[Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

[Greg Mcverry]

Mike,

Minecarft is a fascinating world in that it builds the modular puzzle like
thinking necessary for coding.

I agree it is all child directed. The average 12 year old in the US now
watches more minutes of "play with me" videos on YouTube than TV. Meaning
they just watch other people play games then play games themselves.

I think though much of the minecraft work is the the same identity work
kids did through play. The number of Minecraft players who move beyond the
survival or play modes and start running servers and making mods is
relatively small.

Most of the narratology happening is not too complex.

Also as Minecraft went mainstream the need to hack at solutions dwindled.
It now comes pre-packaged on any mobile device. Not necessarily a bad thing
and as you noted the child directed play is too often a short commodity.

The identity work of Minecraft however is not in short as a commodity. The
marketing, toys, and branding have taken root whereas when I was a kid the
identity work being done in gaming and mod communities was more subversive.
The activity of the others.

In many ways I see this as the state of much technology and the web. It was
built by people figuring out how to do identity work from the outside but
the processes they created have been packaged and this identity work is now
being sold to children.



On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:44 PM mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Greg-- What do you make of the minecraft world? I know a lot of kids that
> love to play it (and adults who
> think they are wasting their time). What has impressed me is how little
> live adult co-presence is needed for a group of kids to develop pretty high
> level skills (the adult is behind the code, somewhere, of course).
>
> I ask both because minecraft appears as an issue in places I inhabit and
> because one of the reasons live adults give if they think it is a good
> activity for kids is that it is a pathway into the world of coding.
>
> I liked the poem as well. Thanks for that.
> mike
>
> (Martin does his flushing in Bogota, Annalisa; perhaps that accounts for
> the poor advice).
>
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Greg Mcverry <jgregmcverry@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends
> to
> > be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
> >
> > I think this is  a stereotype, a specialized set of discourse practices,
> > and a reflection of gender inequity among coders.
> >
> > Nobody learns to code. You can just copy and paste better than the next
> > gal. It takes a long time to generate original code.
> >
> > I am a self taught....actually community taught...the auto-didactic coder
> > is a myth. I have been involved in a variety of open source projects in
> the
> > last few years as a non-technical contributor.
> >
> > Yet every project I get involved in, I learn a little bit more. Right now
> > its just html/css/javascript but its always a little bit more than I knew
> > yesterday.
> >
> > There are amazing and really inclusive places to reach out and learn how
> to
> > code or markup webpages.
> >
> > On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:21 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Thanks Martin and Greg,
> > >
> > > Um... first things first. I never do the paint thinner down the toilet
> > > thing. I actually make an appointment with the waste management
> > department
> > > on Saturdays and drive it in. Do they not have such a thing for you,
> > Martin?
> > >
> > > And, I love your poem Greg. Just because computers "think"
> > algorithmically
> > > doesn't mean we do. Humans first! :) And Humanities first (too!)
> > >
> > > As much as code is a stinky affair for some of us non-STEMers, there is
> > > something to be said of occupying the codebases. I don't mean github or
> > > reddit, as I'm not a masochist.
> > >
> > > However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends
> > to
> > > be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic
> stalinists.
> > I
> > > myself have tried to teach myself to code more times than I can count,
> > and
> > > it still eludes me! If I had the right teacher, I'd do some great
> things
> > > with code. I think it's because of my system-thinking (top-down rather
> > than
> > > bottom up) that it eludes me. You can't sketch with code, and then fill
> > in
> > > the lines (or can you?) I sense, if I were to learn to code, I'd
> become a
> > > dialectic coder.
> > >
> > > Is there such a thing?
> > >
> > > Kind recursions,
> > >
> > > Annalisa
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
> that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>