In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown ...between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units.
In Gamer Nation, John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges.
Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.
Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But, should players worry about the morality of their ...virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve the issue. Focusing on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies, Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy advances debates about the ethical criticism of art, not only by shining light on the interesting and under-examined case of virtual fantasies, but also by its novel application of a virtue ethical account. Video games are works of fiction that enable players to entertain a fantasy. So, a full understanding of the ethical criticism of video games must focus attention on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies. Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy engages with debates and critical discussions of games in both the popular media and recent work in philosophy, psychology, media studies, and game studies.
•We introduce a multistage Stackelberg game for inspections with multiple targets.•We propose two solutions methods, using backward induction and linear programming.•We provide an explicit solution ...for two inspection targets.
We introduce an inspection game where one inspector has the role of monitoring a group of inspectees. The inspector has the resources to visit only a few of them. Visits are performed sequentially with no repetitions. The inspectees report and share the sequence of inspections as they occur, but otherwise, they do not cooperate. We formulate two Stackelberg models, a static game where the inspector commits to play a sequence of visits announced at the start of the game, and a dynamic game where visits will depend on who was visited previously. In the static game, we characterize the (randomized) inspection paths in an equilibrium using linear programs. In the dynamic game, we determine the inspection paths in an equilibrium using backward induction.
Our paper focuses on the mathematical structure of the equilibria of this sequential inspection game, where the inspector can perform exactly two visits. In the static game, the inspection paths are solutions to a transportation problem. We use this equivalence to determine an explicit solution to the game and to show that set of inspection path probabilities in an equilibrium, projected onto its first and second visit marginals, is convex. We discuss how the static and dynamic games relate to each other and how to use these models in practical settings.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
An approach to performance-based assessments that embeds assessments in digital games in order to measure how students are progressing toward targeted goals.
To succeed in today's interconnected and ...complex world, workers need to be able to think systemically, creatively, and critically. Equipping K-16 students with these twenty-first-century competencies requires new thinking not only about what should be taught in school but also about how to develop valid assessments to measure and support these competencies. In Stealth Assessment, Valerie Shute and Matthew Ventura investigate an approach that embeds performance-based assessments in digital games. They argue that using well-designed games as vehicles to assess and support learning will help combat students' growing disengagement from school, provide dynamic and ongoing measures of learning processes and outcomes, and offer students opportunities to apply such complex competencies as creativity, problem solving, persistence, and collaboration. Embedding assessments within games provides a way to monitor players' progress toward targeted competencies and to use that information to support learning.
Shute and Ventura discuss problems with such traditional assessment methods as multiple-choice questions, review evidence relating to digital games and learning, and illustrate the stealth-assessment approach with a set of assessments they are developing and embedding in the digital game Newton's Playground. These stealth assessments are intended to measure levels of creativity, persistence, and conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics during game play. Finally, they consider future research directions related to stealth assessment in education.
The Race Card Fickle, Tara
2019, 2019-11-19, Volume:
22
eBook
This book uncovers popular games' key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic - in short, the authority - behind ...racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference.
Imagine if new knowledge and insights came not just from research centers, think tanks, and universities but also from games, of all things. Video games have been viewed as causing social problems, ...but what if they actually helped solve them? This question drives Karen Schrier’s Knowledge Games , which seeks to uncover the potentials and pitfalls of using games to make discoveries, solve real-world problems, and better understand our world. For example, so-called knowledge games—such as Foldit , a protein-folding puzzle game, SchoolLife , which crowdsources bullying interventions, and Reverse the Odds , in which mobile game players analyze breast cancer data—are already being used by researchers to gain scientific, psychological, and humanistic insights. Schrier argues that knowledge games are potentially powerful because of their ability to motivate a crowd of problem solvers within a dynamic system while also tapping into the innovative data processing and computational abilities of games. In the near future, Schrier asserts, knowledge games may be created to understand and predict voting behavior, climate concerns, historical perspectives, online harassment, susceptibility to depression, or optimal advertising strategies, among other things. In addition to investigating the intersection of games, problem solving, and crowdsourcing, Schrier examines what happens when knowledge emerges from games and game players rather than scientists, professionals, and researchers. This accessible book also critiques the limits and implications of games and considers how they may redefine what it means to produce knowledge, to play, to educate, and to be a citizen.
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
Computer games usually take one of two approaches to presenting game information to players. A game might offer information naturalistically, as part of the game's imaginary universe; or it might ...augment the world of the game with overlays, symbols, and menus. In this book, Kristine Jørgensen investigates both kinds of gameworld interfaces. She shows that although the naturalistic approach may appear more integral to the imaginary world of the game, both the invisible and visible interfaces effectively present information that players need in order to interact with the game and its rules. The symbolic, less naturalistic approach would seem to conflict with the idea of a coherent, autonomous fictional universe; but, Jørgensen argues, gameworlds are not governed by the pursuit of fictional coherence but by the logics of game mechanics. This is characteristic of gameworlds and distinguishes them from other traditional fictional worlds. Jørgensen investigates gameworld interfaces from the perspectives of both game designers and players. She draws on interviews with the design teams of Harmonix Music (producer ofRock Bandand other music games) and Turbine Inc. (producer of such massively multiplayer online games asLord of the Rings Online), many hours of gameplay, and extensive interviews and observations of players. The player studies focus on four games representing different genres:Crysis,Command & Conquer 3: Tiberian Wars,The Sims 2, andDiablo 2. Finally, she presents a theory of game user interfaces and considers the implications of this theory for game design.
