Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Minecrafting Bar Mitzvah: Two Rabbis Negotiating And Cultivating Learner-Driven Inclusion Through New Media., Owen Gottlieb

Articles

In 2013, a boy with special needs used the video game Minecraft to deliver the sermon at his bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, an apparently unique ritual phenomenon to this day. Using a narrative inquiry approach, this article examines two rabbis’ negotiations with new media, leading up to, during, and upon reflection after the event. The article explores acceptance, innovation, and validation of new media in religious practice, drawing on Campbell’s (2010) framework for negotiation of new media in religious communities. Clergy biography, philosophy, and institutional context all impact the negotiations with new media. By providing context of a …

Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb & Ash, 2013) is a place-based mobile augmented reality game and simulation that takes the form of a situated documentary. Players take on the role of time traveling reporters tracking down a story “lost to time” to bring back to their editor at the Jewish Time Jump Gazette. The game is played in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City. Players’ iPhones become their time traveling device and companion. Based on the player’s GPS location, players receive digital images from their location from over a hundred years in the past as well …

Tradition And Novelty: Food Representations In Irish Women’S Magazines 1922–73, Marzena Keating, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish women’s magazines, this paper provides a brief overview of Irish food culture from 1922 to 1973. It illustrates how selected texts from women’s magazines, mainly recipes, food columns, practical suggestions for cooking and housekeeping, as well as articles on food topics mirrored social, cultural, economic, and religious characteristics of a particular period. The paper discusses various culinary trends apparent in the content and style of cookery pages focusing on a paired category of novelty and tradition adapted from the quantitative research conducted by Alan Warde.

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

Jewish Games For Learning: Renewing Heritage Traditions In The Digital Age, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Rather than a discontinuity from traditional modes of learning, new explorations of digital and strategic games in Jewish learning are markedly continuous with ancient practices. An explication of the close connections between traditional modes of Jewish learning, interpretive practice, and gaming culture can help to explain how Jews of the Digital Age can adopt and are adapting modern Games for Learning practices for contemporary purposes. The chapter opens by contextualizing a notion of Jewish Games and the field of Games for Learning. Next, the chapter explains the connections between game systems and Jewish traditions. It closes with a case study …

The Western Way: Democracy And The Media Assistance Model, Daire Higgins

Articles

International media assistance took off during a time where the ideological extremes of USA vs. USSR were set to disappear. Following the Cold War, international relations focused on democracy building, and nurturing independent media was embraced as a key part of this strategy. Fukayama called it the ‘End of History’, the fact that all other ideologies had fallen and Western style democracy was set to become the one common ideology. The US and UK led the way in media assistance, with their liberal ideas of a free press, bolstered by free market capitalism. America was the superpower, and forged the …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …

Nurturing Play-Makers & Active Investigative Agents: Schwartz Tag, Good Video Games And Futures Of Jewish Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can an experiential approach to education, in combination with a games-based orientation, help us reach often-elusive educational goals? In many ways the study of games and game design bring us back to tenets of education that we have long known, including the benefits of self-directed learning and project-based work. Games-based design and learning may provide a way to shift the discussion from “What should an educated Jew know?” to “How does a learner develop a taste for Jewish learning and living?”

Forty Years Of Movie Hacking: Considering The Potential Implications Of The Popular Media Representation Of Computer Hackers From 1968 To 2008, Damian Gordon

Articles

Increasingly movies are being produced which feature plots that incorporate elements of computer security and hacking, and cumulatively these movies are creating a public perception as to the nature of computer security. This research examines movies that feature hackers (and hacking) to identify if any common themes emerge from these movies in their representation of these issues. To achieve this, first a corpus of hacking movies is created, and then using a qualitative data analysis technique, guidelines are developed which distinguish those movies that actually have the potential to create a perception with the general public. The resultant dataset is …

Where Does Creativity Come From? And Other Stories Of Copyright, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Commentary on Lydia Pallas Loren, Untangling the Web of Music Copyrights, 53 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 673 (2003), observes that debates over a variety of copyright law issues can be - and in fact, often are - structured in narrative terms, rather than in terms of doctrine, policy, or empirical inquiry. I suggest a series of such narratives, each framed by a theme drawn from a feature film. The Commentary suggests that we should recognize more clearly the role of narrative in intellectual property discourse, and that intellectual property narratives should be examined critically.