Configurations最新文献

{"title":"Games as Epistemic Mediators: Rethinking Gamification with Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Bateson","authors":"Doug Stark","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924124","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a twenty-first-century design technique. People have applied games to non-entertainment domains for millennia, especially to perform functions that we now associate with computational media, but their status as “epistemic mediators” comes to the fore in recent history. Stark examines two twentieth-century uses of games as models for systems that, contrasted, evidence distinct approaches to formalizing phenomena in the human sciences. First, Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann’s <i>Theory of Games and Economic Behavior</i> (1944) illustrates the propensity game models have to reduce complexity, mechanize judgment, and promote capitalist values. Then, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic game models serve as counterexamples that, along with his critiques of game theory, the conclusion brings to bear on current debates about gamification.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140569085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"I Can't Hear You: Gestures, Stereotypes, and Brushings against the Player in Dota 2","authors":"Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924127","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Starting from the moment Sébastien “Ceb” Debs put a hand on his ear to taunt the crowd at the International <i>Dota 2</i> Championships in Shanghai, this article investigates the way stereotypical gestures both inside and outside videogames mediate cross-cultural communication. Following Giorgio Agamben’s concept of gesture and Rey Chow’s work on stereotypes, we unfold Ceb’s “I can’t hear you” across a series of tournaments to uncover the unique ways language, race, ability, and money shape the <i>Dota 2</i> metagame.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140568996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After the Jump: An SLSA Exchange on Platforming Games","authors":"Peter McDonald, Chris Carloy, Julianne Grasso","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924123","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this collaborative discussion, the three authors interrogate their investments in platforming games, a long-standing genre of video games. Connecting personal and biographical reflections on childhood play to their academic trajectories, the authors reflect on the wider meanings of the genre to players. Several critical themes emerge around the genre’s pleasures, spatial structure, cartoonish style, experiential immediacy, nostalgia, and social functions.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140568998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924131","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Contributors &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ashlee Bird&lt;/strong&gt; is a Native American game designer and PhD in Native American studies. Her work theorizes digital sovereignty, drawing on Native American studies, media studies, and game studies to address representations of Native American characters in video games. Bird analyzes specific colonial methodologies being replicated within game spaces in order to then replace these with decolonial methods of game design being undertaken by herself and fellow Native game designers with a focus on what she terms “synthetic Indigenous identity,” oriented around promoting Indigenous futures. Beyond her academic writing, she has created three artworks, publicly exhibited seven times in group and solo exhibitions, and has curated one show. Among these are two of her original video games, &lt;em&gt;One Small Step&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Full of Birds&lt;/em&gt;, which were featured in InDigital Space at the ImagineNATIVE Film &amp; Media Festival in 2018 and 2019 respectively. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled &lt;em&gt;Red Dead Redemption&lt;/em&gt; that explores the complex relationships different players have with games and undertakes an exploration of the &lt;em&gt;Red Dead Redemption&lt;/em&gt; series and what the games have offered (or not offered) to their player bases.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stephanie Boluk&lt;/strong&gt; plays, makes, and writes about games at the University of California, Davis. Their work incorporates game studies, media theory, and political economy to explore the relationship between leisure and labor in the post-2008 global economy. They co-authored &lt;em&gt;Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames&lt;/em&gt;, as well as a series of small games, including &lt;em&gt;Footnotes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Triforce&lt;/em&gt; with Patrick LeMieux. For more information visit https://stephanieboluk.com.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Christopher Carloy&lt;/strong&gt; is an assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago. His research centers on videogame history, with a focus on the 1990s and 2000s. His dissertation, “‘True 3D’: The Form, Concept, and Experience of Three-Dimensionality in 1990s Videogames,” traced the emergence of “three- dimensionality” as a multivalent and contested concept in video-game cultures in the 1990s and its intersection with shifting styles and experiences in major videogame genres. More broadly, Chris’s work deals with spatiality across media and art forms and seeks to understand videogames as part of much longer traditions of spatial representation and design.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alenda Y. Chang&lt;/strong&gt; is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chang’s work has appeared in numerous journals, among them &lt;em&gt;Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Qui Parle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;electronic","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140569355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to the Game Studies Issue: A Metagame","authors":"Edmond Y. Chang, Ashlee Bird","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924122","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Introduction to the Game Studies Issue: &lt;span&gt;A Metagame&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Edmond Y. Chang and Ashlee Bird, &lt;em&gt;Themed Issue Editors&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;As we have argued elsewhere, video games are here, video games are everywhere; they are in our homes, in our workplaces, in our classrooms, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; And now, video game studies is here and everywhere and crosses and connects nearly every theory, discipline, and practice, academic and otherwise. The essays gathered here represent the continued and growing interest— from academia, publishing, industry, and gaming communities—in games critique and game studies. We are honored to be the first themed issue on game studies in the long, storied history of &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt;. Our first goal is to insist that game studies is interdisciplinary, collaborative, intersectional, even convivial. To this end, essays are often co-authored and contribute to multiple fields, including genre studies, disability studies, philosophy, political economy, popular culture studies, cybernetics, simulation studies, environmental studies, and science and technology studies. And they are in conversations with issues of identity, embodiment, stereotypes, autotheory, rules, interfaces, modeling, metagaming, neurodivergence, nationality, wholesomeness, labor, and attention.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This themed issue also represents a subset of the community of game scholars, artists, designers, and players that found one another at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 73]&lt;/strong&gt; to forge what would become the conference’s collaborative “game studies stream.” Game studies research and presentations have become a staple at SLSA, including streams at the most recent (2023) conference. But they began in 2011 with the first stream, an interdisciplinary series of panels, organized then by Patrick Jagoda, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, and others, which ran from 2011 to 2013, and was resuscitated in 2017 by us alongside Alenda Chang, Timothy Welsh, and others.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; In fact, we are excited to pair this themed issue with the collaborative essay “Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective,” which was published last year as part of the thirtieth anniversary celebration of &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt;. Originally, “Playing at SLSA” was to be the introduction to this themed issue, but we are honored to be able to hold space in two ways in the journal and in the community. According to this retrospective essay, the “serendipitous connections and less formal economies of the stream would forge conversations, collaborations, mentorships, and friendships that well exceed the conference and organization . . . [the retrospective] collects together first-hand accounts, responses, and meditations from past","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140568994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Doing Nothing in San Andreas: Contesting the Value of Play in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V","authors":"Timothy Welsh","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a924128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a924128","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rockstar’s <i>Grand Theft Auto</i> franchise continues to receive critical acclaim for its open-world structure that invites emergent forms of play. The live service monetization of <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i>, however, confers a monetary value on in-game items and activities, which fundamentally alters the playspace and recontextualizes discussions of player agency within the attention economy. This essay explores legitimate and illegitimate techniques players developed for earning in-game currency and rebalancing the game’s economy in their favor. In doing so, it reflects on the implication of these practices for our understanding of an implied player role and the significance of transgressive play.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140603021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn","authors":"Banu Subramaniam, Sushmita Chatterjee","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a917006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a917006","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples—<i>Hortus Malabaricus</i> in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century—as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The <i>Hortus</i> is a comprehensive treatise developed by Hendrik van Rheede, the governor of Dutch Malabar, with the help of local botanists, doctors, and physicians. It remains one of the most comprehensive works on the flora of Asia and the tropics. The impetus for the <i>Hortus</i> was the desire for a catalogue of local plants so colonists could more efficiently extract the rich botanical resources in Asia. The TKDL is a digital repository of traditional knowledge of India. The impetus was to establish prior use of herbs and medicines in India and challenge global biopiracy of traditional Indian knowledge. Both the <i>Hortus</i> and the TKDL are repositories that respond to colonial regimes of power—the former for more efficient colonial extraction, and the latter to thwart it. Yet both are caught up in Western norms of botanical nomenclature. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and transnational studies, this paper examines the two moments to explore the enduring and shifting meanings of transnational colonial regimes of power.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139412189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Isamu Noguchi's Gardens: Yellow Peril in the Age of Information","authors":"Huan He","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a917007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a917007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The origins of the information and digital age can be traced to Norbert Weiner's wartime document \"Yellow Peril,\" a yellow-bound book of \"perilous\" statistics introducing his eventual science of prediction (cybernetics). This essay situates the emergence of \"prediction science\" alongside the growing sentiment of Japanese \"unpredictability,\" two corresponding experiments in perception in 1942. It also examines sculptor Isamu Noguchi's blueprints to transform Poston War Relocation Center into a garden. Highly visible, orderly, and physical, a garden was the externalized proxy of Japanese interior desires, historically aligned with information's foundational premise of unpredictability and chaos. Through the case of Asian racialization, this essay contends that the historical formation of the information age is embedded within the historical formation of racial liberalism.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"264 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139412559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a917009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a917009","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Sushmita Chatterjee</strong> is chair and professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Colorado State University. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, animal studies, and queer-feminist theory. Her book <em>Postcolonial Hauntings: Play and Transnational Feminism</em> is forthcoming (U. Illinois Press).</p> <p><strong>Aaron R. Hanlon</strong> is an associate professor of English and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Department at Colby College. He is the author of <em>A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism</em> (U. Virginia Press, 2019), <em>Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel</em> (Cambridge U. Press, 2022), and co-editor of <em>British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830</em> (Bucknell U. Press, 2023).</p> <p><strong>Huan He</strong> is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His research engages Asian American literature and culture, digital studies, and critical game studies. Currently titled <em>The Racial Interface</em>, his book project examines the racial associations linking Asian Americans and information technologies. His research has been published in <em>College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies</em> and <em>Media-N</em>. He also writes poetry, which appears/is forthcoming in <em>Poetry, Sewanee Review, A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal</em>, and elsewhere. <strong>[End Page 71]</strong></p> <p><strong>Banu Subramaniam</strong> is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is the author of <em>Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism</em> (U. Washington Press 2024), <em>Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism</em> (U. Washington Press, 2019), <em>Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity</em> (U. Illinois Press, 2014). Banu's current work focuses on decolonizing botany and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India. <strong>[End Page 72]</strong></p> Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts ... </p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139412651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abraham Cowley against Bacon's \"Idols of the Mind\"","authors":"Aaron R. Hanlon","doi":"10.1353/con.2024.a917008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2024.a917008","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay examines the contributions of Abraham Cowley's poetry to the development of Royal Society scientific methods in the seventeenth century, particularly through Cowley's clarification of the forms of cognitive bias that Francis Bacon called \"idols of the mind.\" We should understand many of Cowley's poetic choices and stylistic recommendations as part of an effort to illustrate and shape the cognitive habits necessary for experimental science in the Baconian tradition. Beyond stylistic recommendations, Cowley was interested in understanding what makes for accurate perception and reasoned judgment, both of which were essential to poets and experimental scientists alike in this formative period. This essay places Cowley's poetry in the context of seventeenth-century conventions for style and perception among experimental scientists and concludes by examining how Thomas Sprat, Royal Society historian and Cowley's literary executor, understood the value of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemological aims.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"254 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139412546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}