Week 7 (28 October):
Entangled 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 Teams.
- Either:
- Or:
- 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.
- Adventure Capitalist (available via Steam, Google Play, and the App Store).
Things to do
NB Here and below, “Fun” means it is an optional thing to do.
- Re-confirm or change your group membership in the Teams group file (see Brightspace and Teams notification)!
- 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 (4 November):
Digital Playgrounds
Resources
- A PDF of the lecture can be found here.
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 (11 November):
Virtual Worlds
Resources
- A PDF of the lecture can be found here.
Read
- Philip Brey (2014)’s The Phyiscal and Social Reality of Virtual Worlds in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality
- 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)
Things To Do
- Fun: Learn how Ultima Online’s Ecology was designed and destroyed in this video.
- Fun: Visit LambdaMoo as a guest (please, be respectful of its citizens).
Week 10 (18 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 please take care if you choose to play this game.
- Or:
- Robert Yang’s Hard Lads.
Week 11 (29-11):
Playful Computers
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, 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
- Fun: Watch Zondag with Lubach‘s item on Deepfakes (Dutch only, sometimes gets subtitled in English a few days/weeks after the episode has aired)
Week 12 &13 (2 and 9 December):
The Future of the Digital
Your presentations predicting the future of a digital phenomenon!