Should it matter if a story is based on real life or should we only care that the emotions and plot lines represent a cohesive reality

By looking at the games we have played at the end of the class and how much everyone enjoyed participating in it, we can definitely say that we have game-playing culture embedded within ourselves.

Our game-playing culture sometimes enables people to experience different gender roles, assess how humans perceive information, and somewhat experience science and technology depending on what types of games are being played. For example, role playing games (non-computer based) enable people to experience gender role playing. Some of the word games or games such as Mafia make it possible for people to experience how they perceive and process information. Generating poem games use a computer algorithm, which involves technology.

 Hi!  I realized that I never posted my notes from when we skyped with Michael Chorost:

Leading Questions:

·      What do we make of the idea of a public figure? Do we have privacy?

·      How tough will it be to integrate humanity with the internet?

Discussion:

 Class Notes 4/25/2011

“The Alienation of Play” and Performing

            From the Forum:

                        Werner Herzog:           

                                    Resistance to knowing too much

 I was stumbling through the internet and I found this video:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077

This video basically talks about the third category of gender in Pakistan. While some Pakistani transexuals have been more accepted in the community, even working for the government, many are still excluded from society. The government recently installed a new gender category in the country, so transsexuals can have their own category.

 As a recap, for our final presentation my group created a Darwinian game in which players were given a utensil and timed for thirty seconds while they tried to get as many coffee beans from a communal pile into their cups. We meant to eliminate the lowest coffee bean-grossing players over more rounds, but found ourselves strapped for time and did two rounds instead. 

For our presentation, Kristin, Cassie, Laura, and I had the class play an evolution game—with a twist. Three teams were created, with an even amount of forks, knives, and spoons distributed. Two rounds were played, in which people had to collect as many coffee beans using their plastic utensils in a certain amount of time. At the end of the round, the top eight people from each group were able to survive to the next round. Some utensils randomly “died” during the first round as well. After the second round, the two people who collected the most coffee beans in the group “survived”, while all of the other utensils “died”. The twist of the project came at the end, in which literary memes came into play. On all of the utensils, we had written memetic phra

Here is the link to our video:
www.youtube.com/watch

 This is a more thorough explanation of the project I presented today. I realize that I skimmed over the actual calculations I did, but I only had five minutes and wasn't certain how interested people would be. 

Anyway, here is the breakdown, along with snapshots of the pictures I used during hte presentation, and a screenshot of the file I created to check my calculations. If you find this at all interesting, take a course in Linear Algebra. It's fantastic. I'm shamelessly promoting it here. :)