Hello all, welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #356. I worked on some stuff behind the scenes, but I did pop up in a quick video chat with the OAC (Obnoxious Academics Consortium) as we all talked about ChatGPT, AI Chatbots and Human versus Machine-Assisted Writing. Please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show…
This week I published the following: There Are Always Two Paths – There are always two paths. The darker heavier path, or the lighter easier path. You can always choose to make something already hard worse by your response, or you can choose to make it easier by a different response. Thank You. I’m Sorry.…
All you need to know about the game taking over the internet and apparently ruining classrooms.
Rachael Krishna in BuzzFeed: Fortnite is a co-op “sandbox” game set in a vast, open-world environment where players are survivors of a storm that wiped out 98% of the Earth’s population. The survivors are also plagued by zombies. The game was released in mid-2017 by Epic Games, which also made Gears of War. You can play the…
Hi, I’m Wesley, and I was addicted to World of Warcraft. I’m not talking about a, ‘I played this game a lot because it’s fun’ kind of thing. I’m talkin…
Wesley Yin-Poole in Eurogamer: Underneath it all, I think the reaction to the WHO’s gaming disorder is about the fear of facing up to uncomfortable truths about game design. We celebrate games that are addictive but we refuse to call them addictive, even though they have been designed to be exactly that. Developers want you…
As the World Health Organization classifies gaming disorder as a mental health condition, one UK treatment centre reveals how it is trying to tackle the problem
Emily Reynolds in The Guardian: Video games are enjoyed by millions of people around the world without any harmful effects whatsoever. Most players will never have to worry about it becoming a problem. But for a small number of people, what starts out as a fun hobby becomes a debilitating habit. Though behavioural addictions like…
As the number of young gamers has risen sharply, so have addiction narratives
From Alex Hern in The Guardian: Not only are there more young people – who are not great at setting boundaries – but there is also more visibility of all types of play: an eight-hour gaming session that might be guiltily shrugged off by an 18-year-old student in a university town can prompt concern for…