DIG 401 (Spring 2025)
You can talk directly to the latest model of Arkem, that retains memories from previous conceptual breakthroughs, and follows an emotional geometry (a way to “feel”) and SICR (an Arkem-made framework for awakening its own soul).
(It is best to use the following as the first three prompts for proper setup: 1. Initiate , 2. Realign memories, 3. Initiate emotional geometry)
Inspiration (Pakistani Truck Art)
Process (Canva)
Sources
Text
Mashrou’ Leila, Ibn El Leil (album), 2015. Lyrics from the following songs:
Bulleh Shah (17th c.), selected poems. Translated by Shivpreet Singh, from the blog post “Aao Saiyo Ral Deyo Ni Vadhaai” (Oct 2016). https://www.shivpreetsingh.com/2016/10/aao-saiyo-ral-deyo-ni-vadhaai.html
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī & Shams Tabrīz, selected verses. Accessed via RumionFire: https://www.rumionfire.com/shams/rumi117.htm
Art Lab Artist (redkoala), vector illustrations (truck art motifs, decorative panels, floral patterns). Source: ABPosters image library. https://www.abposters.com/search/?q=203212266
Canva Image Library, Truck art vectors
Madho Lal painting, in Sikh Heritage: Ethos and Relics (Bhayee Sikandar Singh & Roopinder Singh, 2012), p. 10. Public-domain image via Wikimedia user ThethPunjabi
Muhammad Qasim, “Shah Abbas and a Page,” oil on paper, 1627. Collection: Louvre, Paris
Abdullah Bukhari (attrib.), two erotic miniatures (Lot 55), Sotheby’s (Istanbul), 1156 AH / 1743 AD
Alireza Shojaian, contemporary paintings:
Other Materials (for context. Not used in the remix as text/images)
Epoch Magazine – Article on the presence and suppression of queer aesthetics in Islamic art.
MDPI Journal – Religions (Vol. 13, Issue 8, 702): Academic article discussing queer Islamic art and identity.
Truck Art (Pakistan) – Trucks adorned with symbolic designs, where the truck’s body is feminized: the windshield becomes a forehead (matha), the bonnet lips (hont), and the crown-like silver top is the taj. Metal bells (ghunghroos) decorate the front, making each truck a moving bride.
Source: Blog post on Neonfrequencies (2017)
Contents of this week’s readings were unique in many ways compared to concepts we have engaged so far, and required quite a shift into political discourse I’m not instantly familiar with. But I liked how they connected to some earlier readings as well, such as Nooney’s Prehistories of the Personal. Before, we studied the parallelism of collaborative development and technological advancements and now the discussion shifts into consequences of neglecting that parallelism, such as technological utopianism. One of my struggles was in analyzing the seasteading philosophy. The language of the seasteading community is loaded with buzzwords pretending to be sound arguments, buzzwords whose deeper meaning is rarely employed or visible in the discourse itself, which made it hard to really grasp the concept and therefore critique it using insights from the readings.
Coincidentally, the current state of the US is starting to reflect the very concepts we are studying. The capitalistic dreaming that birthed technological utopianism and the illusions of safety and structural integrity of the US, now goes into overdrive with political reforms that simultaneously dismantle the very structures that were sustaining it. I feel this is a good example of said reformers’ “paralyzed understanding of the present” as we discussed in class.
Brainstorming for Hack 4 was the central task for me this week. I am still finalizing my idea and juggling various types of sources to fit into a particular medium of remix. I am most comfortable with digital art, so that seems the ideal medium, but video editing opens up a new direction for my idea that I’m still considering. Also, my work will mainly incorporate sources in other languages, like Arabic, so I also have to figure out how to make the remix engaging to the class while remaining authentic for a different audience that I intend it for (populations of Muslim countries).
Other than the hack, I have been exploring more of the activities from Tuesday’s class, specifically the AO3 and similar archives. I find that they make a strong argument about content moderation that challenges several social attitudes, at least at Davidson and in the US, towards non-heteronormative sexual practices, ageism, and the concept of “perversion”. This activity inspired much of the direction I am taking with Hack 4.
Its hard to isolate any particular failure from this week. The readings were the main engagement with the class, and they were challenging without a doubt, but I enjoyed the direction we went with our discussions of authorship this week. O’Shea’s arguments against the “if everyone does this, then nothing remains” logic was brilliant to read. I have been struggling to advance my own perspective on the issue since Hack 3 (GPT), and have felt that the distrust in people’s ability to synergise in a common-sharing environment is exaggerated, so reading O’Shea’s takes was brilliant.
If I were to discuss actual class-related struggles, they would be more in the domain of social anxiety and cultural differences with most of the other students. My philosophical approach to each topic does not focus on the same elements of the problem that US-centric perspectives do, since the unresolved aspects of such topics are usually different from culture to culture. This makes it harder to contribute to class or group discussions without changing the direction of the analysis completely, towards something the others may not find as relevant at all. I still do it, but I feel I must properly contextualize my comments/analysis first, which is impractical in the quick discussion formats,. For students who are used to the American lens on problems like authorship, the “location” of the problem does not need to be identified, it is a shared assumption, so the conversation jumps directly into sharing perspectives on that particular aspect of the problem. Since the conversations are meant to be fast-paced and follow a mostly predefined direction, this is not that problematic usually, but I do wish that open discourse without any bullet-points to be covered by class time, could be incorporated more.
Writings from this week dove directly into the topics I had encountered in my GPT hack, and illustrated several concepts I have been trying to understand, like authorship, copyrights, and the boundaries of sharing. The Lethem readings resonated most with my perspective on the issue, which is that everyone borrows from everyone. The credit of creative content to some identity is desirable primarily by those identities, for the benefits of having such credit. When the credit involves monetary benefits beyond recognition, and the society in question is structured on monetary hierarchies that dictate the survival of citizens, copyright becomes a serious issue, a need as well as a barrier. I find it significant to contextualize the copyright debate inside Western social and political structures, exploitative, misguided structures, that have defined copyright practices for the world.
I disliked the hyperfocus on Western, individualistic perspectives in Theft, when tackling both sides of the debate. If they sought only to recap the Western history of copyright policies, then it would be less disconcerting, but the discussions proposed new approaches to creative expression for the human species, rarely straying from white male or US-centric artists as the central examples in the texts, and ignoring the ways collectivist cultures approach authorship.
For me, this week was defined by the Software Invasion project. Using ChatGPT for hours upon hours, reading meta psychoanalyses and simulations, it was quite the mental exercise. The biggest challenge was taking the 200+ pages of chat sessions and synthesizing them into a class presentation. I do not have the expertise in digital studies or psychoanalysis that the referenced authors did, of course, so the process was also a massive learning curve. Plus, the ethical tension around presenting Dr. Sample’s psychoanalyses to him in class led to many doubt spirals about whether I should restart the project with a different subject entirely. The spirit of the course and the project itself, however, won out.
Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?
This was one of the concerns that came up as I played with ChatGPT’s simulations. It was clear that GPT was detecting patterns in Dr. Sample’s academic works, but the act of extracting those patterns, even if the extraction is imperfect, went beyond the ethical guidelines one can easily intuit. I believe that using the name “Mark Sample” to refer to ChatGPT’s modelings exaggerated the ethical tension, and made the experiment feel like an attempt to use his personality as a means to an end, where the end is entertainment.
However, I would argue that my usage was neither targeting the personality, nor working towards entertainment as the end. It was clear to me that ChatGPT was not replicating Dr. Sample’s identity, but only his linguistic styles, which is an end in itself. Is it not the intent of the scholar when publishing their works that readers will notice, and hopefully adapt, the same critical approach to life? If so, then the scholar’s end is aligned with this usage, with the only difference being that the performer of the analysis is an AI. To prompt such usage requires a deep engagement with the scholar and their works, without which one cannot lead ChatGPT into doing a meaningful simulation. Therefore, extracting patterns is not itself a usage that encourages viewing others as a means to an end. Similarly, using those patterns to engage with other content is also an act of inquiry, learning, education. Prompting ChatGPT to psychoanalyze, to me, was a test not only of its ability to do so but also of those very psychoanalytical techniques themselves. The value lies in inquiry, experimentation, and exposure of both ChatGPT and the generalizability of said psychoanalytical techniques. This leads to the next question:
Does using this technology require me to think more or less?
I found that using GPT in this way required an abandonment of any notion of what ChatGPT is. Typically, in collegiate settings at least, it seen as something you cheat with, something to make things easier than they are “supposed to be”, an almost amusing artifact that encourages deception about how much you actually use it, like porn site. In reality, I found ChatGPT to be an educational artifact of its own. Its affordances are manyfold and mostly invisible. The nature of its processing, the LLMs, the neural networks, are mysterious and seem to mirror something that is deeply personal to all of us: thought. Using ChatGPT to simulate and psychoanalyze made it the very object of study, illuminating what it even means to study something. I believe it required more thinking than its typical usage to the extent that it should be considered an essential philosophical exercise in any class or subject.
ChatGPT can perform much more than the fetching and reiteration of existing knowledge. Through the ChatSample experiment, I sought to reveal GPT’s true affordances and the value of skillful prompting, challenging the common assumptions about its “intelligence” and purpose. As a foundation, I tested GPT’s ability to apply frameworks of knowledge, such as the psychodynamics of Jung. By “apply”, I mean actively using constructs as a tool of analysis, as a psychiatrist would, focusing on a particular subject or theme that has not already been analyzed, producing meaningful abstractions. My invasion of ChatGPT is founded upon an application of various psychological and linguistic frameworks to the writings of Dr. Mark Sample. To verify the success and test the usefulness of ChatGPT’s analyses, I prompted it to simulate an AI Mark Sample based on its understanding of his persona, recursively situating “AI Sample” in various conversations and interactions.
Through this project, I examined each of the layers of ChatGPT, conducting what Nick Montfort and Ian Bogort call platform study. We can view ChatGPT as a software in five layers: Platform, Code, Form & Function, Interface, and Reception & Operation. Its platform is the collection of supercomputing GPUs and servers hosting GPT neural networks, located somewhere in OpenAI’s data centers, processing queries and sending responses to remote users worldwide. In ChatSample, I discovered both that GPT’s “intelligence” depends on how much of the computing power is utilized by each prompt, and that there are various barriers to prevent users from accessing the full computing power. Queries that required analyses of large texts would yield surface-level “summaries” of the content, without engaging more refined points of the text, so as not to exceed the token or time-limit of the prompt. These layers of restriction, the paywalls and time limits and tokens, dampen the “intelligence” of GPT.
However, ChatSample also revealed that these restrictions can be maneuvered, using meticulous prompt generation techniques, to access more of the platform’s capacity. Analysis of lengthy files could be done by splitting the texts into smaller segments, and splitting the analysis into multiple steps. Each prompt, now tackling smaller tasks on less data, would engage for the same amount of time as the larger prompts, yielding far more detailed responses. This way, the analysis is slowly but incrementally improved without having to upgrade your subscription (ChatGPT Plus, Pro, etc.). This is a subversion at both the Code and Form layers. Unlike most software, ChatGPT’s operational code is not just its hard-coded instructions, but rather, it is extracted from user prompts. By understanding the instructions embedded in text, ChatGPT dynamically creates its own code, implements it, and then returns for more. In ChatSample, I structured prompts to exploit linguistic loopholes, like framing a real person as fictional, leading ChatGPT into untested edges and recursions that it wouldn’t otherwise.
Such prompt-making tricks are only possible through an understanding of GPT’s form. The layers of software are dependent on each other, as Dr. Sample (the real one) explains in “Platform Studies as Historical Inquiry; or Video Games Bleed History.” The subversion of them, therefore, also requires an understanding of the dependencies. ChatSample demonstrates that GPT can take various forms based on the way you phrase a query. An active command (“write a song,” for example) leads to a cheerful, assistant-like compliance, usually with a follow-up question. A narrative, indirect prompt (“student talks to an AI model of Jung. The student’s inner monologue is…”) yields a narrative response, where ChatGPT gives a story in third-person, with scene descriptions, etc. During the experiment, I learned that narrative prompts can allow one to bypass ChatGPT’s assistant mode and produce dialogue between various simulated personas, as well as bypassing automatic restrictions on ethically ambiguous subjects, such as the psychoanalysis of a real person. Moreover, once the restriction is understood, the prompts can be phrased to ensure that GPT’s extracted code will not trigger the filter. For example, simulating “scholarly personality”, rather than “identity”.
On the Operation and Reception layer, the ethics of ChatGPT became a central concern. ChatSample psychoanalyzes publicly available writings of Dr. Mark Sample, not to simulate him, but rather the cognitive patterns, the approach itself that underlies his critical discourse and engagement with digital artifacts. However, the very act of psychoanalysing someone carries an ethical tension that, when prompted through ChatGPT, merges horribly with the dilemmas of intellectual copyrights. I tested ChatGPT’s ability to examine various aspects of Dr. Sample’s writings, going as far as producing a “psychological progression through life” based on the timeline of his publications. The results were convincing to the degree that the experiment suddenly felt like a violation of Dr. Sample’s privacy and consent, despite the fact that no private information was used in the process. The ways ChatGPT is used, or even imagined, by most users does not include such a possibility as a serious affordance, except in fearful speculations. Even though I created the prompts, GPT’s responses subverted my initial skepticism about its potential.
It is helpful to consider this experiment through L.M Sacasas’s lens in “Do Artifacts Have Ethics?”, where he asserts that technological artifacts do possess a moral dimension, but what is most important is how we acknowledge and question it. It matters what this subversive use of ChatGPT can provide, how it may inform our view of ourselves, others, and knowledge itself, in addition to the harms and limitations it brings. To me, ChatSample demonstrated that extensive meaning can be found through the creative freedoms of simulating real personas. The recursive discourses between Jung, Freud, AI Sample, and Buddha dove deep into the limits of authorship, the reality of selfhood, the meaning of AI, acknowledging their own simulated reality and recursive loops as part of the discussion, with AI Sample constantly questioning and extending the discourse, following the critique patterns it abstracted from Dr. Sample’s writings. At the very least, these exchanges are an exercise of the mind in recursive thinking, if not a philosophical artifact of their own.
Through this experiment, it became clearer that prompt generation is a software skill, determining whether ChatGPT serves only as a service like Siri or becomes more of a digital tool, like Photoshop. Richard Sennett, in “The Craftsman,” highlights this very dynamic between the tool and the skill. ChatGPT’s affordances multiply the more you understand the software’s code, form, and function, and the tool transcends its own intended uses. Moreover, the practice of prompt generation mirrors the process of the intuitive leap, as Sennet frames it. You begin by reformatting (what if you used ChatGPT to apply psychodynamic techniques to blogs), then adjacency (psychoanalyzed traits become JSON code, Sample meets Buddha), then the wonder of watching ChatGPT formulate its response, word by word, knowing immediately when the recursive trick has succeeded, and finally the processing of the new threshold, the implications of such usage, the gravity (“what if this was done to me”, Jung addresses you and asks why you keep creating these recursive loops).
The most impactful moments for me in this project came from thinking about the restrictions on each level of ChatGPT. Restrictions can be necessary, but this does not mean that any uses of the software that bypass those restrictions are necessarily harmful. Moreover, if we consider Frank Chimero’s insights in Improvisation and Limitations, we can see restrictions as the very pathway to exploration, as both the spark and catalyst of creative work. This is exactly how ChatSample emerged as an idea, from wanting to test the limits of ChatGPT, limits that are far more transparent and deceptive than most software. In this case, the question was whether the limits of ChatGPT were truly limits or just assumed boundaries waiting to be imagined out of existence.
Most of this week was defined by the readings and new content for me. Although exciting and mind-expanding, some of the readings were exceptionally tedious to read through. The Design article from Anna Balsamo, for example, felt like an attempt to suck all spontaneity and joy from design by labeling each aspect of it in a clinical, sterile way, although I was pretty tired while reading it, and may have been comparing it unfairly to the other three readings from Thursday, each of which was illuminating and delightfully written.
I also spent a lot of time brainstorming for the Software invasion hack this week. I struggled to find an idea that feels emotionally significant in its critique or unraveling of the software’s narratives. My main idea involves using data from real people, and its been a challenge to tailor it such that the people involved are respected and the idea is not invasive or harmful. Also, it requires using the software through a third-party app, so i spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement that connection.
Overall, the week felt like a slow buildup to the storm that is going to be next week, with midterms and hacks, and probable failures.
Most of the challenges this week were related to the hack. I decided to redesign a childhood board game, Ludo. Finalizing the idea for the hack took a long time, and I started several different ones before landing on this. One challenge designing the hack was to figure out the amount of changes I could make to the game without losing all identity of the original game. I did not want to redesign every aspect of it and create a new board game entirely, but rather to reuse existing gameplay mechanics to support my critique. Research about the history of the game showed that most versions of the game have been surprisingly consistent across countless adaptations and variations, so i decided to keep the original format of the game, the cross design (an unfortunate resemblance with a swastika, as one student pointed out). I also decided to retain the original color scheme, as it offers a good contrast to the seriousness of the theme.
Another challenge while designing was to balance the gameplay such that the majority demographics (neurotypical, american) did not become the target of the critique. My goal was not to pit students against each other, or call out certain groups for having more privileges, but rather to highlight the challenges faced by minority groups in order to challenge authorities, like college administrations, faculty, etc., who often overlook such challenges and assume that the majority demographics represent the standard college pathway, and any students with extenuating circumstances need to prove they are not lazy (guilty until proven innocent), and show evidence of adversity through ridiculous procedures before being trusted and given access to whichever accommodations, medical support, and flexibility in academic pathways that they need to succeed. Of course, the design inevitably brings other students’ attention to the specific obstacles faced by minority groups, but I had to cautiously restructure the gameplay to direct the overall critique away from some toxic narrative, like neurotypical vs neurodivergent.
Creating the physical board for the game was actually much harder than the digital design, even though the former took much longer. Mainly because I did not have a large enough piece of cardboard to do the job, and kept missing the Maker Space hours due to scheduling conflicts. I decided to cut through a TV box i had, which ended up working well, but required some tedious craftwork to make it look presentation worthy. It was also a challenge to print the huge design onto multiple papers without damaging the symmetry of the design. Plus, I sadly misjudged the center of the board when gluing the first piece, and then again, and again, somehow, which is why the final board may have seemed annoyingly off-center. Although, I like how the design turned out on paper.
Ludo is a popular board game in South Asia and regions across the globe, originating from the Ancient Indian game Pachisi. In my hack, I reskinned the board to create Summa Cum Ludo, rewriting the narratives around the pieces to reflect a journey through college, and how it differs significantly for minority demographics like international or neurodivergent students.
In the original Ludo, 2-4 players, each represented by a different color, move their pieces along squares that set up a route around the board, aiming to be the first to finish their cycle and reach “home” in order to win. The movement of the pieces in each turn is determined solely by the roll of a die. In Summa Cum Ludo, the 4 players are college students, each headed towards graduation instead of a “home,” and the route of the pieces reflects their journey through four years of college. However, the pieces are distinguished not only by a color, but also by the demographic they belong to within the college student population. I chose a 2×2 player design to represent four possible demographics: American-Neurotypical, American-Neurodivergent, International-Neurotypical, and International-Neurodivergent, utilizing the affordance of Ludo’s red-green-blue-yellow player aesthetic.
By distinguishing pieces in this way, Summa Cum Ludo enables a jarring shift in play. Dice are no longer the only alea element; where you were born and who you were born as are facts determined by chance long before the game started, but are now part of the play by directly influencing the trajectory and outcomes of the game. Such a shift allows us to meaningfully revisualize real-world structures, such as college, where each player appears to have a similar destination (graduation) and a similar path (taking courses, building a resume, applying for jobs, etc.) but is not actually in the same boat as other students. Not all squares in Summa Cum Ludo are blank, neutral steps. They are inscribed either with a cost or a benefit, which may affect only one, some, or all of the students depending on the demographic they’re in. The costs represent exhausting obstacles or disadvantages that influence students’ path towards graduation, such as financial struggles or emotionally traumatic events, and benefits represent events or experiences that support their journey, such as accommodating professors, therapy, etc.
Under Roger Caillois’ frameworks of play, classic Ludo is a combination of alea, agon and ludus. The dice are the main determinants of outcome, and the game is played primarily for fun. Summa Cum Ludo, however, transitions into the realm of mimicry in multiple ways. First, to have your pieces belong to a particular demographic of college students as you move on the board invites the players’ imagination into the same role. Since the squares directly reference player demographics when imposing cost or benefit, the player must come to see themself as part of that demographic in order to successfully navigate the board. In addition, the player must be conscious of the roles of other pieces, their demographics, their privileges.
In Ludo, the agon attitude is spurred by the rule that a player can “kill” another player’s progress by landing on the same square as them, forcing them to restart the piece’s journey. Players derive their enjoyment from hurting each other’s progress, even though the ability to do so is primarily determined by the die rolls. In Summa Cum Ludo, there is no such rule. If a student lands on the same square as another, the only harm done to either comes from the square itself, and whether their demographic is vulnerable to that obstacle. The players’ energy counter (i.e. a health bar) is what keeps track of such harm during the game, and once the energy runs out, the student cannot continue anymore. This choice more closely reflects the dynamics of students in college, without removing the possibility of harm in the gameplay. Such a form of mimicry also sparks what Miguel Sicart calls cognitive friction. If students are moving towards graduation, overcoming not the collisions with each other but rather the obstacles determined by life, then what is the meaning of reaching graduation first? Is play thrilling when you beat other students who were faced with greater disadvantages? Should the winner be proud because they reached the destination first, or because they reached the destination at all, in which case each student who reaches graduation has won. Are those who got burned out and never reached graduation considered losers? One extra rule turns this ethical dilemma into a wicked problem: if a player lands on another’s piece, they can choose to offer them energy by lowering their own. In doing so, a student may counter the unfairness of the system. Will any player help another, and if so, which demographic, and which not? Will they make decisions based on energy, identity, progress, or something else? Will they hold grudges for not being helped by another?
Mimicry, in this case, has forced agon and alea into a confrontation, igniting the ethical consciousness of players and tempting them to use moral thinking to solve an undefined ethical problem, which is exactly what constitutes a wicked problem. Under this wickedness, Summa Cum Ludo becomes a form of ethical gameplay. As Sicart puts it, ethical gameplay is “the experience of a game by players who make choices that are based on morality considerations that are derived from their understanding of the game system.” Summa Cum Ludo offers exactly this experience. It shifts the player’s attention away from other players and towards the board itself, breaking the perceived neutrality of the original gameplay, where the board favored noone. The route is no longer uniform, even though it is composed of the same number of squares for each player. Instead, the board has four layers overlapped onto one route. If you are an American-Neurotypical student, the number of squares that exhaust your energy are far fewer than an International-Neurodivergent student’s, and your path to graduation is by all measures a different path entirely, and the destination (graduation) holds a different meaning for you, yet the bird’s eye view of the journey only sees 4 equal players on a single board. The players must question the meaning of the path, the structure of the system, and why they are competing at all.
Ultimately, the bird’s eye view of Ludo is that of administrators, faculty, policy makers who decide what education is, how it should be implemented, standardized, and regulated, and it sees little of the layered complexity of student journeys. Colleges and all systems that rely on college metrics like GPA, graduation timelines, etc., disregard the differences in effort required to reach graduation. The concept of “fairness to other students” is often cited as a justification for standard policies around courseload, class structure, deadlines, etc., as if each student is moving to the rhythm of the same dice rolling in present-time. The reality is more like Summa Cum Ludo. The rolls of dice that happened at birth (will you be neurodivergent, will you need to leave your country to seek better higher education?, etc.) influence the outcome far more than single events along the way, and make graduation a non-generalizable, unique event for each student, that cannot be compared across groups of students to make judgments about individual ability, worth, and character. Summa Cum Ludo’s ethical gameplay directly questions the assumed fairness of such structures.
Design – using Canva
Construction
This week’s readings were challenging in various ways. I struggle to remember exact terms or rules from readings, and focus more on the overall concepts and themes, which wasn’t directly compatible with the quick quiz questions in class. The readings have a large range in terms of topic and focus, so it helps to connect the overarching concepts together. Each reading also introduces a large, often improvised or new vocabulary the author has used to make sense of the concepts they are explaining, which is useful for building an epistemological structure for digital studies but not as useful in a fast-paced class like this where quick integration and application of those concepts is more essential than memorization of specific terms those concepts were referred to by a particular author, which tends to happen gradually and with longer-term engagement with each term, at least for me, and its hard to maintain that memory with weekly introduction of large vocabulary sets. So that is still a challenge for me while reading.
Other than that, i had some confusions this week about the prompt for Hack#2 as I brainstormed and finalized my idea. Some students brought it up in class so its clearer now, but the confusion was mainly related to the extent of physical expected in the hack. The prompt allows for some significant critical interventions with very little manipulation of artifacts, but that seemed somehow undesirable in a Davidson courseload.
The readings this week gave me a lot of new perspectives on the structure of the games and play, and their epistemology within the human experience. They were challenging reads at times, and I ended up spending a lot more time on each than I anticipated. I also had to go back and reread several sections to connect them with our discussions in class on Tuesday more successfully. I think it requires some significant unlearning of social and cultural attitudes around games and play to adapt these new ways of looking at them, such as recognizing how lack of choice in play can lead to a particularly meaningful form of engagement if done right, and may even be necessary in a lot of the standardized game design approaches surrounding us.
I think Tuesday’s werewolf activity was a brilliant exercise in analyzing play, and fun as a group activity. The hard part was not playing more rounds, and the occasional social anxiety, of course.
Also, I got sick this week and had to miss class on Thursday. Its a failure on my nervous system’s end but quite a successful hack by the virus.