October 3, 2014

Today

1) Reminders and OMG! Grades! 2) Baudrillard: what he said3) Baudrillard: What he meant4) Discussion: So that could mean…5) Play: Mafia!

Long about November…I’d like to take a couple of days in November– a Saturday and a Sunday– to play some Dungeons & Dragons. How many of you could make it for several hours on either November 8th or 9th? Email me if you want in.

also…During finals week, I was thinking we might meet at Arcade Legacy in Cincy. Is there interested in spending a little money (probably $6-10 a head) to geek out for an afternoon/evening? Email me if you’re in.

Beatdown Time:On the 17th: we Smash Bros. And work in class while not smashing.

Class vote: 3DS version (if people can bring/share systems) or Wii?

Jean Baudrillard:SIMULATIONS

Voila: le Baudrillard:Baudrillard was a French sociologist/theorist. He’s best known for his contributions to post-structuralism. He left us in 2007. RIP.

From the reading:“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory…today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.”

What?

“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frxvwSrertY&feature=youtu.be

“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. ”

So what Baudrillard is saying is that we cannot see the “real.” We see simulations, replicas that are a step or two or three or eight or fifty from “real.”

Real, though, is pretty much gone to us. We will never be able to see through all the signs to understand real.

Not Baudrillard

Not Baudrillard

How is this useful to us as we study games?

For next Wednesday

Read the gender related readings on the schedule.

In class, we will talk games and culture.