Central Florida Future, Vol. 35 No. 31, December 5, 2002

Fraternity honors departed brother; Surviving the streets.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/2649/thumbnail.jp

Paradigm shift : how the evolution of two generations of home consoles, arcades, and computers influenced American culture, 1985-1995.

As of 2016, unlike many popular media forms found here in the United States, video games possess a unique influence, one that gained its own a large widespread appeal, but also its own distinct cultural identity created by millions of fans both here stateside and across the planet. Yet, despite its significant contributions, outside of the gaming's arcade golden age of the early 1980s, the history of gaming post Atari shock goes rather unrepresented as many historians simply refuse to discuss the topic for trivial reasons thus leaving a rather noticeable gap within the overall history. One such important aspect not covered by the majority of the scholarship and the primary focus of thesis argues that the history of early modern video games in the North American market did not originate during the age of Atari in the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, the real genesis of today's market and popular gaming culture began with the creation and establishment of the third and fourth generation of video games, which firmly solidified gaming as both a multi-billion dollar industry and as an accepted form of entertainment in the United States. This project focuses on the ten-year resurrection of the US video game industry from 1985 to 1995. Written as a case study, the project looks into the three main popular hardware mediums of the late 1980s and 1990s through a pseudo-business, cultural, and technological standpoint that ran parallel with the current events at the time. Through this evaluation of the home consoles, personal computers, and the coin operated arcade machines, gaming in America transformed itself from a perceived fad into a serious multi-billion dollar industry while at the same time, slowly gained popular acceptance. Furthermore, this study will examine the country's love-hate relationship with gaming by looking into reactions towards a Japanese-dominated market, the coming of popular computer gaming, the influence of the bit-wars, and the issue of violence that aided in the establishment of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). In order to undertake such a massive endeavor, the project utilizes various sources that include newspapers, magazine articles, US government documents, scholarly articles, video game manuals, commercials, and popular websites to complete the work. Furthermore, another vital source came from firsthand experience playing several of these popular video games from across the decades in question, which include such consoles as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Genesis, home computer, and several notable arcade titles. The project's goal and its four main chapters serves as a historical viewpoint of towards neglected video game industry during the third and fourth generation of gaming and the influence it possess in the United States... 'Paradigm Shift...' examines the often-overlooked early modern history of video games from 1985-1995 and how they would go on to become a larger part of American culture. Each chapter attempts to explain the growing influence gaming has had via home console, computer, and arcades in the US market, and in turn show the origins of today's modern gaming market... The significance of 'Paradigm Shift...' comes down to one word, acceptance. Despite the controversy it generated before and during the ten critical years of its rebirth, what the gaming industry did right was breaking the notion that video games were simply a popular craze. Unlike the second generation that only fed this belief, the third and fourth generation of gaming proved this assumption wrong. With countless successful launches of influential games across the decade, video games slowly gained the acceptance of both gamers and non-gamers alike allowing gaming to ingrain itself within the American culture. By 1995, the foundation of both the modern gaming industry and culture came into existence, and it would only become greater as the years progressed thanks to the efforts of Nintendo, Sega, and countless other developers and licensees that kept video games from falling to the wayside during this period of growth and uncertainty

Central Florida Future, September 2, 1998

Days are numbered for current ID cards; Soviet art on display at UCF gallery; Chairman of Physics Department named.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/2467/thumbnail.jp

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don\u27t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell\u27s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn\u27t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property. Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1114/thumbnail.jp

Born Again Digital: Exploring Evangelical Video Game Worlds

Evangelical Christians have been creating video games for over thirty years, outpacing the efforts of all other religions. By the count that guides the present study, 773 games were made for religious audiences through 2010, of which 474 identify their affiliation as only "Christian," or "biblical." Like other artifacts of digital religion, these games allow us to see the entanglement of people's theological and technological universes. However, unlike many other aspects of digital religion, religious video gaming's novel artistic forms, cultural critiques, and theological possibilities largely blossomed beneath notice. Evangelical video game culture, thus, presents the creative production of a historically significant avant garde whose critical perspective has been neglected outside its own community. In particular, Evangelical video gaming transforms the concerns that connect it to other digital cultures - "violence," for instance, or "immersion" - by attending to the moral status of the player-in-play. This study combines the methods of Religious Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Cultural Studies to show how the popular artifacts of digital religion can shed light upon their cultural context. My initial frame orients Evangelical video games through broad theoretical concerns and a series of cultural histories then focus our attention upon specific telling instances. My introduction applies a relational ontology to establish a vocabulary for examining religious video games in terms of the digital, religion, and play. Chapter two considers how groups learn to live with computers and details the specific stakes of digital religion for Evangelical Christians in the context of "spiritual warfare." Chapter three situates my catalog of religious games within a detailed history of digital religion. Chapter four focuses on the place of Evangelicals in the debates around video game "violence." Chapter five then considers how those debates are visible in seven Evangelical First-Person Shooter games. Chapter six provides a theoretical orientation to the future of Evangelical gaming by considering the notion of "immersion" in games. Chapter seven concludes by summarizing findings and offering suggestions for further research. Finally, an appendix presents a catalog of religious games as a resource for ongoing research.Doctor of Philosoph

Chicago Arts and Communication, 1993

Student-produced magazine entitled Chicago Arts and Communication, later changed to Echo magazine. Cover Articles: Gwendolyn Brooks; The Future of the 10 O\u27Clock News; Confessions of a Female Rock Singer; Pilsen; Learning to be Funny at Second City; Drawing Blood: Jack Higgins; Cahnnel 11 Fights On; Saturday Night with a Jazz Legend; Sports Radio; Jewelry as Art; Inside an Underground Comic Strip; Balley Chicago; and more... Editor-In-Chief: Carrie Miller. 92 pages.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/echo/1002/thumbnail.jp

Understanding Liberty: The Constitution’s Neoliberal Turn

The three major essays and two smaller pieces that form this dissertation focus on the recent deregulatory turn in U.S. constitutional law. They analyze changing, and often competing, understandings of liberty and its relationship to concepts of welfare, choice, democracy, and the purposes of the state. Over the past forty years plaintiffs have increasingly invoked the Constitution, and the free speech clause in particular, in efforts to avoid economic regulation. Areas of life that were once thought irrelevant to the Constitution have become the fodder of pitched litigation, circuit splits, top appellate practices, and United States Supreme Court review. This dissertation traces the origins of that emerging constitutional revolution, which I describe as the Constitution’s neoliberal turn, and analyzes its implications for administrative practice, theories of democratic legitimacy, and constitutional change. The dissertation is animated by several questions: How do social processes structure law, and how is it structured by them? How does the law conceive of the person, liberty, welfare, democratic participation and legitimacy, and the purposes of the state? The essays herein are prominently informed by both doctrinal and legal realist perspectives. Several draw strongly on social science research, particularly in psychology and behavioral law and economics. The first major essay, The New Lochner, traces two of the key forces that have led to greater conflict between the First Amendment and modern administrative state: (1) a business-led social movement has fostered a deregulatory turn in commercial speech law and (2) administrative law and practice have shifted toward lighter-touch forms of governance that appear more speech-regulating. While a number of scholars have labeled the deregulatory use of the First Amendment a type of Lochnerism, this piece analyzes that analogy to identify the distinctive features of contemporary constitutional deregulation. Those distinctive features include: (1) Different scopes—contemporary constitutional deregulation is broader more trump-like than Lochner-era economic liberty. (2) Different theoretical justifications—where Lochner was based in the theory of Adam Smith and laissez-faire capitalism, advocates of the new Lochner largely base their arguments on the idea that “all speech is speech.” And (3) different baselines—where Lochner rested on the common law distribution of entitlements, the new Lochner largely rests on the apparent obviousness of what constitutes speech. The paper argues that because of the pervasiveness of speech and expression, the First Amendment sets the fullest boundary line of state power. As a result, if taken to its logical conclusion, the argument advanced by advocates of First Amendment deregulation—that all expression is speech for constitutional purposes, and all speech should be subject to the same stringent level of judicial scrutiny—would render democratic self-governance impossible. The first shorter essay, Adam Smith’s First Amendment, which was co-authored with former Dean Robert Post, provides a theorization of the democratic purpose of the First Amendment that, we argue, the First Amendment’s recent deregulatory turn subverts. The second major paper is First Amendment Coverage. First Amendment coverage—the term for the practices to which “the freedom of speech” extends—has been notoriously resistant to both description and theorization. At the same time, First Amendment coverage is currently undergoing great transformations: more of the regulation of economic life is seen in U.S. legal culture as of constitutional moment. This piece provides, first, a positive account of coverage. I demonstrate that while the First Amendment is often thought of as libertarian, its scope reflects the reverse: the social logic of and need for cohesive norm communities. Second, the piece provides a proscriptive argument about how we should approach First Amendment coverage, namely with consideration of those social and institutional contexts. In Business Licensing & Constitutional Liberty, the second shorter essay, I present current constitutional claims about business licensing in the context of the abovementioned trends. I argue that the important thing about these cases has little to do with licensing per se, but instead relates to the expansion of the Constitution and competing substantive understandings of liberty and the proper roles of the state and judiciary within U.S. legal culture. The last paper, The Tragedy of Democratic Constitutionalism, analyzes the broader shift towards a vision of liberty that is defined as freedom from the state and that views market ordering as central to the meaning and operationalization of constitutional liberty. This shift, the paper documents, is occurring not only under the Speech Clause but across a range of constitutional doctrines. The paper critiques the three major justifications for the emergent view of constitutional liberty—one from classical economics, one from originalism, and one from libertarian philosophy: (1) The paper notes that we might contest the importation of neoclassical principles into constitutional law on the grounds articulated by behavioral law and economics scholars. Even bracketing the empirical question of whether people act in consistently rational, wealth-maximizing ways, however, the justification from classical economics faces a steep challenge on its own terms. Namely, rational self-interest, even if stipulated, may not lead to optimal social welfare outcomes, as Garrett Hardin observed in The Tragedy of the Commons. (2) I argue that the living constitutionalist means by which the emergent model is being constructed is also contrary to the methodology from which originalism derives its normative force. (3) The justification from libertarian philosophy fails, too, because it offers no reason that its version of liberty should supplant others in constitutional law, particularly in a country of diverse values. And it ignores both the ways in which non-governmental forms of power structure choice, as Robert Hale observed, and the dimensions of lived freedom that depend on social interdependence rather than autonomy. The paper then situates the emergent constitutional shift within broader theories of constitutional change. It builds off the fact that the U.S. constitutional system is one of open-textured rights, the meanings of which are sensitive to litigant advocacy and norm change, as a deep literature in democratic constitutionalism has traced. Against the backdrop of a highly unequal world, the paper argues, this sensitivity exerts a system-tilt towards constitutional visions of liberty, like the emergent one, that entrench existing distributions of wealth, power, and status—as a product of contingent, if persistent, institutional, and cultural arrangements. That same sensitivity of the U.S. constitutional system to social forces, however, makes the trend toward status-quo-entrenching understandings of liberty one that a sufficiently mobilized populace can overcome