyse the base learning required in any given learning situation, rather than blindly modelling real-life. In other words, simulations need to be about the learning rather than about the simulation." [99-100]

"The negotiable is reduced to the insoluble"

From "Non-Communication: a natural history of human misunderstanding"
by ROBERT ARDREY

"There seem to be several characteristics that appear in all our new exercises of misunderstanding. First, the negotiable is reduced to the insoluble. This is as true between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster as it is between father and son. Second, non-communication leads immediately to non-compassion. The policeman becomes a pig as in old-fashioned warfare the enemy became a wog. Third, there is a remarkable enhancement of what I called in African Genesis the Illusion of Central Position- the illusion gripping the lone assassin or the tiny, ruthless minority that his or their ends surpass the needs of the large majority, justifying any means. One may refer this to paranoia, but the element of righteousness eludes psychotic classification. And finally there is the common character that the new confrontation rarely involves foreigners, but almost always one's social partners."

In COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Feedback on Maria Sanford's High School Graduation Speeches

John Berger on tumblers and jugglers

John Berger on tumblers and jugglers, from Confabulations.

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/some-notes-on-song/13/

Recently, in a French town, I saw a family of tumblers performing on a street corner near a supermarket: a father, three boys, and a girl. There was also a dog, a Scottish terrier. The dog, I later found out, was called Nella, and the father, Massimo. All the kids were slim and had dark eyes. Massimo was thickset and imposing. 

The eldest boy, who was probably seventeen, perhaps more (difficult to estimate their ages because for them there is no category of childhood), was the principal juggler and handler. The young girl, of six or seven, climbed him as if he were a tree, a tree that then transformed itself into beams for a roof that she sat upon. The father was standing a good way behind them with an amplifier and sound gear between his feet on the paving stones.  

He was watching them with beagle eyes and strumming a guitar. The roof beams became an elevator that gently deposited Ariana, the girl, on the ground. The boy descended like an elevator, very, very slowly, and the girl stepped back onto the paving stones to the rhythm of her father’s guitar. 

Comes the moment for David (ten or eleven years old) to do his number. There are only half a dozen spectators, it is midmorning, people are busy. David mounts his unicycle, rides it down the street, turns and rides back with the minimum of exertion. He does this to show his credentials. 

After, dismounting onto the sidewalk, where there is a stuffed leather ball the size of a gigantic pumpkin, he kicks off his sneakers and steps onto the ball. Pushing with his heels, and using the soles of his feet to take on the curvature of the ball, he slowly persuades it forward. The two of them advance. He keeps his arms down by his side. 

Nothing he does reveals the difficulty of maintaining his balance on the rolling ball. 

He stands on it, chin up, looking into the far distance, like a statue on a plinth. The ball and he advance in triumph at the pace of a very slow tortoise. And at this moment of triumph, he begins to sing, accompanied by his father on a harmonica. David has a miniature microphone attached with tape near his left cheekbone. 

The song is Sardinian. He sings in an unruffled tenor, the voice of a solitary shepherd. The words describe what happens when a jinx is put on you, a story as old as the hills. 

Triumph and jinx, jinx and triumph, brought together in an act that, as you watch, you hope will go on and on and on. 

John Berger on Duende

John Berger on Duende, from Confabulations:

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/some-notes-on-song/4/

Flamenco performers frequently talk about el duende. Duende is a quality, a resonance, that makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or compulsion coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it’s unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future. 

In the year 1933 the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca delivered a public lecture in Buenos Aires concerning the nature of duende. Three years later, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot by supporters of General Francisco Franco. Granada was García Lorca’s hometown. 

“All the arts,” he pronounced in his lecture, are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance, and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present. . . . The duende works on the dancer’s body like wind on sand. It changes a girl, by magic power, into a lunar paralytic, or covers the cheeks of a broken old man, begging for alms in the wine shop, with adolescent blushes; gives a woman’s hair the odor of a midnight seaport; and at every instant works the arms with gestures that are the mothers of the dances of all the ages.

Kenneth Burke on his Sources

Kenneth Burke on his Sources

I had borrowed from three sources : an early nineteenth-century theorist of language, a neurolo- gist, and a philosophical genius of great insight, tinged with madness. 

The theorist of language was Jeremy Bentham, particularly his "Table of the Springs of Action," in which he sets up three kinds of what he calls "appellatives," one class "neutral," the other two "censorial." The two kinds of "censorial" terminologies name a given action either "eulogistically" or "dyslogistically," that is, implying praise or blame respectively, and "having, without the form, the force of an assumption." He aimed to replace opposite kinds of "censorial" terms with a corresponding "neutral" set that would set the conditions for a more rational attitude towards the fourteen kinds of pleasures and pains into which he divided the realm of human interests. 

For instance, it would be "neutral" to speak of thirst, hunger, the need for food, the desire for food, etc. It would be "eulogistic" to speak of "the pleasure of the social board" or "the love of good cheer." It would be "dyslogistic" to designate the same interest by some such terms as "gluttony, voracity, gormandizing, sottishness." Or an "interest" that might "neutrally" be called "religiousness" might be "eulogistically" called "devotion, holiness, sanctity," and might "dyslogistically" be called "superstition, bigotry, fanaticism, sancti- moniousness, hypocrisy." My melodramatic fantasy would obviously apply Bentham's design in a way quite alien to his scheme for a "utilitarian" reform of language, since all motives of the foreground, be they neutral, eulogistic, or dyslogistic, would be represented with dyslogistic implications in the pantomime of the quasi-prehistoric background.

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Burke on his Sources III

Burke on his Sources III

Thoughts of that sort were in the back of my mind- but the trend they took was most definitely influenced by Nietzsche, in such veritable philosophic battlefields as The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche's own combativeness was in itself enough to make him realize the value of combat so far as he was concerned, in his rest- less ingenious ways of building philosophic perspectives designed to produce a "transvaluation of all values." With his astounding com- bination of madness and profound insight, he dealt with the elements of vengeance, enslavement, and tragically idealized pugnacity that he saw, rightly or wrongly (probably a bit of both) lurking beneath our words for virtues, religion, Socratic reformism. And his very style seemed to me like a constant striking of blows. Indeed, the Nietzschean mode of critique causes us to remind ourselves that even our word "virtue" is related to the Latin word vir, the man of arms-bearing age, as per the arma virumque cano on which the Aeneid begins, in con- trast with the young (puer) and the old (senex), terms that give us re- spectively "puerility" and "senility." And since he himself in his book, The Will to Power, laid such great stress upon what he calls "perspectives," on noting the element of "transvaluation" in his dart-like nomenclature I entitled the middle section of my book "Perspective by Incongruity," having in mind the two-faced or Janus-like aspects of much modern style, due to the ambiguities of the transitions which the rapid transformations of technology are forcing upon us.

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

But for these lucky accidents (by KB)

Were I not tall and suave and handsome
were I not famed for my glamorous Byronic love-affairs had not each of my books sold riotously
had not my fists made strong men cringe

did not my several conversions
enlist further hordes of followers
and did not everything I turned to
make me big money

despite my almost glorious
good health of both body and mind
how in God's name
could I through all these years
have held up and held out and held on?

Kenneth Burke

In COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Burke on his Sources II

Burke on his Sources II

The neurologist I had in mind was Sherrington, who pointed to the biologic fact that during the hunting, grasping, and eating of nourish- ment, awareness is intense; but once satisfaction is attained, the organism tends towards a state of well being, relaxation, stupor, and sleep, unless some disorder of digestion still serves to stimulate aware- ness. Thus, the very equipment that serves to bring about the benign sluggishness and relaxation of satiety is in itself the essence of turbu- lence and sruggle. This could be interpreted as meaning that without the intense exercise of its "militant" powers, the organism would fall into decay.

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer