In our last small group meeting we talked a lot about the set format that exists in academic writing, and why that is.  We said that there are selection pressures on those papers and that they need to be in that set format to remain as objective as possible, so that they will be accepted and respected in their given academic field.  This made me think about memoirs, and in particular the memoirs that have in the recent past been outed as fiction.  A Million Little Pieces and 3 Cups of Tea were both highly respected, immensely popular memoirs that were later proved to be fiction.  The uproar surrounding both of these stories was not about the writing style, or the stories that were told, but rather that fictional stories were portrayed to be true.

 I don't know if our class is obsessed with the Library of Babel, or if I, personally, am obsessed with it, but once again I have Babel on the mind. A book I read a few days ago was in the habit of throwing the word "destiny"  around as though it meant something, and I'm wondering if destiny and Babel aren't inter-related. Would a finite number of possibilities in this universe imply destiny, or would it negate the idea? If a person can only choose from so many options, perhaps the option that she chooses in therefore "destiny" - or, if there are an infinite number of options, perhaps the option that she invents is possible only because it is her "destiny".

 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