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Even though it's simplistic and all too often preachy, the Good/Evil binary solves a simple but fundamental problem with choice in games: letting players know they have one. It's easy to put a byline on a package about choice, but harder to define exactly what that means to the player. By framing choice in such stark terms, it lets players know what to expect. This is great for splitting narrative and gameplay, but it's far too simple to make narrative choices a meaningful or interesting part of gameplay.

Where Farmville differs from other games of this type is the way that goods and values shift by incorporating the game into Facebook’s social network. In order to upgrade the size of your farm, which allows you to plant more crops, you can either “neighbor” a certain number of people or pay real money. Neighboring someone in Farmville is a bit like friending them on Facebook in that you’re probably not going to expose yourself to a total stranger, so this usually means recruiting people from your social circle to play.

Neighbors are also handy to have because you can go visit their farm to gain experience by weeding or fertilizing their crops. This tends to help the person doing the fertilizing more than it helps the one receiving the service, so such motivation is automatic. The ultimate effect is that Farmville creates a strong incentive for players to recruit their friends, and perhaps more importantly, to actively visit each other’s farms and look around. Players cannot negatively impact each other in anyway. They can only help.

My curiosity about Farmville is almost enough to make me reactivate my Facebook account. Almost.

I focused on Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland (along with Morrowind and Okami) in my dissertation. More than once, I've read about the similarities between Harvest Moon and Farmville, thereby piquing my curiosity even more.

notebooks are, in effect, an annex of the superego. My own notebooks play that role at times.They document opinions or enthusiasms that sometimes prove embarrassing, after a few years have passed. But they are also full of injunctions – usually to work harder, or to finish some project now gathering dust in one of the more workshop-like volumes, or to start studying X in a systematic fashion (and here’s the syllabus...).

"1984" by George Orwell:

 

At first I did like the book. Then it just started to suck right around the time when Winston was getting sexually involved with his girl friend. I hated the book so much that I forgot her name. The first hundred or so pages i liked, then it just got really boring. So II highly reccomend that you DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. And please for the love of God don't read that "Brave New World" book by Hoxley. It is twice as worse as 1984. To put it bluntly, DON'T READ ANY GEORGE ORWELL. Your just waisting your time.

Some professional athletes, however, have developed an unhealthy passion for video games. For example, Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards, an avid video gamer, became so obsessed about winning at Halo that he played games with a fake teammate to drive up his experience points. And Joel Zumaya, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was unable to pitch in 2006 after suffering forearm and wrist inflammation in his arm from playing too much Guitar Hero.

More and more books are being printed with soy-based inks, rather than petroleum-based ones, on paper that is recycled or sourced from well-managed forests and that was produced at pulp mills that don’t use poisons like chlorine to whiten it. The electronics industry, too, is trying to reduce the use of toxic chemicals, and to improve working conditions and worker safety throughout its far-flung supply chains.

So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even?

With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.

Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories.

Adding to the quandary in which university presses find themselves while navigating the storms of the digital transition (elevated to a near-perfect storm by the simultaneous recession) is that few of them have pools of available capital to fund required new investments in digital publishing platforms and cyberinfrastructure or to replace falling print revenues even temporarily while awaiting the predicted, but uncertain revenues deriving from sales of digital versions of texts. Faced with the collapse of their traditional business model, the decline of university subventions, and the increasing unwillingness and inability of universities to tolerate press debt, the problem for many university presses is not just how to manage the digital transition, but how to survive it.

The rising popularity of uncontrolled peer-to-peer networking is having an effect on the classic role of peer review for research validation, one of the core functions of academic publishing. But if some researchers may be worried by the potential loss of rigor in the assessment process, others see it as liberating.