Secure Trick-Taking Game Protocols How to Play Online Spades with Cheaters

International audienceTrick-Taking Games (TTGs) are card games in which each player plays one of his cards in turn according to a given rule. The player with the highest card then wins the trick, i.e., he gets all the cards that have been played during the round. For instance, Spades is a famous TTG proposed by online casinos, where each player must play a card that follows the leading suit when it is possible. Otherwise, he can play any of his cards. In such a game, a dishonest user can play a wrong card even if he has cards of the leading suit. Since his other cards are hidden, there is no way to detect the cheat. Hence, the other players realize the problem later, i.e., when the cheater plays a card that he is not supposed to have. In this case, the game is biased and is canceled. Our goal is to design protocols that prevent such a cheat for TTGs. We give a security model for secure Spades protocols, and we design a scheme called SecureSpades. This scheme is secure under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our model and our scheme can be extended to several other TTGs, such as Belotte, Whist, Bridge, etc

Ludic Garden: The Work of Play in Composition and Rhetoric

This dissertation explores the intersections between play and game studies and composition and rhetoric. Through an analysis of the provenance of the five canons of ancient rhetoric, invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, this dissertation argues that new media, exemplified by video games, can help us reconceptualize and revitalize composition and rhetoric for our increasingly digital world. In Chapter 1, memory is examined in relation to identity and agency in order to demonstrate the productive overlaps between the act of writing and the act of playing. Invention is the focus of Chapter 2. Breaking down games into the constituent parts of materials, limits, and goals allows composers to create games that model systems or ideologies. Composers can then play these created games as a way to formulate, understand, and test their understanding of the world. Chapter 3 looks at style and differentiates between three types of style operating in digital games: representational style, procedural style, and ludic style. Emphasizing the actions and decisions of the player, ludic style can be a powerful tool to help composers identify, experience, and enact tropes and schemes. Chapter 4 looks at both arrangement and delivery and argues that in new media, the two happen simultaneously. Through an analysis of propaganda in video games, this chapter argues that the patterning of objects in games and subsequent delivery of the propaganda through the performance of the player represents a powerful new avenue to disseminate propaganda. The dissertation is concluded with Chapter 5, a pedagogical take on how the ancient canons of rhetoric can help identify conspicuous computing through the use of play and games to subvert hegemonic views and dominating ideologies. Taken as a whole, this dissertation demonstrates how play and writing can inform each other and promote understanding of the ways new media shapes how we communicate, how we make meaning of the digital world, and how we can use this to produce better writers, players, and citizens

The Fixer

In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker—known as a “fixer”—as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life

The Fixer

In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker—known as a “fixer”—as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life

Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation

Many critics have interpreted Bob Dylan’s lyrics, especially those composed during the middle to late 1960s, in the contexts of their relation to American folk, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll precedents; their discographical details and concert performances; their social, political and cultural relevance; and/or their status for discussion as “poems.” Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation instead focuses on how all of Dylan’s 1965-1967 songs manifest traces of his ongoing, internal “autobiography” in which he continually declares and questions his relation to a self-determined existential summons

Bowdoin Orient v.136, no.1-25 (2006-2007)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1007/thumbnail.jp

Leadership development:containment enough

How can we do leadership better, for any place, for whatever we need leadership to do there? In this thesis I propose that the ongoing ability to perceive, reflex on, choose and act to get safe-enough, problematized-enough to make confident-enough decisions on the leadership practice needed is a key practice to practise. This is doing containment. Practising involves paying critical attention to place, practices, power, pace, position, performance, processes, purpose for our people (the Ps). It involves getting comfortable-enough sitting into discomfort. Practise, as explored in the Development section, necessitates seeking guides, resources, models and other ‘stuff’ and making critical agentic choices to purpose this ‘for’ doing development (of self, of others). Enough is key to this. I draw on voices from multiple academic fields and also from other philosophical, cultural, practice-based ways of knowing, being and becoming, particularly the work of Nagarjuna. These voices form a notional community of consensus-enough with justification-enough to support the theory-in-use of containment. This is explored in four studies: the first two studies with partner firms in Nepal to substantiate containment-in-practice; the second two studies, in India and the UK, build the theory-in-use to a framework for interventions supporting leadership development. These studies initially followed a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology (CGTM) then moved towards a more post-qualitative approach to method. Containment is proposed within constructivist, situated knowledges and a Middle Way approach. As such the researcher’s voice, position and socio-cultural place and those of the research participants are explored along with their influences on the inquiry, its development and impacts. The thesis concludes with a call for a renaissance in criticality within groups, organisations and the public sphere, activated by leadership as a counter to the too-safe consensus that feels not-safe-enough. Attention to Place and to Practise is the key. Please find individual parts of this thesis uploaded here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/e8vuro6ayxxxo45/AAA__28kSNwKNgMgw7CVFtsAa?dl=

Leadership development: containment enough

How can we do leadership better, for any place, for whatever we need leadership to do there? In this thesis I propose that the ongoing ability to perceive, reflex on, choose and act to get safe enough, problematized-enough to make confident-enough decisions on the leadership practice needed is a key practice to practise. This is doing containment. Practising involves paying critical attention to place, practices, power, pace, position, performance, processes, purpose for our people (the Ps). It involves getting comfortable-enough sitting into discomfort. Practise, as explored in the Development section, necessitates seeking guides, resources, models and other ‘stuff’ and making critical agentic choices to purpose this ‘for’ doing development (of self, of others). Enough is key to this. I draw on voices from multiple academic fields and also from other philosophical, cultural, practice-based ways of knowing, being and becoming, particularly the work of Nagarjuna. These voices form a notional community of consensus-enough with justification-enough to support the theory-in-use of containment. This is explored in four studies: the first two studies with partner firms in Nepal to substantiate containment-in-practice; the second two studies, in India and the UK, build the theory-in-use to a framework for interventions supporting leadership development. These studies initially followed a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology (CGTM) then moved towards a more post-qualitative approach to method. Containment is proposed within constructivist, situated knowledges and a Middle Way approach. As such the researcher’s voice, position and socio-cultural place and those of the Frontispiece Leadership development: containment enough PhD thesis Jo Chaffer 2020 research participants are explored along with their influences on the inquiry, its development and impacts. The thesis concludes with a call for a renaissance in criticality within groups, organisations and the public sphere, activated by leadership as a counter to the too-safe consensus that feels not safe- enough. Attention to Place and to Practise is the key