My present-day fascination with videogames does not derive from personal affection. I prefer working out and skiing to playing videogames. But that's a personal preference, not a value judgment. I happen to think that videogames are an ideal means to help broaden the imaginations of young people.
For Millennials, life is not relegated to evenings and weekends. We have been instilled with the determination to find jobs we enjoy – and why not? Many criticise my generation for having high aspirations, as if rising to the top in a sector that we hate is a preferable alternative to landing a job we are passionate about – but this view can be enormously damaging to any business.
If we value the humanities enough to teach them at the undergraduate level, if we believe that humanities education produces thoughtful, critical, self-aware global citizens, then we need to recognize that advanced training in the humanities cannot be simply the province of aspiring tenure-track faculty members. If there’s no prospect of a tenure-track job in the humanities, and humanities graduate programs train students for nothing but tenure-track jobs, how long can these programs be sustainable?
How did Facebook come to the decision to make these newest changes in its privacy policy? At one point in the conversation, Zuckerberg emphasized how the company's decision making is driven by numbers. He spoke at length about how real, everyday users were not freaking out about these privacy shifts. They keep coming back to the site, they use it more than ever in fact, and they are more concerned about the way that game notifications show up in their newsfeed than they are about the privacy debates of pundits and watchdogs. It felt like a very dismissive way to discuss the concerns being discussed.
The soundtracks of both games jarringly counterpoint the brutal actions of scavengers in the Capital Wasteland and Rapture. Inhumanity and desperation is hauntingly accompanied by songs by songs by Billie Holiday, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters. That both soundtracks are comprised of songs, which almost exclusively belong to a time associated with values, decency, and decorum, is, of course, intended to be ironic and also serves as a means of emphasizing just how rotten the world has become since a time so idealized in the American imagination.
Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what it thinks we meant. Since we're not weighted in the Metacritic score, no one bugs us about what rating we're going to give a game, and we've never been presented a variable embargo based on the score. In other words, not being a part of that scoring system removes a lever that publishers can use to try to change how their games are covered. Based on the number of publishers willing to send us early games to review, they don't appear to mind.
Identified by its creators as the “dead simple place to post everything,” Posterous is a blogging platform focused on ease-of-use. Because of its relative simplicity in comparison to more hefty platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, some consider Posterous and its main competitor Tumblr to qualify as a form of microblogging. For instance, in a 2008 review of Posterous, ReadWriteWeb identified it as “minimalist blogging.” A more accurate understanding of the capabilities of Posterous is evident in an Ars Technica side-by-side comparison with Tumblr, both of which Chris Foreman (2010) describes as “quick blogging tools…characterized by two main features that set them apart from more traditional blogging tools.” The first concerns a content-specific focus as text, images, videos and links appear “in a suitable format for its content type” and the second involves the relative ease and speed of posting content. Perhaps it is because of this second feature that some might be quick to declare Posterous as a microblogging service or tool, but, as its creators boast on their FAQ, “there are no limits to what you can post.”
In my experience of using Posterous and witnessing how students use the service, Posterous is quicker to begin and easier to maintain than Blogger. In part, this is because Posterous offers multiple methods of content production, including posting options by email, mobile and web. It also has to do with how Posterous handles the content a user sends. Text-based content, like a Microsoft Word document for example, attached to an email to Posterous appears onsite via Scribd, a free, HTML5-based document-sharing service. Posterous arranges images emailed or uploaded into a web-friendly gallery; music and video files show up on Posterous in web-based Flash players, too.
This format suitability to content is important to note because not all students coming into college-level courses possess the knowledge necessary to deem the appropriate format for a particular kind of content. For instance, I required students in previous semesters to sign up for Blogger accounts. This was as much because of my own greater familiarity with that particular blogging platform as because of the potential for students to make their own unique, personal stamp on the blog they created. That it was possible to post blog entries via Google Docs was an additional positive influence on this decision. I also thought students might help me learn more about the particular possibilities of Blogger, that this technology could provide an opportunity for us to learn the technology together.
The potential complexity of Blogger caused some trepidation, though. The great freedom of choice led to some poor design decisions by students, including color and font size. There were additional formatting issues, too, as too many students composed blog entries in Microsoft Word and then copied and pasted the content to Blogger only to be upset by significant problems with alignment and spacing. Since the shift to Posterous, the vast majority of formatting problems have disappeared. So long as students attached their text-based efforts rather than copying and pasting direct into the body of an email, the all-important formatting of their blog entries remained intact on Posterous. As mentioned in the next section of this chapter, the autoposting feature of Posterous in particular made for a unique success across all courses.
While many things precipitated the move from Blogger to Posterous, the latter’s overall ease-of-use was a dominant determinant. Posterous has a sharper focus on how someone might want to provide content, that personalizing a particular blog space comes as much from the content as the format, that some bloggers might be more concerned with pushing content than anything else. Embedding documents, images and videos in Posterous happens with little to no frustration. There are also a limited number of themes to choose from to eliminate the possibility of color clash and font fiasco. Posterous features a streamlined process for blogging in my writing-centered courses; it has proven to be a better choice for students.
Some examples:
http://johnnyc2010.posterous.com/
http://savsanford.posterous.com/
http://kroby.posterous.com/
This past weekend, M’s niece C came for an overnight visit. An avid gamer at nine years old, C is enamored with LittleBigPlanet (LBP). She often spends as much time outfitting her Sackperson as playing through favorite levels. Up until this most recent stay, C had no knowledge of LBP’s capacity for user-generated levels. When I informed her of this at a previous family gathering, she went about drafting an initial idea for a level on the back of her mother’s Mead notebook.
C presented a second draft of her level ideas at the beginning of her latest visit.
That the sketches were an amalgamation of elements from previously played LBP levels didn’t surprise me. However, I was curious about how those aspects were among the most difficult for her to play through. She often nominated me to carry us beyond those harder sections. I was the one to make it across the wooden planks. I was the one to lead and sustain the escape from Skulldozer. I was the one to hold tight to the skateboard as it raced up and down hills and ramps. When I asked her why she had these challenging elements in her design, she replied: “I want to make the hardest level ever.” And she wanted to get started right away.
Rather than begin with a blank level, we elected to open up a familiar template, one from which C drew inspiration: The Islands - Endurance Dojo. The wooden planks just mentioned appear around the 1:20 mark.
With so much infrastructure already in place, though, our approach to level creation changed. The desire to experiment and play took over. We became "garbage gods," more interested in filling up the space with assorted junk just to see what would happen. The very top of the level template was soon marked by three layers of white balloons. Scores of beach balls piled upon a massive zombie. Odd shapes of metal and plastic toppled what were once thought to be sturdy sections of the in-game environment. Our Sackperson avatars hovered with glee over an LBP landfill.
Impeding this pollution-based progress were the tutorials. Any time C attempted to add something different to our collective mess of crap, we were taken to a different, instruction-based space. Most of the tutorials were informative and helpful, though the requirement to complete particular tasks before continuing proved a problem. For some reason, the audio tutorial was a specific difficulty for us, making for enough frustration that we abandoned level creation in favor of running around with Paintinators in the Metal Gear Solid levels.
My task now is to suffer through each of LBP's tutorials in time for C’s next visit. This way, I can better serve my secretarial function in transcribing her LBP vision.
Consider Facebook's privacy options. Regulators in the United States have long called for companies to give users choices to control personal data. Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers these choices - more than 100 of them. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.
Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice.