Block 2

Week 7 (2 November): 

Amazing Economies

Resources

• A PDF of the lecture can be found here.

Read

NB here and below, “read” means before next class. In addition, unless hyperlinked, the texts can be found on Brighstpace.

• Pittman and Sheehan’s Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a Digital Sweatshop? Transparency and Accountability in Crowdsourced Online Research
• McGurl’s Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon.
• Nieborg’s Crushing Candy: The Free-to-Play Game in Its Connective Commodity Form

Play

NB Here and below, “Play” means spend at least half an hour with the referenced game. Yes, you have to play games!

• Adventure Capitalist (free to play, available via Steam, Google Play, and the App Store).
• The Amazon Race (a news game, free to play)

Things to do

NB Here and below, “Fun” means it is an optional thing to do.

• Fun: Re-watch the New Yorker’s Turking for a Living
• Fun as well as a challenge: scroll all the way through Wealth, shown to scale (it’s especially hard on a smartphone). Also, if you feel like sharing anything on social media, I personally think this absolutely effective and stunning interactive visualization deserves to be seen more widely.

Week 8 (9 November): 

Digital Playgrounds

Resources

• A PDF of the lecture can be found here. ♥ NB this lecture discusses an occurence of sexual harassment and violence in a virtual world ♥

Read

• Hunicke et al.’s MDA-Framework
• Ian Bogost’s (2016) Play Anything, Foreword and Chapter 1 (Playgrounds Everywhere).
• Bogost’s The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird. (Atlantic, February 3, 2014).

Play

• Flappy Bird (most true to the original when played on a smartphone)

Week 9 (16 November): 

The Metaverse

Resources

• A PDF of the lecture can be found here.

Read

• Matthew Ball’s Framework for the Metaverse.
• Chapter 1 and 2 from Nick Yee (2014)’s The Proteus Paradox.

Play

• The ancestor of all virtual worlds: Colossal Cave Adventure (more info here)
• Or Visit LambdaMoo as a guest (please, be respectful of its citizens).

Things To Do

• Fun: Learn how Ultima Online‘s Ecology was designed and destroyed in this video.

Week 10 (23 November):

We Are Cyborgs

Resources

• A PDF of the lecture can be found here.

Read

• Donna Haraway (1985)’s A Cyborg Manifesto
• Chapter 6 of Brendan Keogh (2018)’s A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Video Games.

Play

• Either:
  • Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest . ♥ NB this game deal directly with the topic of clinical depression, so take care if you choose to play it. ♥
• Or:
  • Robert Yang’s Hard Lads.
  • Robert Yang’s artist statement and the video to which this refers. The video features performative physical violence (men hitting each other with a chair) and nude male torsos, which is probably why YouTube locked it behind a content warning.

Week 11 (30 November):

Are Computers smart having fun?

Resources

• A PDF of the lecture is available here.

Read

• Chapter 3 of Julian Togelius’ Playing Smart.

Play

• AI Dungeon
• or play, create, or talk with any of the other AI out there online, such as at Chess.com, Write with Transformer, Inferkit, This Person Does Not Exist, Eugene Goostman, or the NEAT algorithm that plays Flappy Bird

Things To Do

• Fun: Re-watch the Open AI Hide and Seek Video

Week 12 & 13 (7 and 14 December):

Digital Futurology

Your presentations predicting the future of a digital phenomenon! Make sure to hand your presentation in via Brightspace!