Books Read In 2014

  1. Breathing Machine, A Memoir of Computers by Leigh Alexander
  2. Clipping Through: One Mad Week In Video Games by Leigh Alexander
  3. And Eternity by Piers Anthony
  4. vN by Madeline Ashby
  5. The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
  6. The Boss by Abigail Barnette
  7. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
  8. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolano
  9. Fetish Sex: A Complete Guide to Sexual Fetishes by Violet Blue
  10. Borges On Writing by Jorge Luis Borges
  11. It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd
  12. The High Druid's Blade: The Defenders of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  13. Witch Wraith: The Dark Legacy of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  14. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
  15. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  16. The Divine Comedy by Dante
  17. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  18. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  19. How To Read A Poem by Terry Eagleton
  20. A Case Of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud
  21. The Fear Of An Illusion by Sigmund Freud
  22. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
  23. Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry by Clinton Heylin
  24. Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
  25. Devilish by Maureen Johnson
  26. Critique Of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
  27. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil
  28. Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  29. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
  30. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  31. The Trial And Death Of Socrates by Plato
  32. Rouge Code by Mark Russinovich
  33. Trojan Horse by Mark Russinovich
  34. Zero Day by Mark Russinovich
  35. Dimension Of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
  36. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
  37. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
  38. Influx by Daniel Suarez
  39. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves by Jill Walker Rettberg
  40. The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil Degrasse Tyson
  41. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil Degrasse Tyson
  42. Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut by Kurt Vonnegut
  43. Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by Melanie Warner
  45. A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
  46. Come To Our Show: Punk Show Flyers From DC To Down Under

Books Read In 2013

  1. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
  2. For Love Of Evil by Piers Anthony
  3. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
  4. Bloodfire Quest by Terry Brooks
  5. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
  6. Homeland by Cory Doctorow
  7. Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow
  8. Falling Man by Don Delillo
  9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  10. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Carolyn Maddux
  11. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
  12. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
  13. And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life by Charles Shields
  14. Freedom by Daniel Suarez
  15. Kill Decision by Daniel Duarez
  16. In Defense of Terror: Liberty or Death in The French Revolution by Sophie Wahnich
  17. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
  18. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
  19. Conversations With David Foster Wallace
  20. Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner
  21. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities Anthology

Books Read In 2012

  1. Being A Green Mother by Piers Anthony
  2. The Tent by Margaret Atwood
  3. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  4. Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort
  5. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
  6. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  7. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
  8. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
  9. The Mind of Italo Calvino by Dan Cavallaro
  10. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin
  11. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
  12. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
  13. Crossed by Ally Condie
  14. Noir by Robert Coover
  15. Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
  16. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow
  17. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue
  18. Football The First Hundred Years The Untold Story by Adrian Harvey
  19. My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles
  20. The Map & The Territory by Michel Houllebecq
  21. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard
  22. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
  23. Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James
  24. Fifty Shades Freed by E. L. James
  25. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
  26. The Life & Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson
  27. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
  28. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
  29. The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason
  30. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
  31. Batman The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
  32. Batman Year One by Frank Miller
  33. Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  34. Paradise Lost by John Milton
  35. Batman-The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
  36. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
  37. The Watchmen by Alan Moore
  38. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabakov
  39. King Lear by William Shakespeare
  40. Authors In Context: Virginia Woolf by Michael Whitworth
  41. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
  42. The Quran (Sher Ali Holy translation)
  43. Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
  44. The Tel Quel Reader

Books Read 2011

  1. Beowulf & Other English Poems
  2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  3. Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
  4. With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
  5. Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
  6. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  7. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
  8. Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
  9. Incidents by Roland Barthes
  10. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
  11. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
  12. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  13. High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
  14. High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
  15. The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
  16. Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
  17. Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
  18. The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
  19. Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
  20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  21. Matched by Ally Condie
  22. Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
  23. Makers by Cory Doctorow
  24. With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
  25. Ten Plays by Euripides
  26. Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
  27. H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
  28. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
  29. The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
  30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  31. Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
  32. New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
  33. Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
  34. Piers Plowman by William Langland
  35. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  36. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
  37. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
  38. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
  39. Plato-Euthyphro
  40. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
  41. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
  42. Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
  43. Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
  45. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  46. The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf

Position Paper #8

William P. Wend
Position Paper #8
Dr. Rettberg
4/2/06

    Jesper Juul's, in his article Introduction To Game Time, begins by stating that there hasn't been much discussion of theory of time in games.  Juul argues that games “engage in a kind of pretense play” (Juul 131).  By this Juul means that the player is playing as two different persona: the gamer plays as themselves and as someone in the world the game being played resides in.  This is what Juul calls game time.  Game time can be described further as “a duality of play timei and event timeii” (131).  Play time and event time, Juul continues, have a different relationship in different kinds of games.  An action game like Contra takes place in real time.  Strategy games, like Axis & Allies, and Simulation games, like Sim City, often speed up time or allow the player to change the speed of time or stop it all together. In Final Fantasy Tactics a battle will continue to happen but wait until the player inputs commands for his soldiers to proceed. While waiting, rain will continue to fall, players will move in place, and time will not pass even though there is still action on the screen.

    The player, Juul argues, takes on the duel role he refers to when discussing pretense play.  Juul uses the example of Tomb Raider.  When playing Tomb Raider, the gamer is hitting X, square, and the other buttons on the Playstation controller but they are also moving Lara Croft across the screen while doing so.  This is, according to Juul, a much more direct interaction than how a reader would interact with a text or a viewer would watch a DVD. 

    Juul continues by discussing how game time can be used to examine the history of a game.  Adventures games allow the gamer to explore a world in a “coherent” time (132). An action game like Contra allows the gamer to move from levels, or worlds, that aren't connected to the next level in various ways. 

    In the next part of Juul's essay he explicates the differences between play time and event time. Play time “denotes the time span taken to play a game” (132). In a game like Tetris, Juul argues, time moves forward in a straight line.  Event time can be described as the duel role the game takes on while playing a game.  The gamer is “themself” and Lara Croft at the same time.  When the gamer hits X on their controller Ms. Croft reacts on the screen in another world taking place at the same time. 

    Not all games have only play time or event time.  Juul notes that Sim City has both play time and event time.  When I play Sim City on my Super Nintendo a series of commercial buildings are built instantly. Within minutes businesses move in, leave, and build bigger, more powerful, businesses.  While only a minute or two has passed in the gamer's world, in the city created for Sim City weeks or months, depending on the speed of time change the gamer has set, have passed. 

    Juul describes play and event time's relationship as “mapping” (134).  The gamer's input are projected into the world in which the game takes place.  When I push A on my Super Nintendo controller a commercial area is placed on the screen.  This happens in both the “now” which takes place in my world and the “now” that takes place in the world of my created city.  In Sim City, as noted before, I choose how play and event time relate to each other by picking how fast or slow time progresses.  I choose how quickly a game maps to event time. 

    Juul's theories about game time can also be applied to literature as well.  When discussing pretense play I have to disagree with Juul about the lack of direct interaction while reading a text.  While sitting on your bed reading Harry Potter isn't all that interactive, hypertext fiction and other forms of hypertext are.  When reading These Waves Of Girls the reading is directly interacting with the text in front of them. The reader reads a page, but then the story does not progress until they click on another link to move to more of the story.  In essence, this is much like the rain continuing to fall in Final Fantasy Tactics.  The story is paused until the reader, or gamer, decides what their next move, whether using a spell or clicking a link, is. 

    Literature can progress at the same elongated speed described from Sim City.  If the reader is reading Piers Anthony's For Love Of Evil, which takes place over about 800 years or so, time moves at the whim of the author.  However, time can also move quickly if the reader reads the entire book in one sitting, or slowly if over a bunch of sittings. The reader cannot, however, change the actual time within the book. 

    Mapping also takes place when reading.  When reading interactive fiction like Book & Volume the reader types in a command.  She inputs “walk north.” Her typing happens in real time alongside the action on the screen, where the user controlled character in the game walks south towards a Starbucks. 

    Games like Contra, which allow the gamer to move from level to level that are barely or not at all related, don't have a lot to do with anything literary. It could be argued, potentially, that Contra is much like a series of non-related short stories, like Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths.  Borges' short stories take place in starkly different and vast worlds much like Contra's nine levels are very different.  I'm not so sure how good this argument is however. When I played Contra last night it didn't feel, even in the vaguest terms, literary. 

i Play time is described by Juul as “the time the player takes to play” (131). 

ii Event time is described by Juul as “the time taken in the game world” (131).