The Best Sentence of the Day

This blog is a cut-up of a dissertation in progress. Each day, I will post my favorite sentence that I have newly scribed. Everything out of context, but suggestive. I hope.

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I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Best Sentence #37

Too stressed about writing... must play more.

I had this very silly idea recently to quote ABBA in my dissertation. Today, I insert that quote as an epigraph to the new chapter 2 "What's the Name of the Game? Classifying Multiple Genres of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Play". I insert it by way of saying This is MY dissertation and if I want to quote ABBA, I will quote ABBA! Somehow it puts things in perspective.

I wonder how many UC Berkeley dissertations have quoted ABBA. We do have a rather prestigous Scandinavian Studies Ph.D. program. So who knows? Maybe I am actually part of a long tradition of quoting ABBA.

Here's the complete Chapter 2 epigraph

In the case of ubiquitous computation… people are still trying to find the loose verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work is basically a literary endeavor. When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology…. So language is of consequence. Those of us who make up words about
these matters probably ought to do a better job.
–science fiction author and design critic Bruce Sterling, “The Internet of Things”


What’s the name of the game?/ Does it mean anything to you?— pop
group ABBA, “The Name of the Game”

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My fourth chapter begins with a ref to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, which is nothing like ABBA except in being rather distant in its ostensible relationship to the rest of the chapter.

(I keep forgetting my blogger passwd because I need it only for comments.)

11:47 AM  
Blogger Jane said...

excellent! What's the fourth chapter about?

8:33 PM  

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