JFK reloaded: Documentary framing and the simulated document

Often the most well known “documentary videogames” are the most controversial. JFK Reloaded—a game based on the assassination of American president John F. Kennedy—is one of the better known examples. When it rose to public attention in 2004, the game added fuel to a growing outcry over violence and inappropriate content in videogames. It was explicitly condemned by the Kennedy family—and even used to signify the moral vacuum of digital games in an episode of the television series Law and Order . JFKR has always fallen back in defense on its “documentary” status– specifically, that the core simulation at the heart of the gameplay, and supporting game elements such as vantage points, are based meticulously on real Warren Commission data. I will argue a strong indexical relation in JFKR lies between the game and the documents—not the historic act itself. As such, the game’s primary strength as a documentary work is in re-engaging the archive, rather than simulating history

Framing Gender: Ellis Island Immigration Portraits

Currently, the United States is experiencing renewed debates over immigration and its immigration policy, which range between arguments for increased or decreased admittances. These conversations are not new; there is an uncanny familiarity in how arguments have remained the same over the span of a hundred years. Through looking at the historical representation of immigrants at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, perhaps we can foster further critical dialogue about how we currently understand the “foreign” and the “other” with respect to gender. While this paper focuses specifically on gender subversion within the photograph versus typical representations of gender, it is also important to understand issues of race and disability at Ellis Island, as it was a site for the medical gaze to determine which bodies were fit to enter the United States. Within portraits of Ellis Island immigrants, we see a similar fascination with the “other” that mirrors the visual dissemination process of the institution

Beyond boy’s toys: Women, play and Mindstorms™ Robotics

The LEGO® MindStorms™ Robotics Invention System is increasingly used by adults for both serious prototyping and creative play. What is particularly interesting about the MindStorms™ system is that it offers women the opportunity to participate in an embodied computing environment that supports women-friendly programming concepts such as Constructionism and bricolage. So where are the female hobbyists and artists? This paper argues for the development of a feminine/feminist MindStorms™ robotics practice that subverts the male agency of the product and creates a dialogue surrounding women and robotic play. Using a toy for expression and discourse is a political act: a reclaiming of play time and space for women, and an affirmation of a programming style that rejects dualisms and situates women in the programming experience. This paper will argue the mechanics and cultural space surrounding the MindStorms™ system make it a particularly interesting subject for theorizing and encouraging discourse surrounding women’s relationships to robotics and play. It also presents several ongoing projects by the author that explore the idea of subverting the cultural space surrounding MindStorms™ robotics

Discourse Engines for Art Mods

This paper presents a genealogy of "art mod" (artistic videogame modification) definitions and frameworks. Such frameworks serve, either intentionally or unintentionally, to establish modding within a tradition of analysis and critique: whether participatory design, alternative media, folk art, and/or fine art. By situating the definition and history of art mods within a particular discourse, researchers construct the ground from which to make arguments towards organizing the reception and critique of these works. Such arguments include whether mods in general (and art mods in particular) are inherently political or banal (even boring), whether these works speak back at all to games themselves (and whether they should), whether these works are powerful and disruptive; or compromised (by virtue of their parasitic position), and as a result marginal. A genealogy of art mod frameworks highlights the boundary politics of the critique of art mods, and the problem of presenting transparent interpretive lenses in an interdisciplinary field such as game studies

Quantum Proofs of Deletion for Learning with Errors

Quantum information has the property that measurement is an inherently destructive process. This feature is most apparent in the principle of complementarity, which states that mutually incompatible observables cannot be measured at the same time. Recent work by Broadbent and Islam (TCC 2020) builds on this aspect of quantum mechanics to realize a cryptographic notion called certified deletion. While this remarkable notion enables a classical verifier to be convinced that a (private-key) quantum ciphertext has been deleted by an untrusted party, it offers no additional layer of functionality. In this work, we augment the proof-of-deletion paradigm with fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). We construct the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme with certified deletion - an interactive protocol which enables an untrusted quantum server to compute on encrypted data and, if requested, to simultaneously prove data deletion to a client. Our scheme has the desirable property that verification of a deletion certificate is public; meaning anyone can verify that deletion has taken place. Our main technical ingredient is an interactive protocol by which a quantum prover can convince a classical verifier that a sample from the Learning with Errors (LWE) distribution in the form of a quantum state was deleted. As an application of our protocol, we construct a Dual-Regev public-key encryption scheme with certified deletion, which we then extend towards a (leveled) FHE scheme of the same type. We introduce the notion of Gaussian-collapsing hash functions - a special case of collapsing hash functions defined by Unruh (Eurocrypt 2016) - and we prove the security of our schemes under the assumption that the Ajtai hash function satisfies a certain strong Gaussian-collapsing property in the presence of leakage

Discourse Engines for Art Mods

This paper presents a genealogy of "art mod" (artistic videogame modification) definitions and frameworks. Such frameworks serve, either intentionally or unintentionally, to establish modding within a tradition of analysis and critique: whether participatory design, alternative media, folk art, and/or fine art. By situating the definition and history of art mods within a particular discourse, researchers construct the ground from which to make arguments towards organizing the reception and critique of these works. Such arguments include whether mods in general (and art mods in particular) are inherently political or banal (even boring), whether these works speak back at all to games themselves (and whether they should), whether these works are powerful and disruptive; or compromised (by virtue of their parasitic position), and as a result marginal. A genealogy of art mod frameworks highlights the boundary politics of the critique of art mods, and the problem of presenting transparent interpretive lenses in an interdisciplinary field such as game studies