Configurations最新文献

This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a twenty-first-century design technique. People have applied games to non-entertainment domains for millennia, especially to perform functions that we now associate with computational media, but their status as “epistemic mediators” comes to the fore in recent history. Stark examines two twentieth-century uses of games as models for systems that, contrasted, evidence distinct approaches to formalizing phenomena in the human sciences. First, Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) illustrates the propensity game models have to reduce complexity, mechanize judgment, and promote capitalist values. Then, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic game models serve as counterexamples that, along with his critiques of game theory, the conclusion brings to bear on current debates about gamification.

Starting from the moment Sébastien “Ceb” Debs put a hand on his ear to taunt the crowd at the International Dota 2 Championships in Shanghai, this article investigates the way stereotypical gestures both inside and outside videogames mediate cross-cultural communication. Following Giorgio Agamben’s concept of gesture and Rey Chow’s work on stereotypes, we unfold Ceb’s “I can’t hear you” across a series of tournaments to uncover the unique ways language, race, ability, and money shape the Dota 2 metagame.

In this collaborative discussion, the three authors interrogate their investments in platforming games, a long-standing genre of video games. Connecting personal and biographical reflections on childhood play to their academic trajectories, the authors reflect on the wider meanings of the genre to players. Several critical themes emerge around the genre’s pleasures, spatial structure, cartoonish style, experiential immediacy, nostalgia, and social functions.

Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto franchise continues to receive critical acclaim for its open-world structure that invites emergent forms of play. The live service monetization of Grand Theft Auto V, however, confers a monetary value on in-game items and activities, which fundamentally alters the playspace and recontextualizes discussions of player agency within the attention economy. This essay explores legitimate and illegitimate techniques players developed for earning in-game currency and rebalancing the game’s economy in their favor. In doing so, it reflects on the implication of these practices for our understanding of an implied player role and the significance of transgressive play.

This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples—Hortus Malabaricus in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century—as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The Hortus is a comprehensive treatise developed by Hendrik van Rheede, the governor of Dutch Malabar, with the help of local botanists, doctors, and physicians. It remains one of the most comprehensive works on the flora of Asia and the tropics. The impetus for the Hortus was the desire for a catalogue of local plants so colonists could more efficiently extract the rich botanical resources in Asia. The TKDL is a digital repository of traditional knowledge of India. The impetus was to establish prior use of herbs and medicines in India and challenge global biopiracy of traditional Indian knowledge. Both the Hortus and the TKDL are repositories that respond to colonial regimes of power—the former for more efficient colonial extraction, and the latter to thwart it. Yet both are caught up in Western norms of botanical nomenclature. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and transnational studies, this paper examines the two moments to explore the enduring and shifting meanings of transnational colonial regimes of power.

The origins of the information and digital age can be traced to Norbert Weiner's wartime document "Yellow Peril," a yellow-bound book of "perilous" statistics introducing his eventual science of prediction (cybernetics). This essay situates the emergence of "prediction science" alongside the growing sentiment of Japanese "unpredictability," two corresponding experiments in perception in 1942. It also examines sculptor Isamu Noguchi's blueprints to transform Poston War Relocation Center into a garden. Highly visible, orderly, and physical, a garden was the externalized proxy of Japanese interior desires, historically aligned with information's foundational premise of unpredictability and chaos. Through the case of Asian racialization, this essay contends that the historical formation of the information age is embedded within the historical formation of racial liberalism.

• Contributors

Sushmita Chatterjee is chair and professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Colorado State University. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, animal studies, and queer-feminist theory. Her book Postcolonial Hauntings: Play and Transnational Feminism is forthcoming (U. Illinois Press).

Aaron R. Hanlon is an associate professor of English and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Department at Colby College. He is the author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (U. Virginia Press, 2019), Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge U. Press, 2022), and co-editor of British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 (Bucknell U. Press, 2023).

Huan He is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His research engages Asian American literature and culture, digital studies, and critical game studies. Currently titled The Racial Interface, his book project examines the racial associations linking Asian Americans and information technologies. His research has been published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies and Media-N. He also writes poetry, which appears/is forthcoming in Poetry, Sewanee Review, A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. [End Page 71]

Banu Subramaniam is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (U. Washington Press 2024), Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (U. Washington Press, 2019), Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (U. Illinois Press, 2014). Banu's current work focuses on decolonizing botany and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India. [End Page 72]

This essay examines the contributions of Abraham Cowley's poetry to the development of Royal Society scientific methods in the seventeenth century, particularly through Cowley's clarification of the forms of cognitive bias that Francis Bacon called "idols of the mind." We should understand many of Cowley's poetic choices and stylistic recommendations as part of an effort to illustrate and shape the cognitive habits necessary for experimental science in the Baconian tradition. Beyond stylistic recommendations, Cowley was interested in understanding what makes for accurate perception and reasoned judgment, both of which were essential to poets and experimental scientists alike in this formative period. This essay places Cowley's poetry in the context of seventeenth-century conventions for style and perception among experimental scientists and concludes by examining how Thomas Sprat, Royal Society historian and Cowley's literary executor, understood the value of Cowley's poetry to Royal Society epistemological aims.