This document discusses postcolonial perspectives on history and video games. It explores how games often portray simplified or stereotypical versions of colonial histories from a Western perspective. Alternative histories presented in games are examined, as well as efforts to rewrite histories from subaltern or indigenous perspectives. The use of games to critique and reimagine colonial narratives is also covered.
The document discusses the trickster figure, which appears in many cultures' folklore and myths. Trickster figures like to stir up trouble for fun and use tricks and humor to challenge social hierarchies. In African and African American folktales, common trickster figures include monkeys, spiders, and tortoises. The trickster was later adapted in modern Black literature. Minstrel shows also portrayed racial stereotypes of Black people as trickster or comic figures, though their popularity stemmed from their evolving nature and ambiguities. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston used trickster figures and humor in their work to provide outsiders insights into Black culture in a subtle way.
The document discusses various types of narratives and stories. It defines a narrative as a sequence of connected events typically involving humans or sentient beings. Stories are said to involve at least one central character moving toward a goal. Different types of stories are also discussed, including myths, legends, and folktales, which often involve supernatural elements and serve to explain cultural beliefs.
Elit 48 c class 10 post qhq quiz continuous vs contnualjordanlachance
The document provides the agenda and notes for an ELIT 48C class, including a quiz, lectures on "The American Dream" and My Antonia, and introductions of modernist poets Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The lecture section defines the American Dream, traces its origins and evolution, and discusses how it is portrayed in My Antonia through the successes and failures of various characters in pursuing prosperity.
Elit 48 c class 7 post qhq peak, peek, and piquekimpalmore
The document provides context and discussion about Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles. It summarizes that the play examines gender differences through the investigation of a murder on a rural Midwest farm in the early 20th century. The female characters, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, are able to deduce clues about the murder from details in the farmhouse that the male characters overlook, highlighting women's greater attention to "trifles." Isolation, especially for women, is another theme, as the play illustrates how the demands of rural farm life left Mrs. Wright lonely and detached from her community. The style of the one-act play and use of regional dialect reflect the literary movement of local color writing popular at
This is a review of "Bitter Lake", a documentary produced by Adam Curtis in 2015 where he talks about Afghanistan and its effect on countries are strongly related to its affairs.
Elit 48 c class 8 post qhq new teams racked vs wrackedjordanlachance
This document discusses the differences between the words "racked" and "wracked" and provides examples of their meanings. It notes that "racked" refers to being stretched on a torture device like a rack, as in feeling "racked with nerves." It also discusses using one's brain and being "racked with" a difficult task. Meanwhile, "wracked" refers to ruinous accidents and things being "wracked by" negative events, like a recession wracking the stock market. The document provides a clear summary distinguishing the meanings of these two easily confused words.
This document analyzes the Machiavellian tactics used by characters in George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones and compares them to modern American politics. It discusses how young king Joffrey Baratheon ruthlessly wields power, while Eddard Stark's honorable nature leads to his downfall. Meanwhile, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish effectively manipulates events through deception and information, embodying a true Machiavellian leader. The document argues that while ruthless tactics may ensure success, they often come at the expense of followers.
The document discusses the different opportunities and barriers to fulfillment that individuals faced in public and private spheres across Western societies from feudal times to the Elizabethan era. In feudal societies, public prestige and fulfillment were largely limited to those born into powerful families or who demonstrated physical strength. The Elizabethan era valued intellectual achievement more, but commoners and women still lacked opportunities. Some women found ways to express themselves through writing under male pseudonyms. The document analyzes these issues through the lens of characters and events in A Game of Thrones, and examines how societal values both enabled and restricted different groups over time from achieving fulfillment.
The document discusses the trickster figure, which appears in many cultures' folklore and myths. Trickster figures like to stir up trouble for fun and use tricks and humor to challenge social hierarchies. In African and African American folktales, common trickster figures include monkeys, spiders, and tortoises. The trickster was later adapted in modern Black literature. Minstrel shows also portrayed racial stereotypes of Black people as trickster or comic figures, though their popularity stemmed from their evolving nature and ambiguities. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston used trickster figures and humor in their work to provide outsiders insights into Black culture in a subtle way.
The document discusses various types of narratives and stories. It defines a narrative as a sequence of connected events typically involving humans or sentient beings. Stories are said to involve at least one central character moving toward a goal. Different types of stories are also discussed, including myths, legends, and folktales, which often involve supernatural elements and serve to explain cultural beliefs.
Elit 48 c class 10 post qhq quiz continuous vs contnualjordanlachance
The document provides the agenda and notes for an ELIT 48C class, including a quiz, lectures on "The American Dream" and My Antonia, and introductions of modernist poets Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The lecture section defines the American Dream, traces its origins and evolution, and discusses how it is portrayed in My Antonia through the successes and failures of various characters in pursuing prosperity.
Elit 48 c class 7 post qhq peak, peek, and piquekimpalmore
The document provides context and discussion about Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles. It summarizes that the play examines gender differences through the investigation of a murder on a rural Midwest farm in the early 20th century. The female characters, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, are able to deduce clues about the murder from details in the farmhouse that the male characters overlook, highlighting women's greater attention to "trifles." Isolation, especially for women, is another theme, as the play illustrates how the demands of rural farm life left Mrs. Wright lonely and detached from her community. The style of the one-act play and use of regional dialect reflect the literary movement of local color writing popular at
This is a review of "Bitter Lake", a documentary produced by Adam Curtis in 2015 where he talks about Afghanistan and its effect on countries are strongly related to its affairs.
Elit 48 c class 8 post qhq new teams racked vs wrackedjordanlachance
This document discusses the differences between the words "racked" and "wracked" and provides examples of their meanings. It notes that "racked" refers to being stretched on a torture device like a rack, as in feeling "racked with nerves." It also discusses using one's brain and being "racked with" a difficult task. Meanwhile, "wracked" refers to ruinous accidents and things being "wracked by" negative events, like a recession wracking the stock market. The document provides a clear summary distinguishing the meanings of these two easily confused words.
This document analyzes the Machiavellian tactics used by characters in George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones and compares them to modern American politics. It discusses how young king Joffrey Baratheon ruthlessly wields power, while Eddard Stark's honorable nature leads to his downfall. Meanwhile, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish effectively manipulates events through deception and information, embodying a true Machiavellian leader. The document argues that while ruthless tactics may ensure success, they often come at the expense of followers.
The document discusses the different opportunities and barriers to fulfillment that individuals faced in public and private spheres across Western societies from feudal times to the Elizabethan era. In feudal societies, public prestige and fulfillment were largely limited to those born into powerful families or who demonstrated physical strength. The Elizabethan era valued intellectual achievement more, but commoners and women still lacked opportunities. Some women found ways to express themselves through writing under male pseudonyms. The document analyzes these issues through the lens of characters and events in A Game of Thrones, and examines how societal values both enabled and restricted different groups over time from achieving fulfillment.
Tywin Lannister is the most powerful man in Westeros despite his birth status. His power comes from his vast wealth and brutal tactics, not his family name. However, Tywin places great importance on birth status and manipulates others' perceptions to believe that power comes from inheritance. This illusion of power through birth mirrors Plato's Allegory of the Cave, where prisoners are enslaved to shadows on a wall. Similarly, Tywin enslaves people to the idea that birth determines power. Tywin's manipulation parallels how modern media shapes public perceptions and influences governments, becoming a pillar of society through information control.
1) The document discusses how African playwrights have used historical events and figures as source material to rewrite and reinterpret history through their plays.
2) It provides examples of plays that have dramatized African resistance to colonialism, like The Trial of Dedan Kimathi about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and Sizwe Bansi is Dead about apartheid in South Africa.
3) The author argues that historical drama allows playwrights to transform factual history into artistic works that can address current social and political issues, though some historical accuracy may be altered for dramatic purposes.
This document analyzes representations of race in Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog. It explores how Disney attempted to address criticisms of lacking African American representation with their first Black princess, Tiana, but ultimately had her spend over half the movie as a frog. It examines how Disney softened Tiana's original character design and changed her occupation from chambermaid to avoid negative stereotypes. Several studies discussed found Disney downplayed the realities of 1920s New Orleans segregation laws and focused more on Tiana's culinary skills to make her more palatable to mainstream audiences. While Disney profited greatly from selling Princess Tiana merchandise, critics argue the movie did little to empower young Black girls and showed being green was easier than being brown
Gallows Humor, Sick Humor, and Toilet HumorBernie DeKoven
This document discusses different examples of gallows humor, sick humor, and toilet humor in various works of literature and film. It provides examples from novels by John Irving, Terry Southern, and Lemony Snicket as well as films by Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino. It also discusses how gallows humor can be grounded in real tragic events like the case of Alfred E. Packer who was sentenced to death for cannibalism. The document examines humor related to death, violence, sexuality, and bodily functions.
This document provides a comparison of the films The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Glory and their portrayal of the Civil War and issues of race. It argues that Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind presented inaccurate and distorted views of history that negatively impacted Americans' understanding of slavery and race relations. In contrast, Glory was praised for being the most historically accurate film about the war and the first to properly depict the role of black soldiers. While all three films had large cultural impacts, Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind spread misinformation, while Glory helped correct previous misrepresentations.
Mary Pickford was one of the earliest film stars and helped establish the new film industry in America. She began her career in the early 1900s acting in films for D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company. By the 1910s, she was one of the most popular actresses in the world and was known as "America's Sweetheart." She expanded acceptable behaviors for women on screen, portraying youthful and energetic roles. Off screen, Pickford was a savvy businesswoman and helped form United Artists studio with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. She remained an iconic film star through the 1920s.
Mary Pickford was one of the earliest film stars and helped establish the new film industry in America. She began her career in the early 1900s acting in films for D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company. By the 1910s, she was one of the most popular actresses in the world and was known as "America's Sweetheart." She expanded acceptable behaviors for women on screen, portraying youthful and energetic roles. Off screen, Pickford was a savvy businesswoman and helped form United Artists studio with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. She remained one of the highest paid stars of her time and a prominent figure in the film industry.
Romancing the gothic: When Love and Death EmbraceHolly Hirst
This document provides an overview of the intersection between Gothic literature and romance novels. It begins by discussing early Gothic works like The Castle of Otranto that had romantic elements. It then explores tropes that emerged like surprise heroes and chivalrous norms. Other sections examine themes of sensibility, the role of servant heroes, how to become a Byronic hero, and intersections with vampires and female sexuality. The document considers questions around Gothic formulas and how the genres combined in works like Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It traces the evolution of the Gothic romance over time and provides examples of further reading on the topic.
This document provides a biography of British explorer Rosita Forbes. It summarizes her early life and interest in exploration. It then details her first major expedition in 1920-1921 when she accompanied Ahmed Hassanein to explore the remote Kufra oasis in the Libyan desert. Though Hassanein had more expertise, Forbes took credit for planning the journey and downplayed Hassanein's role in her book about the expedition. The expedition was successful in reaching the isolated oasis but Forbes was denied recognition from the Royal Geographical Society due to lack of scientific data collected.
The document asks repeatedly if the reader was "sleeping" or ignoring countless injustices and atrocities happening in the world such as orphaned children, abused soldiers, deforestation, religious persecution, unemployment, violence, oppression of women and minorities, abuse of animals, poverty, and more. It argues that if people were ignoring these issues, they cannot blame God or destiny for the world's problems and must instead admit their own cowardice and inaction.
This document provides information about an upcoming essay assignment, dates for an English literature class, and summaries of readings from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It discusses the novel's themes of social Darwinism and the corrupting influence of rewards. It also summarizes the "Battle Royal" chapter, focusing on the grandfather's advice and the humiliating boxing match the narrator experiences. Finally, it introduces the author Arthur Miller and provides biographical details about his background and influence on Death of a Salesman.
The document provides a comparison of legends of ancient woman warriors and their modern portrayals in film. It summarizes several ancient legends including Camilla of Italy, Mulan of China, Joan of Arc of France, and Deborah Samson who fought in the American Revolution disguised as a man. It then analyzes themes, characters, and plots that are common across these legends and their modern film adaptations, such as Xena: Warrior Princess, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Kill Bill. Key findings include that while ancient legends focused on courage and wisdom helping communities, modern films emphasize personal motives like vengeance; and ancient legends lacked romantic relationships, which are prominent in modern films.
Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in the late 1820’s, he can only guess how old he is, like most slaves he did not know when he was born. Frederick was both a brilliant and a troublesome slave who had many masters before he escaped to freedom in his early twenties. He escaped slavery on his second attempt to run away to the Northern states, and not only did he teach himself how to read; he became a spell-binding orator and abolitionist, agitating for the end of slavery, and becoming a best-selling author, publishing three autobiographies, other books, and a newspaper. Some bigots claimed it was impossible for an ex-slave to be able to write that well, though they could not argue that it was not him making his speeches.
We learn what it was like:
• To be born and grow up as a slave.
• To be a plantation slave, and a city slave.
• For slaves to be denied the chance to learn how to read and write, and be educated.
• For slaves to sleep without beds, with little food and clothing.
• For slave women to be treated as unwilling concubines, and be continually sexually assaulted by their white masters, earning the contempt of their mistress.
• For slaves to be continually whipped by overseers, as encouragement.
• For masters to occasionally murder their slaves, without fear of punishment.
• To live in fear of having your family split apart and be sold in slave auctions, including young children.
Other incidents in his life include:
• How Frederick Douglass broke Master Covey, the slave breaker.
• How Frederick Douglass learned how to read and write, and eventually become a best-selling author and orator.
• His first impressions of New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he escaped slavery, when he was emancipated.
• Why he despised the cruel Christianity of his slave masters, and how it was very un-Christian.
Our blog on Frederick Douglass: http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/frederick-douglass-tells-us-about-his-life-as-a-slave-in-his-autobiography/
Please support our channel when purchasing these books from Amazon:
Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery and The Life of Frederick Douglass
https://amzn.to/3ja2ITo
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
https://amzn.to/3mtkIKv
Please share with your friends and associates!
Mysterious South Dakota, Legends of Banshees, Water Beasts and a Weird BigfootCharlie
I talk about the strange and the paranormal in the US state of South Dakota including a Banshee type entity, water cryptids, some kind of strange humanoid creature and a haunting.
This document summarizes an English literature class. It discusses the differences between continual and continuous, and provides an agenda covering a quiz, the American Dream, and the novels My Antonia and Trifles. It introduces the upcoming midterm exam and provides a review of exam topics, including passage and character identification, modern manifestos, author and event recognition, terms, literary theory, and an essay question. Students are assigned to study vocabulary, theory, relevant novels, and manifestos for the exam.
This document provides context about Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. It includes a summary of Conrad's life experiences, including his time working in the Belgian Congo which inspired the novella. It also provides historical context about King Leopold II's exploitation of the Congo Free State in the late 19th century. This led to atrocities against the local population and an international campaign against Leopold's rule. The document examines the narrative style of Heart of Darkness, including its frame narrative structure and use of light and dark motifs. It also discusses the novella's circular structure and Conrad's technique of distancing himself as the author through the frame narrator.
Comparison Between Waiting for Barbarians and Heart of Darkness KAVITABA P. GOHIL
This document provides information for a paper on African literature, including a synopsis, definitions, introduction of novels, and comparison of characters between Heart of Darkness and Waiting for Barbarians. It discusses how colonialism and imperialism portrayed African natives as barbaric others through exoticization and notions of civilization versus savagery. While Conrad presented Africa as dark and natives as cannibals in Heart of Darkness, J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians provides a post-colonial perspective that questions who the real barbarians are.
Wonder Woman is a feminist icon whose origins, characteristics, and actions represent feminist values. She was created during World War II to show that women can be heroic and do things traditionally done by men. Wonder Woman fights for truth, justice, and equality using compassion and reason over violence. Her close relationships with other female superheroes promote solidarity among women. Though some critics claim she is not feminist, Wonder Woman inspires girls and women to see their full potential and that gender should not limit what they can achieve.
This document discusses the evolution of terms used to describe digital scholarship in the humanities, from "new media" to "digital humanities." It explores debates around how digital tools are changing scholarly practices and the nature of texts. While some argue digital methods only update traditional humanities work, others see a more significant cultural shift through new forms of interactivity, reference, and authorship enabled by digital technologies. The document also references debates around establishing game studies as a discipline and defining appropriate methodologies for analyzing digital games.
Re membering and dismembering: Memory and the (Re)Creation of Identities in V...Souvik Mukherjee
This is my presentation for the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2011. The accompanying paper is available at: http://gameconference2011.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/re-membering-and-dismembering-final.pdf.
The document explores the appeal of wasteland spaces to gamers and their link to game spaces more generally. It discusses wastelands as non-places, which are spaces defined by certain functions rather than organic social relations. It also examines the concept of any-space-whatever, a virtual and fragmented space with infinite possible configurations. The document considers whether video games can be considered non-places or any-space-whatevers due to their virtual and changeable environments.
Tywin Lannister is the most powerful man in Westeros despite his birth status. His power comes from his vast wealth and brutal tactics, not his family name. However, Tywin places great importance on birth status and manipulates others' perceptions to believe that power comes from inheritance. This illusion of power through birth mirrors Plato's Allegory of the Cave, where prisoners are enslaved to shadows on a wall. Similarly, Tywin enslaves people to the idea that birth determines power. Tywin's manipulation parallels how modern media shapes public perceptions and influences governments, becoming a pillar of society through information control.
1) The document discusses how African playwrights have used historical events and figures as source material to rewrite and reinterpret history through their plays.
2) It provides examples of plays that have dramatized African resistance to colonialism, like The Trial of Dedan Kimathi about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and Sizwe Bansi is Dead about apartheid in South Africa.
3) The author argues that historical drama allows playwrights to transform factual history into artistic works that can address current social and political issues, though some historical accuracy may be altered for dramatic purposes.
This document analyzes representations of race in Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog. It explores how Disney attempted to address criticisms of lacking African American representation with their first Black princess, Tiana, but ultimately had her spend over half the movie as a frog. It examines how Disney softened Tiana's original character design and changed her occupation from chambermaid to avoid negative stereotypes. Several studies discussed found Disney downplayed the realities of 1920s New Orleans segregation laws and focused more on Tiana's culinary skills to make her more palatable to mainstream audiences. While Disney profited greatly from selling Princess Tiana merchandise, critics argue the movie did little to empower young Black girls and showed being green was easier than being brown
Gallows Humor, Sick Humor, and Toilet HumorBernie DeKoven
This document discusses different examples of gallows humor, sick humor, and toilet humor in various works of literature and film. It provides examples from novels by John Irving, Terry Southern, and Lemony Snicket as well as films by Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino. It also discusses how gallows humor can be grounded in real tragic events like the case of Alfred E. Packer who was sentenced to death for cannibalism. The document examines humor related to death, violence, sexuality, and bodily functions.
This document provides a comparison of the films The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Glory and their portrayal of the Civil War and issues of race. It argues that Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind presented inaccurate and distorted views of history that negatively impacted Americans' understanding of slavery and race relations. In contrast, Glory was praised for being the most historically accurate film about the war and the first to properly depict the role of black soldiers. While all three films had large cultural impacts, Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind spread misinformation, while Glory helped correct previous misrepresentations.
Mary Pickford was one of the earliest film stars and helped establish the new film industry in America. She began her career in the early 1900s acting in films for D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company. By the 1910s, she was one of the most popular actresses in the world and was known as "America's Sweetheart." She expanded acceptable behaviors for women on screen, portraying youthful and energetic roles. Off screen, Pickford was a savvy businesswoman and helped form United Artists studio with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. She remained an iconic film star through the 1920s.
Mary Pickford was one of the earliest film stars and helped establish the new film industry in America. She began her career in the early 1900s acting in films for D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company. By the 1910s, she was one of the most popular actresses in the world and was known as "America's Sweetheart." She expanded acceptable behaviors for women on screen, portraying youthful and energetic roles. Off screen, Pickford was a savvy businesswoman and helped form United Artists studio with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. She remained one of the highest paid stars of her time and a prominent figure in the film industry.
Romancing the gothic: When Love and Death EmbraceHolly Hirst
This document provides an overview of the intersection between Gothic literature and romance novels. It begins by discussing early Gothic works like The Castle of Otranto that had romantic elements. It then explores tropes that emerged like surprise heroes and chivalrous norms. Other sections examine themes of sensibility, the role of servant heroes, how to become a Byronic hero, and intersections with vampires and female sexuality. The document considers questions around Gothic formulas and how the genres combined in works like Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It traces the evolution of the Gothic romance over time and provides examples of further reading on the topic.
This document provides a biography of British explorer Rosita Forbes. It summarizes her early life and interest in exploration. It then details her first major expedition in 1920-1921 when she accompanied Ahmed Hassanein to explore the remote Kufra oasis in the Libyan desert. Though Hassanein had more expertise, Forbes took credit for planning the journey and downplayed Hassanein's role in her book about the expedition. The expedition was successful in reaching the isolated oasis but Forbes was denied recognition from the Royal Geographical Society due to lack of scientific data collected.
The document asks repeatedly if the reader was "sleeping" or ignoring countless injustices and atrocities happening in the world such as orphaned children, abused soldiers, deforestation, religious persecution, unemployment, violence, oppression of women and minorities, abuse of animals, poverty, and more. It argues that if people were ignoring these issues, they cannot blame God or destiny for the world's problems and must instead admit their own cowardice and inaction.
This document provides information about an upcoming essay assignment, dates for an English literature class, and summaries of readings from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It discusses the novel's themes of social Darwinism and the corrupting influence of rewards. It also summarizes the "Battle Royal" chapter, focusing on the grandfather's advice and the humiliating boxing match the narrator experiences. Finally, it introduces the author Arthur Miller and provides biographical details about his background and influence on Death of a Salesman.
The document provides a comparison of legends of ancient woman warriors and their modern portrayals in film. It summarizes several ancient legends including Camilla of Italy, Mulan of China, Joan of Arc of France, and Deborah Samson who fought in the American Revolution disguised as a man. It then analyzes themes, characters, and plots that are common across these legends and their modern film adaptations, such as Xena: Warrior Princess, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Kill Bill. Key findings include that while ancient legends focused on courage and wisdom helping communities, modern films emphasize personal motives like vengeance; and ancient legends lacked romantic relationships, which are prominent in modern films.
Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in the late 1820’s, he can only guess how old he is, like most slaves he did not know when he was born. Frederick was both a brilliant and a troublesome slave who had many masters before he escaped to freedom in his early twenties. He escaped slavery on his second attempt to run away to the Northern states, and not only did he teach himself how to read; he became a spell-binding orator and abolitionist, agitating for the end of slavery, and becoming a best-selling author, publishing three autobiographies, other books, and a newspaper. Some bigots claimed it was impossible for an ex-slave to be able to write that well, though they could not argue that it was not him making his speeches.
We learn what it was like:
• To be born and grow up as a slave.
• To be a plantation slave, and a city slave.
• For slaves to be denied the chance to learn how to read and write, and be educated.
• For slaves to sleep without beds, with little food and clothing.
• For slave women to be treated as unwilling concubines, and be continually sexually assaulted by their white masters, earning the contempt of their mistress.
• For slaves to be continually whipped by overseers, as encouragement.
• For masters to occasionally murder their slaves, without fear of punishment.
• To live in fear of having your family split apart and be sold in slave auctions, including young children.
Other incidents in his life include:
• How Frederick Douglass broke Master Covey, the slave breaker.
• How Frederick Douglass learned how to read and write, and eventually become a best-selling author and orator.
• His first impressions of New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he escaped slavery, when he was emancipated.
• Why he despised the cruel Christianity of his slave masters, and how it was very un-Christian.
Our blog on Frederick Douglass: http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/frederick-douglass-tells-us-about-his-life-as-a-slave-in-his-autobiography/
Please support our channel when purchasing these books from Amazon:
Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery and The Life of Frederick Douglass
https://amzn.to/3ja2ITo
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
https://amzn.to/3mtkIKv
Please share with your friends and associates!
Mysterious South Dakota, Legends of Banshees, Water Beasts and a Weird BigfootCharlie
I talk about the strange and the paranormal in the US state of South Dakota including a Banshee type entity, water cryptids, some kind of strange humanoid creature and a haunting.
This document summarizes an English literature class. It discusses the differences between continual and continuous, and provides an agenda covering a quiz, the American Dream, and the novels My Antonia and Trifles. It introduces the upcoming midterm exam and provides a review of exam topics, including passage and character identification, modern manifestos, author and event recognition, terms, literary theory, and an essay question. Students are assigned to study vocabulary, theory, relevant novels, and manifestos for the exam.
This document provides context about Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. It includes a summary of Conrad's life experiences, including his time working in the Belgian Congo which inspired the novella. It also provides historical context about King Leopold II's exploitation of the Congo Free State in the late 19th century. This led to atrocities against the local population and an international campaign against Leopold's rule. The document examines the narrative style of Heart of Darkness, including its frame narrative structure and use of light and dark motifs. It also discusses the novella's circular structure and Conrad's technique of distancing himself as the author through the frame narrator.
Comparison Between Waiting for Barbarians and Heart of Darkness KAVITABA P. GOHIL
This document provides information for a paper on African literature, including a synopsis, definitions, introduction of novels, and comparison of characters between Heart of Darkness and Waiting for Barbarians. It discusses how colonialism and imperialism portrayed African natives as barbaric others through exoticization and notions of civilization versus savagery. While Conrad presented Africa as dark and natives as cannibals in Heart of Darkness, J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians provides a post-colonial perspective that questions who the real barbarians are.
Wonder Woman is a feminist icon whose origins, characteristics, and actions represent feminist values. She was created during World War II to show that women can be heroic and do things traditionally done by men. Wonder Woman fights for truth, justice, and equality using compassion and reason over violence. Her close relationships with other female superheroes promote solidarity among women. Though some critics claim she is not feminist, Wonder Woman inspires girls and women to see their full potential and that gender should not limit what they can achieve.
This document discusses the evolution of terms used to describe digital scholarship in the humanities, from "new media" to "digital humanities." It explores debates around how digital tools are changing scholarly practices and the nature of texts. While some argue digital methods only update traditional humanities work, others see a more significant cultural shift through new forms of interactivity, reference, and authorship enabled by digital technologies. The document also references debates around establishing game studies as a discipline and defining appropriate methodologies for analyzing digital games.
Re membering and dismembering: Memory and the (Re)Creation of Identities in V...Souvik Mukherjee
This is my presentation for the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2011. The accompanying paper is available at: http://gameconference2011.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/re-membering-and-dismembering-final.pdf.
The document explores the appeal of wasteland spaces to gamers and their link to game spaces more generally. It discusses wastelands as non-places, which are spaces defined by certain functions rather than organic social relations. It also examines the concept of any-space-whatever, a virtual and fragmented space with infinite possible configurations. The document considers whether video games can be considered non-places or any-space-whatevers due to their virtual and changeable environments.
Canonical conceptions of narrative might find such a story-game equation problematic but the borders between the narrative and the ludic have always been fluid and allowed varying degrees of overlap between the two. With older games, this might not have been as obvious but with the sophisticated machinic narratives developing within and through computer games, it is clear that current conceptions about narrative have to take into account the ludic and the machinic nature of stories to be able to explain the functioning of problematic forms, like the narratives created within computer games. Such changing conceptions of narrative also need to address the participatory and constructive role that the reader has in the development of the narrative. In computer games, the narratives are formed within the game system (i.e. a base narrative) but through a complex identification with the in-game protagonists whose actions (and therefore the player’s) play the story into existence, thus establishing a constant interplay between playing and reading. Keeping the above in view, this paper will try to analyse the workings of narratives with reference to computer games and other new media as well as by identifying how older media also incorporate similar characteristics, hitherto ignored. It will therefore try to re-examine some key issues that inform essential conceptions of narratives and also show how Alice, in both kinds of texts, plays a videogame.
Over the last three months, the author has:
1) Engaged in various virtual reality activities including slaying dragons, fighting the mafia, ruling the Roman Empire, and playing god to a minor tribe.
2) Read about narrative structures in computer games and how games can tell stories.
3) Explored the relationship between story and gameplay in computer games, discussing major game characteristics and structures.
4) Analyzed examples like Max Payne and Alice that blend story and gameplay.
This document contains excerpts from PKD and other authors discussing concepts related to virtuality, the virtual and actual, and the possibility of multiple universes. It explores how reversibility in games can trivialize life, how the virtual forms part of the real world, and how different levels of a cone represent different lives playing out the past. It also includes a quote from PKD imagining God wearing different universes and another discussing how a character slipped between universes in one of his novels.
Sherlock Holmes returns after seemingly dying in a battle with his archenemy Professor Moriarty. Watson is shocked to see Holmes alive and demands an explanation for how he survived. The document then discusses different representations and interpretations of Sherlock Holmes in various narratives and video games. It analyzes the concepts of endings, virtual reality, and metempsychosis in relation to Sherlock Holmes stories. One video game mentioned combines the Holmes stories with Lovecraftian elements.
Souvik Mukherjee is a researcher who received his PhD from Nottingham Trent University studying videogames as an emerging storytelling medium. He currently works as a Learning Technology Trainer at Nottingham Trent University and is designing an interdisciplinary Masters course on videogames. His research interests include videogames as narratives, how literary and film theory relate to videogames, and using videogames for learning and teaching.
Egoshooting, Presentation at Magdeburg Games conference 2009.Souvik Mukherjee
EgoShooting in Chernobyl:
Identity and Subject(s) in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R Games
As the player 'walks into' a first-person shooter, does she retain her real-life identity or is the 'I' (or 'eye') that sees not so simple after all? Even as the case for the complexity of identity-formation in videogames builds up, FPS games, nevertheless, are singled out as representing a seamless first-person identification that is unique to videogames. This paper develops on earlier research to reveal major problems in such a claim: it argues that the very conception of subjectivity has always been problematised in the FPS and that the genre itself self-consciously keeps pointing this out. The recently-released FPS, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl (called SOC, hereafter) and its second-part 'prequel' are important cases in point.
In SOC, the player enters the game after being dumped for dead and picked up by a passing body snatcher who sells him as a 'live' corpse to the local trader. He wakes up as an amnesiac and devoid of any identity save for a message on his PDA that says, 'kill the Strelok'. The gameplay, then, is the player's quest for identity. Ironically, however, one of the game endings reveals that Strelok is the player himself. Further, in the second game, the player will again find himself being asked to kill Strelok: his own 'self' in the first game. Who, then, is the 'I' in these games and who shoots whom? This paper finds a more appropriate representation of this phenomenon in the German term for FPS: 'egoshooters'. In this scenario, it is a term that can be translated both as 'I, shooter' or 'I-shooter', thus further complicating notions of player-subjectivity and identity.
To take this a step further, the very notion of 'player' is brought under scrutiny in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games. SOC derives its tale from the Russian sci-fi novel, Roadside Picnic, and Tarkovsky's film Stalker. In both these pre-texts, the lone explorer protagonist moves through the Zone, a landscape that is 'alive' and reacts to the actions of those who travel on it. The Stalker's experience in the Zone is comparable to the player's moment-to-moment survival attempt in the face of the feedback loop created between player and Zone (game) in SOC. The formation of identity is influenced by the machine code that makes up the game program. Identity is, therefore, complicated further with the realisation that the 'I' in the FPS is after all a machinic selfhood. These complex planes of subjectivity cannot be analysed by the limited critical appartus of immersion and seamless identification as used by current game theory . In this context, the Gilles Deleuze's concept of identity as a continual actualisation of potentialities emerges as a more apposite framework for understanding the complex subjectivities of the FPS shown in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games. The Deleuzian framework will also illustrate how instead of being exclusive or 'new', videogames develop on questions of identity already addressed by earlier narrative media.
SOUVIK MUKHERJEE
NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY
UNITED KINGDOM
Dandelion Hashtable: beyond billion requests per second on a commodity serverAntonios Katsarakis
This slide deck presents DLHT, a concurrent in-memory hashtable. Despite efforts to optimize hashtables, that go as far as sacrificing core functionality, state-of-the-art designs still incur multiple memory accesses per request and block request processing in three cases. First, most hashtables block while waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. Second, open-addressing designs, which represent the current state-of-the-art, either cannot free index slots on deletes or must block all requests to do so. Third, index resizes block every request until all objects are copied to the new index. Defying folklore wisdom, DLHT forgoes open-addressing and adopts a fully-featured and memory-aware closed-addressing design based on bounded cache-line-chaining. This design offers lock-free index operations and deletes that free slots instantly, (2) completes most requests with a single memory access, (3) utilizes software prefetching to hide memory latencies, and (4) employs a novel non-blocking and parallel resizing. In a commodity server and a memory-resident workload, DLHT surpasses 1.6B requests per second and provides 3.5x (12x) the throughput of the state-of-the-art closed-addressing (open-addressing) resizable hashtable on Gets (Deletes).
Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots - like ChatGPT - can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots - the focus of this paper - are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Like any other software, task-oriented chatbots need to be properly tested, usually by defining and executing test scenarios (i.e., sequences of user-chatbot interactions). However, there is currently a lack of methods to quantify the completeness and strength of such test scenarios, which can lead to low-quality tests, and hence to buggy chatbots.
To fill this gap, we propose adapting mutation testing (MuT) for task-oriented chatbots. To this end, we introduce a set of mutation operators that emulate faults in chatbot designs, an architecture that enables MuT on chatbots built using heterogeneous technologies, and a practical realisation as an Eclipse plugin. Moreover, we evaluate the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on open-source chatbots, with promising results.
HCL Notes und Domino Lizenzkostenreduzierung in der Welt von DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-und-domino-lizenzkostenreduzierung-in-der-welt-von-dlau/
DLAU und die Lizenzen nach dem CCB- und CCX-Modell sind für viele in der HCL-Community seit letztem Jahr ein heißes Thema. Als Notes- oder Domino-Kunde haben Sie vielleicht mit unerwartet hohen Benutzerzahlen und Lizenzgebühren zu kämpfen. Sie fragen sich vielleicht, wie diese neue Art der Lizenzierung funktioniert und welchen Nutzen sie Ihnen bringt. Vor allem wollen Sie sicherlich Ihr Budget einhalten und Kosten sparen, wo immer möglich. Das verstehen wir und wir möchten Ihnen dabei helfen!
Wir erklären Ihnen, wie Sie häufige Konfigurationsprobleme lösen können, die dazu führen können, dass mehr Benutzer gezählt werden als nötig, und wie Sie überflüssige oder ungenutzte Konten identifizieren und entfernen können, um Geld zu sparen. Es gibt auch einige Ansätze, die zu unnötigen Ausgaben führen können, z. B. wenn ein Personendokument anstelle eines Mail-Ins für geteilte Mailboxen verwendet wird. Wir zeigen Ihnen solche Fälle und deren Lösungen. Und natürlich erklären wir Ihnen das neue Lizenzmodell.
Nehmen Sie an diesem Webinar teil, bei dem HCL-Ambassador Marc Thomas und Gastredner Franz Walder Ihnen diese neue Welt näherbringen. Es vermittelt Ihnen die Tools und das Know-how, um den Überblick zu bewahren. Sie werden in der Lage sein, Ihre Kosten durch eine optimierte Domino-Konfiguration zu reduzieren und auch in Zukunft gering zu halten.
Diese Themen werden behandelt
- Reduzierung der Lizenzkosten durch Auffinden und Beheben von Fehlkonfigurationen und überflüssigen Konten
- Wie funktionieren CCB- und CCX-Lizenzen wirklich?
- Verstehen des DLAU-Tools und wie man es am besten nutzt
- Tipps für häufige Problembereiche, wie z. B. Team-Postfächer, Funktions-/Testbenutzer usw.
- Praxisbeispiele und Best Practices zum sofortigen Umsetzen
What is an RPA CoE? Session 1 – CoE VisionDianaGray10
In the first session, we will review the organization's vision and how this has an impact on the COE Structure.
Topics covered:
• The role of a steering committee
• How do the organization’s priorities determine CoE Structure?
Speaker:
Chris Bolin, Senior Intelligent Automation Architect Anika Systems
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift.pdfTosin Akinosho
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift
Overview
Dive into the world of anomaly detection on edge devices with our comprehensive hands-on tutorial. This SlideShare presentation will guide you through the entire process, from data collection and model training to edge deployment and real-time monitoring. Perfect for those looking to implement robust anomaly detection systems on resource-constrained IoT/edge devices.
Key Topics Covered
1. Introduction to Anomaly Detection
- Understand the fundamentals of anomaly detection and its importance in identifying unusual behavior or failures in systems.
2. Understanding Edge (IoT)
- Learn about edge computing and IoT, and how they enable real-time data processing and decision-making at the source.
3. What is ArgoCD?
- Discover ArgoCD, a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, and its role in deploying applications on edge devices.
4. Deployment Using ArgoCD for Edge Devices
- Step-by-step guide on deploying anomaly detection models on edge devices using ArgoCD.
5. Introduction to Apache Kafka and S3
- Explore Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and Amazon S3 for scalable storage solutions.
6. Viewing Kafka Messages in the Data Lake
- Learn how to view and analyze Kafka messages stored in a data lake for better insights.
7. What is Prometheus?
- Get to know Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, and its application in monitoring edge devices.
8. Monitoring Application Metrics with Prometheus
- Detailed instructions on setting up Prometheus to monitor the performance and health of your anomaly detection system.
9. What is Camel K?
- Introduction to Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built on Apache Camel, designed for Kubernetes.
10. Configuring Camel K Integrations for Data Pipelines
- Learn how to configure Camel K for seamless data pipeline integrations in your anomaly detection workflow.
11. What is a Jupyter Notebook?
- Overview of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application for creating and sharing documents with live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.
12. Jupyter Notebooks with Code Examples
- Hands-on examples and code snippets in Jupyter Notebooks to help you implement and test anomaly detection models.
The Microsoft 365 Migration Tutorial For Beginner.pptxoperationspcvita
This presentation will help you understand the power of Microsoft 365. However, we have mentioned every productivity app included in Office 365. Additionally, we have suggested the migration situation related to Office 365 and how we can help you.
You can also read: https://www.systoolsgroup.com/updates/office-365-tenant-to-tenant-migration-step-by-step-complete-guide/
Freshworks Rethinks NoSQL for Rapid Scaling & Cost-EfficiencyScyllaDB
Freshworks creates AI-boosted business software that helps employees work more efficiently and effectively. Managing data across multiple RDBMS and NoSQL databases was already a challenge at their current scale. To prepare for 10X growth, they knew it was time to rethink their database strategy. Learn how they architected a solution that would simplify scaling while keeping costs under control.
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/how-axelera-ai-uses-digital-compute-in-memory-to-deliver-fast-and-energy-efficient-computer-vision-a-presentation-from-axelera-ai/
Bram Verhoef, Head of Machine Learning at Axelera AI, presents the “How Axelera AI Uses Digital Compute-in-memory to Deliver Fast and Energy-efficient Computer Vision” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
As artificial intelligence inference transitions from cloud environments to edge locations, computer vision applications achieve heightened responsiveness, reliability and privacy. This migration, however, introduces the challenge of operating within the stringent confines of resource constraints typical at the edge, including small form factors, low energy budgets and diminished memory and computational capacities. Axelera AI addresses these challenges through an innovative approach of performing digital computations within memory itself. This technique facilitates the realization of high-performance, energy-efficient and cost-effective computer vision capabilities at the thin and thick edge, extending the frontier of what is achievable with current technologies.
In this presentation, Verhoef unveils his company’s pioneering chip technology and demonstrates its capacity to deliver exceptional frames-per-second performance across a range of standard computer vision networks typical of applications in security, surveillance and the industrial sector. This shows that advanced computer vision can be accessible and efficient, even at the very edge of our technological ecosystem.
Have you ever been confused by the myriad of choices offered by AWS for hosting a website or an API?
Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Amplify, S3 (and more!) can each host websites + APIs. But which one should we choose?
Which one is cheapest? Which one is fastest? Which one will scale to meet our needs?
Join me in this session as we dive into each AWS hosting service to determine which one is best for your scenario and explain why!
HCL Notes and Domino License Cost Reduction in the World of DLAUpanagenda
Webinar Recording: https://www.panagenda.com/webinars/hcl-notes-and-domino-license-cost-reduction-in-the-world-of-dlau/
The introduction of DLAU and the CCB & CCX licensing model caused quite a stir in the HCL community. As a Notes and Domino customer, you may have faced challenges with unexpected user counts and license costs. You probably have questions on how this new licensing approach works and how to benefit from it. Most importantly, you likely have budget constraints and want to save money where possible. Don’t worry, we can help with all of this!
We’ll show you how to fix common misconfigurations that cause higher-than-expected user counts, and how to identify accounts which you can deactivate to save money. There are also frequent patterns that can cause unnecessary cost, like using a person document instead of a mail-in for shared mailboxes. We’ll provide examples and solutions for those as well. And naturally we’ll explain the new licensing model.
Join HCL Ambassador Marc Thomas in this webinar with a special guest appearance from Franz Walder. It will give you the tools and know-how to stay on top of what is going on with Domino licensing. You will be able lower your cost through an optimized configuration and keep it low going forward.
These topics will be covered
- Reducing license cost by finding and fixing misconfigurations and superfluous accounts
- How do CCB and CCX licenses really work?
- Understanding the DLAU tool and how to best utilize it
- Tips for common problem areas, like team mailboxes, functional/test users, etc
- Practical examples and best practices to implement right away
How to Interpret Trends in the Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart.pdfChart Kalyan
A Mix Chart displays historical data of numbers in a graphical or tabular form. The Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart specifically shows the results of a sequence of numbers over different periods.
AppSec PNW: Android and iOS Application Security with MobSFAjin Abraham
Mobile Security Framework - MobSF is a free and open source automated mobile application security testing environment designed to help security engineers, researchers, developers, and penetration testers to identify security vulnerabilities, malicious behaviours and privacy concerns in mobile applications using static and dynamic analysis. It supports all the popular mobile application binaries and source code formats built for Android and iOS devices. In addition to automated security assessment, it also offers an interactive testing environment to build and execute scenario based test/fuzz cases against the application.
This talk covers:
Using MobSF for static analysis of mobile applications.
Interactive dynamic security assessment of Android and iOS applications.
Solving Mobile app CTF challenges.
Reverse engineering and runtime analysis of Mobile malware.
How to shift left and integrate MobSF/mobsfscan SAST and DAST in your build pipeline.
Driving Business Innovation: Latest Generative AI Advancements & Success StorySafe Software
Are you ready to revolutionize how you handle data? Join us for a webinar where we’ll bring you up to speed with the latest advancements in Generative AI technology and discover how leveraging FME with tools from giants like Google Gemini, Amazon, and Microsoft OpenAI can supercharge your workflow efficiency.
During the hour, we’ll take you through:
Guest Speaker Segment with Hannah Barrington: Dive into the world of dynamic real estate marketing with Hannah, the Marketing Manager at Workspace Group. Hear firsthand how their team generates engaging descriptions for thousands of office units by integrating diverse data sources—from PDF floorplans to web pages—using FME transformers, like OpenAIVisionConnector and AnthropicVisionConnector. This use case will show you how GenAI can streamline content creation for marketing across the board.
Ollama Use Case: Learn how Scenario Specialist Dmitri Bagh has utilized Ollama within FME to input data, create custom models, and enhance security protocols. This segment will include demos to illustrate the full capabilities of FME in AI-driven processes.
Custom AI Models: Discover how to leverage FME to build personalized AI models using your data. Whether it’s populating a model with local data for added security or integrating public AI tools, find out how FME facilitates a versatile and secure approach to AI.
We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A session where you can engage with our experts on your specific use cases, and learn more about optimizing your data workflows with AI.
This webinar is ideal for professionals seeking to harness the power of AI within their data management systems while ensuring high levels of customization and security. Whether you're a novice or an expert, gain actionable insights and strategies to elevate your data processes. Join us to see how FME and AI can revolutionize how you work with data!
Taking AI to the Next Level in Manufacturing.pdfssuserfac0301
Read Taking AI to the Next Level in Manufacturing to gain insights on AI adoption in the manufacturing industry, such as:
1. How quickly AI is being implemented in manufacturing.
2. Which barriers stand in the way of AI adoption.
3. How data quality and governance form the backbone of AI.
4. Organizational processes and structures that may inhibit effective AI adoption.
6. Ideas and approaches to help build your organization's AI strategy.
Digra 2017 keynote Playing Alternative Histories Mukherjee
1. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
‘Darmok’, Season 5 Episode 2, Star Trek: The Next Generation
No, I’m not insane (yet). It’s not the jet-lag. Or
a virus-corrupted slideshow.
4. What history? Whose history?
Perhaps in the
future there will be
some African
history to teach;
But at present
there is none …
Africa has
no history!
Indian society has no
history at all, at least no
known history. What
we call its history, is
but the history of the
successive intruders
India’s history is a
highly interesting
portion of British
History
5.
6. Colonial Cybertypes: Indians are just Indians!
Consider, for example, the history
of India as told by Age of Empires 3
which has Brahmin healers riding
elephants and an infantry comprised
of Rajputs, Gurkhas, and Sepoys. For
those not familiar with Indian
culture and history, this can be
misleading: the Sepoy, unlike the
Rajput and the Gurkha, is not an
ethnic community but the standard
name for a soldier in the East India
Company’s time. Finally, elephants
were traditionally used by the
warrior class or the Kshatriyas;
Brahmins, or the priestly class,
would seldom be seen near them
7. Colonial Cybertypes : ‘Virtual UnAustralia’
One of the more controversial aspects of Europa
Universalis II, which contributes to Australia’s popularity as
a destination for colonization, is the ease with which the
‘natives’ may be either exterminated or assimilated. […]
This native population is assimilated into the colony once it
has become a certain size, and the natives automatically
become productive citizens in the economic output of the
colonies’ economy. A peaceable native population can be
easily assimilated to create a large thriving colony without
having to allocate troops to protect the colonists. Australia
is a desirable colony in the game because it has a large and
peaceful native population. However, trying to set up a
colony or even a trading post in a province that has large
and aggressive native population will often lead to the
extermination of the colonists. This can be prevented by
stationing the colony with troops, as even the weakest
colonizing troops can usually defeat a large native army.
- (Tom Apperley ‘Virtual UnAustralia: Videogames and
Australia’s Colonial History’ 2006).
8. E.H Carr – ‘idle parlour games’
E.P. Thompson – ‘unhistorical shit’
Johan Huizinga – ‘The historian must [...] constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will
seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks
of the coup d'état of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed.’
Stephen Weber – ‘raise tough questions about things we think we know and […] suggest unfamiliar or uncomfortable
arguments about things we had best consider’
Niall Ferguson – ‘those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and
those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favour of computation’
(on videogames such as Civ and Empire Earth): ‘a crude caricature of the historical process’
Tom Apperley – ‘Europa Universalis II provides scope for players to articulate and explore their counterfactual imaginary.’
Adam Chapman – ‘These games’ function as counterfactual history is not entirely self-contained […] there are still
historiographical expectations that are more problematic.’
Counterfactual History and Historians
9. In Which Civilization is deeply hurtful to me:
Counterfactuality and the Persistence of Colonial
Stereotypes.
- Luke Plunkett in Kotaku.com, 2014
In later games this bug was obviously not an issue, but as a tribute/easter egg of sorts, parts of
his white-hot rage have been kept around. In Civilization V, for example, while Gandhi’s regular
diplomatic approach is more peaceful than other leaders, he’s also the most likely to go dropping
a-bombs when pushed. (Plunkett 2014)
[A]larming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing
as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal
palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to
parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. (Winston Churchill 1931)
10. Reverse colonialism in the Maratha victory over Europe: the code pure and simple is the fetishization of the imperial perspective.
The SAME LOGIC as THEIRS!
11. Enter Postcolonial History (re)Writing: The
Nationalist and the Subaltern
1. Nationality, nationalism. nativism: the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining.
In countries like Algeria and Kenya one can watch the heroic resistance of a community partly
formed out of colonial degradations, leading to a protracted armed and cultural conflict with
the imperial powers, in turn giving way to a one-party state with dictatorial rule. (Edward Said
1994)
2. Subaltern historiography involves ‘focusing on their blind-spots, silences and anxieties, these
historians seek to uncover the subaltern's myths, cults, ideologies and revolts that colonial and
nationalist elites sought to appropriate and conventional historiography has laid to waste by
their deadly weapon of cause and effect’ (Gyan Prakash 1992).
12. Bhagat Singh (Mitashi 2002) was a first-person shooter in the style of Doom and instead of
fighting monsters, the player would be shooting British colonial police officers.
13. Explanation of the narrative discontinuity between Nusantara Online's cutscene and the game itself lies in
understanding the cutscene as a unit operation of "playable" nationalism and disregarding its incongruity with the
game's narrative progression. The cutscene's narrative of invasions, as a unit operation, metaphorically indicates the
colonial domination that threatens the formation of an ideal Nusantara in the game realm. (Iskandar Zulkarnain 2014)
14. The hero of the game, Enzo Kori-Odan, is the
ruler of Zama - a diverse country free of an
imperialist past but now threatened by a coup.
The story centers around Enzo and his wife
Erine, and their fight to regain the throne. The
hero's power comes from the collective energy
of his ancestors, a force known as the Aurion.
(Patel 2016)
We have an advantage with our colonial past, in
that we can relate to people from different
countries. (Madibe Olivier, developer of Aurion)
15. Subaltern History
Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed
(a) a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist
histories of capital,
(b) a critique of the nation-form, and
(c) an interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge
(hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge).
(Dipesh Chakraborty 2000)
16. Playing Beyond the Archive(able): 80 Days There are also times we use fantasy to
enable us to tell the kind of story we wanted
to be able to tell, to redress some of the
colonialism, sexism and racism of the
period. If you’re inventing a world, why not
make it more progressive?
Why not have women invent half the
technologies, and pilot half the airships?
Why not shift the balance of power so that
Haiti rather than barely postbellum United
States is ascendant in the region? Why not
have a strong automaton-using Zulu
Federation avert the Scramble for Africa?
Why not have characters who play with
gender and sexuality without fear of reprisal?
History is full of women, and people of
colour, and queer people, and minorities.
That part isn’t fantasy - the fantastical bit in
our game is that they’re (often but not
always) allowed to have their own stories
without being silenced and attacked. That
their stories are not told as if they’re
exceptional.
(Meg Jayanth 2014)Inkle Studios 2013.
17. Playing Beyond the Archive(able): Sîochân Leat (aka The Irish Game)
“You’re playing the Irish,” she said. “You’ve already lost.” A
successful game meant that we lost the fewest amount of
game pieces possible—each piece represented thousands of
Irish people. The game began with each square of the board
holding two game pieces, one green figure and one white
figure.
During each turn, we placed an orange cube that represented
Cromwell’s army into one of the spaces, thus displacing the
Irish people (game pieces) onto other squares. Each square
could hold up to four figures, which demonstrated the tale of
the Irish losing their land and huddling together in
increasingly crowded areas. If no free spaces remained, we
placed the Irish figures off to one side of the board. These
figures, Brenda explained, would be shipped to Barbados to
serve as slaves. [...]
I wondered about how many families split up, how many lost
parents or children to slavery, and whether the English
officers felt any remorse for their actions. (Shannon Symonds
2013)
Brenda Romero 2009. The game is exhibited at The
Strong Museum of Play, NY.
It was a measure beneficial tthey said to
Ireland which was thus relieved of a
population that might trouble the Planters it
was a benefit to the people removed who
might thus be made English and Christians
and a great benefit to the West India sugar
planters who desired the men and boys for
their bondmen and the women and Irish girls
in a country where they had only Maroon
women and Negresses [sic] to solace them.
(J.P. Prendergast The Cromwellian Settlement
of Ireland 1868)
18. Set in an alternate reality post-colonial India,
the story follows a search for the mythical
city of Kayamgadh. According to the game’s
lore: “People of Kayamgadh do not speak.
They are afraid that their words might
penetrate the layers under which their
bodies are hidden. […]
As a comment on post-colonial nationalism,
Rituals reveals that fictions construct the
reality around us, while its mechanics show
that other people’s fictions can infect one’s
own sense of self.
(Jess Joho, KillScreen, 2014)
Playing Somewhere Beyond
the Archive(able)
19. Playing Alternative Histories
The historian must [...] constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to
permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks
of the coup d'état of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed.
- Johan Huizinga, “The Idea of History.” 1973.
Postcolonialism, History and Videogamese-mail:souvik.eng@presiuniv.ac.in tweet: @prosperoscell https://tinyurl.com/gamepoco
Editor's Notes
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Everyone here except diehard Star Trek fans is probably thinking that I am insane.
But I wanted to begin with these words from a rather strange episode of Star Trek where Captain Picard meets an alien spaceship captain who speaks to him in a language with familiar words but which remains incomprehensible despite the Enterprise’s universal translator machine.
After an almost deadly confrontation, Picard is able to figure out that the semantics in this alien language is not connected to individual words but to the knowledge of the entire history of the alien culture.
History, in the form of metaphor, serves as a language here. The episode serves
To remind us of the different ways in which history can be perceived
And tell us how this multiplicity of perceptions is important to comprehend what we think of as different, Othered, alien and even monstrous.
It is with these two points in mind that I have called my talk ‘Playing Alternative Histories’
Before I say more, however, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the organisers of DiGRA 2017, especially Marcus and team. I am also very grateful that we have been able to organize the first workshop on diversity at DiGRA, this year. Thank you William Huber for your support and of course, for chairing this session (and your very kind introduction).
I am extremely honoured to be addressing such an august gathering of videogame scholars from all over the world whose work I have much admired for many years now. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
As I said, my talk is called ‘Playing Alternative Histories’ and
In recent years, there has been some substantial research on videogames and history consisting of with seminal essays by William Urrichio, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Adam Chapman, Tom Apperley, Adrienne Shaw among others and these are just some examples of the publications.
One of the potential outcomes of such an engagement, one hopes. is that historians might find the videogame medium an increasingly interesting one to explore and link up with mainstream historical studies.
But then a slightly different question arises: Whose history? What history?
From the 19th c to the middle of the twentieth, we have these answers.
From James Mill in 1817 to Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 1950s, the history of some peoples of the world, those of the colonized nations, has been characterized by its absence and denial.
Maybe the game of history-making belongs to a select few in this world. The point now is whether we can replay it differently.
Of course, we have been playing games of empire for as long as one can remember. In fact Imperial historiography often seeks to be playful as is well reflected in the use of the ludic metaphor in describing the imperial contest of Britain and Russia as the Great Game or the British politician Lord Curzon’s comment that eastern nations are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.
The colonial fascination persists in newer boardgames like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan and not much has changed with the coming of videogames – if one is to go by the titles of some of them. And here I shall argue that a similar construction of history, with all its stereotyping, which I indicated in my previous slide also persists in the portrayal of colonial history in videogames.
Let me use my own ludic journey from India to Australia as an example of the colonial stereotypes that describe the ludic construction of colonial history.
Videogames that address a broader sweep of colonial history, such as the Age of Empire series (particularly Age of Empires 3), Rise of Nations (Big Huge Games 2003), Empire: Total War (Creative Assembly 2009), the Civilization series and a slew of other RTS games, often do so with equally problematic stereotypes. Consider, for example, the history of India as told by Age of Empires 3 which has Brahmin healers riding elephants and an infantry comprised of Rajputs, Gurkhas, and Sepoys. For those not familiar with Indian culture and history, this can be misleading: the Sepoy, unlike the Rajput and the Gurkha, is not an ethnic community but the standard name for a soldier in the East India Company’s time. The word itself comes from Sipahi or Sipah, which was a generic term for infantry soldiers in the Mughal and Ottoman armies. Finally, elephants were traditionally used by the warrior class or the Kshatriyas; Brahmins, or the priestly class, would seldom be seen near them.
[Consider, for example, the history of India as told by Age of Empires 3 (Ensemble Studios 2005). As Brian Reynolds, head of Big Huge Games, lays out the basic historical context he adds ‘one other fun detail [...] you may be aware that for religious reasons Indians do not consume cows and so forth, and so indeed they do not in the game’ (Butts 2007). Now, although Hindus do not eat beef, there are many other religious communities in India that do (the Mughal rulers who were Muslim would be a case in point for the particular historical setting of the game) so there is already a very problematic oversimplification going on here. Further, although the game features the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in one of its early missions and hints at the discontent against the East India Company, the colonial history of India is presented in a sanitised uniformity that views exploitation of resources in colonial India in the same light as perhaps one would see mining or farming in one’s home country. ]
Moving from India to Australia, Tom Apperley’s brilliant essay analyses how two separate videogames treat the colony:
[In the videogame Victoria] Australia is of little importance to Britain, as it produces no goods that are not already available from the home isles. Furthermore, the colony does not attract many settlers due the algorithm having a bias towards sending unoccupied population to the USA; this means that even as a self-governing dominion, Australia will remain a relative backwater with little industry or manpower to contribute to the Empire’s armies and economy.
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One of the more controversial aspects of Europa Universalis II, which contributes to Australia’s popularity as a destination for colonization, is the ease with which the ‘natives’ may be either exterminated or assimilated. […] Australia is a desirable colony in the game because it has a large and peaceful native population. However, trying to set up a colony or even a trading post in a province that has large and aggressive native population will often lead to the extermination of the colonists. This can be prevented by stationing the colony with troops, as even the weakest colonizing troops can usually defeat a large native army.
Both of the stereotypes in one way or another link the colonial rhetoric of the game is also linked to the game’s algorithm and code, its procedural rhetoric, as it were.
But with games we are aware of another scenario: beause these are games and they can be played differently the procedural rhetoric also implicitly comprises something else: the possibility of the Counterfactual, or in other words replaying history the way it didn’t happen.
Counterfactual history has been dismissed by eminent historians such as E.H. Carr and E.P. Thompson. Others, especially Niall Ferguson, have championed its cause. Ferguson describes two kinds of counterfactual history: “those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favour of computation” (Ferguson 1999). He also comments directly about videogames saying that the counterfactuality in them (picking out Civilization and Empire Earth especially) provides only a “crude caricature of the historical process” and that this is because they are profoundly unhistorical and because the cost of miscalculation is low.
Nevertheless, the plurality of videogames’ presentation of history is undeniable and indeed the very historical process has been characterized as plural and multiple by none other than Game Studies favourite historian, Johan Huizinga (although his work besides Homo Ludens is given less than due attention).
Even if one looks at the dominant discourse of counterfactual history in videogames, it seems to match the dominant discourse of colonial history. Let us take the (in)famous case of Gandhi in the Civilization series.
While this might seem to be fun for some people, this treatment of the entire history of India’s freedom movement and colonization is a violent erasure and although videogames often move away from the actual history, this seems singularly insensitive to a significant section of the world’s population who revere the figure and the ideals of Gandhi. Whether this deliberate reversal of the stereotype of Gandhi as the figure of peace and non-violence is also an expression of the colonial fear of the ‘Other’ is a moot question but one that has its historical antecedents. Winston Churchill had notoriously found “alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor” (Iggulden 2002). Churchill’s alarm seems to have been converted into the entirely non-Gandhian, very different and yet very current fear of India as a nuclear-capable nation. In Civilization’s version of history, not much has changed from the colonial times.
Niall Ferguson’s version of the counterfactual, incidentally, sees the Churchillian model as an ideal and imagines a continuation of the glory days of the British Empire. Even if it is counterfactual history, it tends to go the way of the erstwhile colonizers.
Of course, there is the other option where with mods and the exploitation of in-game possibility-spaces, history maybe replayed to show the colonized as the conquerors. In Darthmod’s version of Empire: Total War, here we have the Hindu Maratha Empire ruling over most of Europe. Does this not amount to a re-writing? A just response to colonial historiography?
Despite the plurality in the procedural logic of videogames, more often than not this plurality and counterfactuality does not reflect the historical plurality in the same way as Huizinga wants to describe it. Pace some of the earlier Game Studies claims, I am not sure that the ability to play out a counterfactual scenario of conquest represents a postcolonial history rewriting. If at all, then it is only one kind of postcolonial reaction – one that we see in contemporary jingoistic nationalism. Instead I argue, that the counterfactual history portrayed in Empire Total War is nothing but the vindication of the old logic and premise of Empire. Whether Britain colonises India as the East India Company or the Maratha Confederacy makes Britain part of its Hindu Empire, the logic is just the same. The British Empire making English the official language and a Hindu Empire banning the use of onions in your cooking – same thing, if you ask me!
Instead of playing against the grain, this is to play straight into the procedural rhetoric of empire and to the main imperialist world-historical agenda that Mill and the historians of the British Raj espoused. This is the logic that validates empire and nationalism but only with the players changed.
Alexander Galloway has noted that “'History' in Civilization is precisely the opposite of history, not because the game fetishizes the imperial perspective, but because the diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the synchronic homogeneity of code pure and simple” (2006: 102). The procedural logic that Galloway calls the opposite of history can be shown as resembling the logic of colonial historiography. So the question needs to be reframed: whose history is being referred to, who is to judge it and how? Historical verisimilitude and plurality notwithstanding, the empire-building RTS games are finally justifications for the logic of empire. The code pure and simple is the fetishization of the imperial perspective.
The question of plurality brings me to how history is being written in the postcolonial scenario – it is certainly quite different from Hegel, Marx and even Ferguson. Postcolonial theorists do not entirely eschew the idea of the nation: Fanon declares ‘[e]very native who takes up arms is a part of the nation which from henceforward will spring to life’ (Cheah 1999, 216). Fanon, however, understands the state as ‘merely the corporeal incarnation of the national spirit, for the nation-state is only a secondary institutional manifestation or by-product of national consciousness’ (Cheah 1999). This is not how the nation-state functions after the end of colonialism, as Said warns:
Nationality, nationalism. nativism: the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining. In countries like Algeria and Kenya one can watch the heroic resistance of a community partly formed out of colonial degradations, leading to a protracted armed and cultural conflict with the imperial powers, in turn giving way to a one-party state with dictatorial rule. (Said 1994, 303)
In a sense, then, as Partha Chatterjee argues ‘‘in the Third World, anticolonial cultural nationalism is the ideological discourse used by a rising but weak indigenous bourgeoisie to co-opt the popular masses into its struggle to wrest hegemony from the colonial regime, even as it keeps the masses out of direct participation in the governance of the postcolonial state’’ (Chatterjee 1986, 168-9). As Said and Chatterjee point out, such nationalist agenda effectively replicates its roots in imperialist notions of the nation-state. Postcolonial history is not about replicating the imperialist logic of conquest and expansion.
Speaking about the postcolonial historians’ enterprise, Gyan Prakash states that their historiography involves ‘focusing on their blind-spots, silences and anxieties, these historians seek to uncover the subaltern's myths, cults, ideologies and revolts that colonial and nationalist elites sought to appropriate and conventional historiography has laid to waste by their deadly weapon of cause and effect’ (Prakash 1992).
In a similar light to the rewriting of postcolonial histories, it will be intriguing to see how the nascent videogame industries of the formerly colonized countries across the world have been portraying their own histories, or if at all. Three games from India, Indonesia and Cameroon will serve as indicative case studies of games portraying national history.
Incidentally, one of the first videogames made in the country had a post-colonial, or rather an anti-colonial theme: coming in the wake of the numerous films based on Bhagat Singh, the Indian revolutionary who attempted to assassinate a British viceroy, Bhagat Singh (Mitashi 2002) was a first-person shooter in the style of Doom and instead of fighting monsters, the player would be shooting British colonial police officers.
The game, is "technically wanting in many ways” (Mukherjee 2015b, 237) but it remains one of the earliest examples of presenting an anticolonial take on history, albeit perhaps an unwitting one. In any case, though, it still ties into strong nationalist notions of history-writing toeing the populist political line and following the lead of the Bollywood entertainment industry (which was producing multiple Bhagat Singh themed films at the time).
The next example is Nusantara Online (Telegraph Studio 2009) from Indonesia. The game was launched by Indonesia’s President Yudhiono and described as the “product of the nation’s sons and daughters” (Rakhmani and Darmawan 2015, 257). Nusantara in the Indonesian context means “the other islands”, or a pre-nation-state and pre-colonial mythical place where the player gets to interact with the histories of the Majapahit empire and two other kingdoms that flourished in the region in the fourteenth century. Players take part in missions loosely related to the history (and myths) of these kingdoms taking on bandits and demons. In the cutscenes, however, the narrative is different: it is one of the lost glory of Nusantara and it includes foreign invaders such as the Dutch and the Tatars.
Iskander Zulkarnain observes,
Explanation of the narrative discontinuity between Nusantara Online's cutscene and the game itself lies in understanding the cutscene as a unit operation of "playable" nationalism and disregarding its incongruity with the game's narrative progression. The cutscene's narrative of invasions, as a unit operation, metaphorically indicates the colonial domination that threatens the formation of an ideal Nusantara in the game realm. (Zulkarnain 2014)
The absence of the foreign powers from the actual gameplay is described by Zulkarnain as part of the procedural rhetoric of “playable nationalism” envisaged by the game’s programmers. The Indonesia they present is one that is an “unadulterated” Nusantara where players get a “pure” experience of nationhood that the contemporary independent Indonesia also seeks. Nevertheless, the traces of colonial domination remain, arguably as uncomfortable voices even in the history of the origins of Indonesia and its golden age.
Africa’s first-ever indigenously developed roleplaying game, Aurion: Legacy of Kori Odan (Kiro’o Games 2016), has recently been developed in Cameroon through funding from a Kickstarter campaign. The plot involves an African hero and an African context:
The hero of the game, Enzo Kori-Odan, is the ruler of Zama - a diverse country free of an imperialist past but now threatened by a coup. The story centers around Enzo and his wife Erine, and their fight to regain the throne. The hero's power comes from the collective energy of his ancestors, a force known as the Aurion. (Patel 2016)
Interestingly, Aurion, like Nusantara avoids directly addressing the imperialist past of African nations. Cameroon itself was colonized by the Germans, the British and the French. Another similarity is that Aurion , too, is about harking back to the energy of the ancestors and by implication to a mythical past. Madiba Olivier, the developer, describes the difficulty in creating the game because of the economic challenges and repeated power-cuts – both quite symbolic of postcolonial problems. Intriguingly, despite the game’s apparent disconnect with colonial history, Olivier announces that “we have an advantage with our colonial past, in that we can relate to people from different countries” (Ibid.).
In the nationalist histories these games create, while there is an attempt at counterfactual history with the victory of heroes such as Bhagat Singh against colonialism, quite often the engagement with colonialism remains elided and unarticulated. It is this entity that is voiceless and other that is addressed by the term ‘subaltern’.
The origin of subaltern studies in postcolonial historiography was the work of South Asian historians such as Ranajit Guha. Following in their footsteps, Dipesh Chakrabarty outlines the main principles of reading and writing history in this way, thus:
Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed (a) a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, (b) a critique of the nation-form, and (c) an interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge). (Chakraborty 2000)
Guha alleges that the archive, hitherto held sacrosanct, is constructed by the colonial powers and the local elite – for example the official records of the peasant insurgencies in colonial India were produced by the counter-insurgency measures of the ruling classes, armies and police. Prakash’s stress of focusing on silences, blind spots and the suppressed voices in the understanding of colonial history speaks well to the concerns of subaltern studies.
To discuss this historiography beyond the archive, especially in its colonial framework, I will use three rather ludic examples.
My second example is a game called Siochan Leat (pronounced Shiocon Lath) – I first came across this game in a talk by Casey O’Donnell in 2012 and it has made a deep impression. The game was made by Brenda Romero and is about the colonization of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell’s troops. Let me tell you a little about this game and how it represents the history of those rendered voiceless in the colonial archives.
Studio Oleomingus’s indie game Somewhere makes a conscious inclusion of the ideas of subaltern historiography. Dhruv Jani, the designer, is aware of the problems of articulating the history of the colonized through the historical archive and apparatus of the colonizer. Hence, he takes recourse to the magic realism and multiplicity of Borges and Calvino trying to link it with his perceptions of the colonial in Narayan, Kipling, Manto and Forster. Jani, in trying to construct a historical fiction, ends up in the region magical realism. Because the history if it is ever written, will always already be rewritten and unwritten. Because the history remains plural.
I am almost done – thank you for hearing me out so patiently – and I need to add that there are many more games that I could have used as examples, also the Assassin’s Creed games (despite some of the problems that have been highlighted by Sisler and Shaw). I would be very happy to talk about them during this conference and I have already written about them elsewhere as well as in my forthcoming book, the flyers for which you might have seen outside.
Plurality of history
I started with my anecdote of the Darmok episode in Star Trek. One of the reasons was to address the plurality of the historical process itself and the other was to recognize the need to admit those unheard voices existing outside the archives created by hegemonic frameworks.
Although, many of them end up replicating and upholding stereotypes and established power-structures, there is always the Othered voice that emerges as yet an-Other possibility. Videogames can be very effective tools in exploring these spaces of possibility, of hearing the voices that have been silent or those that are different. Depends on what our focus is. I’m not making a case for subaltern history here - I’m advocating the recognition of the plurality of history and how it can be represented via the plurality of the videogame, instead of replaying stereotypes and closing off the more playful aspects of history.
Thank you ever so much for listening. I welcome your comments and queries either here or via email or twitter. I have written about videogames and postcolonialism at length in my book of the same name. In case you are interested, there is more info here (link) and flyers outside with discount codes.
Thank you again.