Critical Mass

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A group of faculty from the University of Florida has issued the following call for papers:

Call for Papers: Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology

Editors Sidney I. Dobrin, Cathlena Martin, and Laurie Taylor seek proposals for a new collection of original articles that address the use and place of space and ecology in video games. This collection will examine video games in terms of the spaces they create and use, the metaphors of space on which they rely, and the ecologies that they create within those spaces. This collection will address the significant intersections in terms of how and why video games construct space and ecology as they do, and in terms of how those constructions shape conceptions of both space and ecology.

The editors seek proposals for innovative papers that explore the intersections between ecocriticism, theories of spatiality, and video games. Ecocriticism of video games straddles studying ecology as the Earth (or alternate world setting), nature, and land, while adding physical representation and experimentation through video game spaces and other technological spaces. These video games spaces create their own spatial practice through their representation and through the players' lived interaction with the gaming environments as constructed worlds. Video game spatial analysis comprises the created representation of space in the games, the players' experiences with those spaces, and the nuances by which those spaces are constructed and conveyed, including their portrayal of cultural norms for space and spatiality. In addition, the editors are looking for several papers that specifically address children's culture and education in terms of video games, space, and ecology.

Editors seek contributions which explore and initiate conversations using the triple lens of ecology, space, and video games about areas that may, but will not necessarily, pertain to:

* Role of imaginary space in video games
* Implications of Soja’s Thirdspace and other spatial theories on video games
* Artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL) and the creation of artificial ecologies
* Games specifically designed for education about ecological concerns, places, or uses (Oregon Trail, free online games)
* Over-all ecological educational/conceptual effect of video games
* Environment in video games and how it is constructed spatially and rhetorically
* Relationship of the players to the game worlds arenas, landscapes, cities, and worlds
* Rhetorical effect of nostalgic and romantic representations of nature
* How video games effect eco literacies
* Rhetorical effect of architecture and the creation of game spaces
* Function of utopian and dystopian World Constructions
* Creation of communities within artificial lands (often in MMORPGs, like Everquest homes and communities)
* Ecologies of play: evolutionary change and progression (powerups and enemy progression in relation to evolutionary models); cycle of life and death and the disruption of that cycle with re-play
* Game creatures / anthropomorphism; cyborgs / cloning
* Relationship of science and nature (control in games like Zoo Tycoon, science as a perversion of nature sci-fi games)
* Analysis of ecolological tropes: mastery or control of nature (SIMCITY and the natural disasters as the opponent; land as something to be controlled and colonized in Civilization)
* Cultural construction of nature (prevalence of post apocalyptic worlds in Japanese games like Final Fantasy)
* Virtual zoos viewing and capturing 'nature' (photographs of alien creatures in Beyond Good and Evil, capturing creatures in Pokemon)
* Intersections of eco-theories and visual rhetoric as portrayed in video games
* Historical representations of physical spaces and its relationship to the cultural definitions of those spaces (Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor)

Some of the following questions may help in orienting essays, but they should not be limited by these questions:

* What role does the physical setting play in the plot of the video game is it interactive, is the space helpful, is the space important in terms of game play or game narrative, or is it just a blank space on which the game is played?
* How is nature represented in video games or a particular video game?
* For the symbolic construction of species, how do games define human and nonhuman?
* Are the values expressed in the video game consistent with ecologiocal wisdom?
* Do different genres treat nature in different ways that are consistent within those genres? Are there stereotypes within games that relate to nature?
* How are the nature and technology represented narratively and spatially in video games - what are the implications of this?

Notably absent from the questions above: "What does an essay collection on the ecology of video games have to do with the discipline of English?" and "Why is this study originating from within an English department?"

Hat tip: Jonathan Winkler

Columbine moment

Last Friday, a twelve-year-old Virginia boy chose to commemorate the last day of school by expressing his anger at how other kids treated him. Outraged at how he had been teased about his weight, his glasses, and his clothes, he brought several guns with him to school. His mother, a school cafeteria worker who drove him to school that morning, saw the guns but did not ask her son about them. Later that day, the boy retrieved the guns from his mother's car. Dressed in full camouflage and wearing a red bandanna over his face, he walked into the principal's office with a loaded shotgun and ordered everyone to get down. They did.

While the boy roamed the halls of the school, the school went into lockdown and police were summoned, following nationwide procedures devised after the Columbine shootings. They stormed the building, and subdued the boy before anyone was hurt. Things could well have turned out differently: The boy and and several friends had been planning a violent takeover of the school, with the aim of hurting or even killing those who had been mean to them. But at the last minute, the boy's principal accomplice backed out and he was left to terrorize the school alone. The accomplice has since been charged with conspiracy to possess firearms on school property. The boy himself has been charged with possession of a firearm by a minor, use of a firearm in commission of a felony, conspiracy to commit abduction for money and conspiracy to commit murder. He is being held without bail. His mother, who did not know of the plot, has been charged with possession of a weapon on school property.

Stories like this one are becoming archetypal. We have heard so many of them by now; parallel episodes at other schools in other places are reported seemingly constantly in the papers. And some of the most influential narrators of our time are recognizing this. Say what you will about Michael Moore and his fast-and-looseness with facts in Bowling for Columbine, the man saw an archetypal story in the making, and in his film he made a powerful bid to be the guy who tells us what the archetype ultimately means.

Moore is not alone, though. Francine Prose, the novelist who brought us Blue Angel, a chilling tale of how so-called progressive campus policies on sexual harassment recreate a punitively neo-Puritanical campus culture, has recently turned to teen fiction in order to meditate on the Orwellian character of post-Columbine schools' safety measures. After is well worth reading, not for its literary value, but for its historical interest as a document seeking to comment constructively on how the phenomenon of school shootings is reshaping--and at points misshaping--the terms upon which kids today grow up.

Where Moore's film argues that America's love affair with guns predisposes disgruntled kids to try to solve their problems with guns, Prose's novel argues that the post-Columbine preventive measures instituted by schools across the country--the metal detectors, the random searches, the surveillance cameras, the pervasive atmosphere of distrust and suspicion--pose their own very real threat to kids' freedom and wellbeing.

Both Moore and Prose are seeking to shape an emerging, recurring pattern into some semblance of meaning. As mythmakers--and Moore is much more in the business of telling viscerally powerful stories than in making objective comments--both see in school shootings the outlines of an archetype for our moment. Both recognize that school shootings are fast becoming a defining event in our age, and both are, in the earnestly aggressive manner of the fabulists they are, eager to define what that event will come to mean to us. They are aware that above and beyond the practical problems schools face when confronted with preventing and managing violence, there looms the problem of what it all means--or, to be more precise, of what we are going to decide, collectively, that it means. What we say about school shootings, after all, says a lot about us.

I'm interested in readers' thoughts--on the Virginia case, on the larger phenomenon of school shootings, on the related phenomenon of school safety programs, and on the ways and means artists and commentators are working to frame our understanding of it all. Comments are welcome.

Entrance requirements

Should colleges conduct criminal background checks on new students? The University of North Carolina is considering doing just that after a two UNC-Wilmington students were killed by fellow students (one was shot to death by an ex-boyfriend, another was raped and strangled by a friend). Both murderers lied on their applications when asked whether they had criminal records, the one concealing a prior conviction for felony sexual assault, the other concealing a misdemeanor conviction for larceny. The question is being debated here.

Offensive language

There is a very fun discussion at Blind Cave Fish and Sheila O'Malley's about words one hates. Not words that mean hateful things, necessarily, but words whose sheer phonetic misshapenness repels us. The lists are wonderful, full of both oddly idiosyncratic peeves ("the word 'scone' makes me uncomfortable," quoth one reader; others cite "moist" and "slacks") and widely held but hitherto unacknowledged ones ("dungarees," "cooch," "smegma"). Since this site so frequently deals with the topic of offensive language, it seems only appropriate to join in. I've made a very restrained list below. Readers are welcome to add their own. And when this game tires, we'll list our favorite words.

A short list of words I sincerely dislike, in no particular order:

phlegm
impacting
culottes
utilize
problematize
homogenize
mojo
pinny
horny
segue
downward dog (love the pose though)
sherbet
eyeball
deconstruct
goober
bap
quickie
buckaroo
pussy (I say this without reference to connotation: this word is a phonetic disaster, and would be hideous even if it only ever referred to actual cats)

Comments are open. Slainte.

Religious liberty 101

San Diego school administrators have engaged in viewpoint discrimination against a student, and now they are being sued for it.

Chase Harper, a sophomore in the Poway Unified School district, was offended when his school recently participated in the "Day of Silence," a national event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. GLSEN describes Day of Silence as “an annual, national student-led effort in which participants take a vow of silence to peacefully protest the discrimination and harassment faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth in schools.” About 300,000 school kids participate in the event each year. According to Harper and his lawyers, the school sponsored the event and administrators worked with the Gay-Straight Alliance, a student group, to coordinate it.

To protest his school's promotion of a viewpoint he, as a Christian, finds immoral, Harper commemorated the Day of Silence by coming to school in a homemade t-shirt protesting homosexuality. The next day, he did so again, wearing a shirt bearing the words “Be Ashamed” and “Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned” on the front, and reading “Homosexuality is Shameful” and “Romans 1:27” on the back. That's when the trouble began.

Harper's Christian friends warned him to lose the shirt, but he wouldn't. When school administrators found out about it, they attempted to "counsel" him into taking it off. A vice principal advised him that, in Harper's words, “When I come to school, I leave my faith in the car, and you should leave your faith in the car when it might offend others.” The principal initially told Harper that the problem was that he wore a homemade t-shirt to school, but he quickly came clean about what the real issue was: "It wouldn’t have mattered whether it was homemade or not," Harper reports him saying. "It’s your viewpoint that you’re expressing on your T-shirt that is offensive and inflammatory.” When Harper refused to remove the shirt, he was suspended.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group dedicated to defending religious liberty, filed suit in federal court on June 2, alleging that Harper's First Amendment rights were violated when he was suspended for wearing a shirt that expressed his view that homosexuality is a sin. The ADF contends that when the school told Harper he was not allowed to bring his religious beliefs about homosexuality to school with him, it violated his constitutionally protected right to religious freedom.

It looks like the school's defense is going to be that the shirt was harassing, that it created an unsafe environment, and that it therefore was not protected speech. While the school is not commenting on the case, it has supplied the media with copies of its policies on "hate behavior," free speech, and acceptable dress. These, in turn, look like they may not be constitutional. Jordan Budd, the legal director for the San Diego ACLU, explained it to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Poway High's dress code, which is given to each student at the beginning of the year, states that unacceptable dress includes clothing that promotes or portrays "violence or hate behavior including derogatory connotations directed toward sexual identity."

The district's policy on freedom of speech and expression recognizes students' rights to express ideas and opinions through their speech, writing and clothing, but cautions against anything that would "incite students so as to create a clear and present danger . . . of unlawful acts . . . or of the substantial disruption (of school)."

Jordan Budd, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego, said Harper's case may have merit. "The school district is not empowered to censor based on what they deem inflammatory, it has to be based on a constitutional standard."

As long as Chase's T-shirt did not substantially disrupt activities, he had a right to express his political or religious beliefs, said Budd. He said the T-shirt could not be construed as harassment because harassment has to be directed against a particular individual.

This one seems like a slam dunk. If a public school wants to get into the business of promoting certain political and ideological viewpoints--which it should not be doing, even in the name of tolerance--it should recognize that there will be some students who disagree with the school-sponsored party line. For the school not to grasp that it is out of line when it officially sponsors something like a Day of Silence, and for the school to compound that problem by punishing students who are unwilling to be herded into viewpoints that compromise their beliefs, shows either a lamentable lack of administrative savvy, a disturbing ignorance of the law, or a deplorable lack of ethics. Whatever the case, it seems clear that the school crossed the line when it told Harper that it would not tolerate his protest.

It is not necessary to agree with Harper, or to like the way he chose to express his views, to see that what the school did was wrong. The irony of the case--that the school's attempt to promote mutual tolerance was really nothing of the kind, that its so-called promotion of tolerance was in fact an attempt to impose belief--is so rich that it hardly needs stating.

UPDATE: Alex Carnevale disagrees with me, citing as his reason, "Homosexuality is not a sin. Period." But I am not arguing that homosexuality is a sin (not being a religious person, I don't think in terms of sin to begin with; more to the point, I don't have the least problem with same-sex attraction). What I am arguing: that Harper has a right to believe that homosexuality is sinful, and that he also has a right to express that belief.

Virgin territory

An English university student is auctioning off his virginity. It looks like it will go for around $11,000 at the current exchange rate. That should help with the tuition, and then some: Bournemouth University costs £1125; per year.