Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality

By Devin C. Griffiths

Rowman & Littlefield   2013

215 pages     Non-Fiction

Devin Griffiths has written a comprehensive view of the state of video gaming from its beginnings to its many manifestations today and its Virtual Ascendance. Certainly gaming has moved from its Pong beginnings to its ubiquitous presence in most homes, but Griffiths also shows us the many ways that gaming has changed and will continue to change society. He says, “Gaming is fundamental to our experience as human beings, to our biology. Like the need for food, shelter, clothing, and love, the need to play is coded in our genes. Who’s a gamer? We all are. Whether our game is played with dice, cards, tiles, pencil and paper, on a board, or on the latest touchscreen tablet, we all have one, we’re all linked by the common thread of play.” 

As Griffiths explores the past, present, and the future of gaming, he expands our knowledge of what we think we know to what we think is possible—or maybe impossible. In 2012 there were four hundred million people around the world playing some type of massively multiplayer online role-playing game or MMO. Wow! At the same time that he explores the kinds of games that people do for fun, he is also exploring the potential of role playing games for education, for health, and for military training. This, I would think, is the future of gaming. Just as there are people tremendously engrossed in MMO role playing, there are developers seeking new uses for gaming to the benefit of society. Griffith even devotes an entire chapter to the music that goes with the games, and how symphony orchestras are enticing an entire new generation to love classical music. 

One thing I didn’t know was that I could be considered a gamer. I am part of the demographic that Griffiths devotes an entire chapter to—casual gaming. I am a casual gamer because I play two games—Candy Crush Saga on my cell phone and Words with Friends on my tablet. Every time I have just a few minutes, I pick up my phone and play a level. It only takes a minute, and I have a minute to waste. Actually, I have to say I am addicted to Candy Crush. Can anyone help me get beyond level 100? I play Words with Friends totally anonymously and usually have 4 or 5 games going at one time. Actually I am pretty good at Words with Friends. Comes from years and years of playing Scrabble with my mother and my sister.

 I am on vacation this week and I have sworn off my games as part of my vacation. It is sort of like swearing off coffee—you know you can do it for a while—but forever???

Griffiths devotes a chapter of Virtual Ascendance to what he sees as the future of gaming for education. This type of simulation gaming was just coming into fashion when I retired, but lately I have been helping some graduate students in science education. They are very interested in simulations as part of cooperative learning, one of the new educational trends. There is much more to gaming than killing people. In one of his examples, he discusses the game Whyville and how a teacher used it to teach her students about infectious diseases. 

He speaks about the misconception that violent games create violent children. His discussion is relevant but in the end he has no answers other than to say that violent video games are not bad in themselves, but they reflect “those aspects of human nature of which we’re least proud. Right now, we live in a society that accepts violence as the norm, even celebrates it.” He feels that blaming video games is ignoring the ills that plague our society because we, as humans, are prone to finding scapegoats. In another chapter, he discusses how gaming is being used to treat severely mentally ill people—the other side of the same coin.

My son-in-law is a gamer. I asked him about it as I was reading the book. He says that he likes role playing games with a good story line. He is not so much interested in shooting things as he is in figuring things out. Because of that he says that his all-time favorite game is Blade of Darkness, an older game that most people don’t play. He says he likes it because the story line is so complex. He says that the graphics aren’t as good as the newer games, but the plot is wonderful. This is the same son-in-law that loved the Game of Thrones books, so his gaming choices seem logical.

Virtual Ascendance expanded my understanding of gaming and gave me some encouragement for its future uses. Things are moving so fast that Griffiths will have to come out with a companion book in a year or two. It was also a fairly breezy read. Griffiths writes well and the book is well researched. There are extensive notes and a comprehensive index. A friend introduced me to him via email and I agreed to read and blog about his book. Glad I did. I really learned a lot. 

I have on my shelf a book called The App Generation by famous educator Howard Gardner. I am anxious to read it to see how he feels about gaming and social media. 

Devin Griffiths blog: http://devingriffiths.wordpress.com/

Facebook page for Virtual Ascendance: https://www.facebook.com/virtualascendance

                                                                                                                                              

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

by Novella Carpenter

Penguin Books   2009

276 pages     Memoir

The theme for the Reading Together program at the Kalamazoo Public Library this year is food and there are two author visits scheduled, including Tracie McMillan author of The American Way of Eating and Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Excellent choices I think, particularly in our community which has a booming farmer’s market, a localvore movement, and farms all over southwest Michigan bringing fruit, vegetables, and meat to our tables.

Novella Carpenter’s earliest years were spent on a hippie farm in Idaho, and by the time she and her boyfriend Bill moved to Oakland California, they had gardened for as many years as they had been together. They chose to live in Oakland because it was a bit scruffy as a community, and they thought that they would fit right in. In a second floor apartment near the Interstate on a dead-end street, they looked over an empty lot. Ah-Ha, they thought, a perfect spot for a garden, so over the course of a couple of years, they squatted on the property, building raised bed gardens, tending bees and chickens. Finally, the owner of the property gave her permission to farm, and she expanded her repertoire from plants, bees, and chickens to turkeys, ducks, geese, rabbits, and, wonder of wonders, pigs. 

Carpenter has a wonderful sense of the ridiculous. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. She also seems to understand that they are living in a neighborhood and life situation that most people would not choose. One story that runs through the memoir is about Bobby who lives at the end of the street in a wrecked car. Lana, another neighbor, lives in a warehouse where she runs a speakeasy. Another neighbor cooks meals which she sells to guests at her dining table to raise extra cash. It is a colorful neighborhood, and Novella and Bill are as colorful as everyone else. So, no one is surprised by Novella’s urban farm, and Novella is generous with her food and with her gardening advice.

Sometimes, Carpenter’s behavior is so outlandish that even she can’t believe that she is doing whatever it is she is doing. Some of the best stories concern her dumpster diving behind neighborhood restaurants in order to feed the animals. This gets really crazy after they get two pigs, because the pigs eat mountains of food every day and seem to prefer their food already cooked. In one of their forays, they meet a famous chef who seems really entranced with Novella’s spunk and offers to teach her how to make sausage and other exotic salamis. Novella realizes that she can’t get too attached to her animals, because she knows that she is raising these animals for food, but at the same time, she has a strict sense about how they should be treated and how they should be killed and butchered. 

Another interesting narrative concerned  the month

Carpenter decided to eat only what she could find in her garden or within 1000 feet of her house. This proved to be a hellish month with very few carbohydrates and no coffee. She was hungry all the time. She ate a lot of eggs, a couple of ducks and rabbits, and subsisted on a lot of salads. In her desperation for carbohydrates, she even ground up some decorative corn and made a sort of pancake of the cornmeal. She says, “And so I did something I’d never done before. I ate an item of home décor. ..They were the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten.”

Having lived most of my adult life in Southwest Michigan where the season begins with asparagus and ends with apples, I enjoyed every minute of this book. My husband Lee was a 4Her and so were my three kids. We raised rabbits for competition and garden vegetables to show at the fair. I have “put foods by” every year, but I never have considered myself an urban farmer. My little plot of garden doesn’t produce very well, and I have decided to grow herbs and flowers rather than tomatoes and green peppers which I have been trying to do for several years. As long as I can get fresh tomatoes at the farmer’s market, I guess that I will be happy.

This year, for the first time in many years, we shared a pig with my daughter’s in-laws. Wow! What a difference from what we usually buy at the grocery. The bacon and pork chops were marvelous. We have one ham left that we are saving for Easter. Carpenter closes her book by talking about all the wonderful meals they made from their two pigs. I could completely relate. Not that I plan to raise a pig on the patio!

You might also want to read Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It tells about the year her family lived off the products of their farm and the neighboring farms. 

Also I enjoyed Folks, This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin. Here is my blog posting about it: http://mimi-cyberlibrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/folks-this-aint-normal-farmers-advice.html

Carpenter’s blog is delightful: http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/

Novella Carpenter appears in Kalamazoo on April 15. Here is the information about her visit: http://www.kpl.gov/reading-together/2014/meet-novella-carpenter.aspx

An Unspoken Compromise

by Rizi Xavier Timane

 Hawkfish Publishing     2013

185 pages     Spiritual

Rizi Timane began his life in Nigeria as Nasele, a girl. He always knew he was a boy, but did not transition until he was in his late 30s. An Unspoken Compromise, his memoir and spiritual guide, is directed to the LGBT community he serves with his ministry. He has been a resident of the United States for many years and has a PhD. He studied theology at Claremont School of Theology and he works as a pastor and counselor, specializing in LGBT and grief issues.

An Unspoken Compromise is divided into two parts; the first part is a memoir and the second is a theological look at the biblical passages that are most often presented as indictments of homosexuality. The two themes that I identified with the most are his lifelong desire to be accepted by his parents, and the biblical, fundamentalist position taken by his parents that would not allow them to accept him for most of his life.

The first theme--the overwhelming desire for love and acceptance by his parents--is a very heart-rending exploration of a child's need for acceptance. His mother was very outspoken in her condemnation of his "choices," but Timane seems to understand that it is her religious views speaking rather than her heart, which seems to yearn to hug him close. When my son came out to me as a gay man, I remember that my very first thought was, "There is nothing that can separate my son from me or from the love of God!" 

 

The second theme is a study of the scriptures.

Timane helps LGBT Christians understand the context of the scriptures that on first reading seem so condemning. He says, "For example, instead of viewing the Bible as unforgiving and set in stone, I read it with an open, humble, and inquisitive mind, and always view its stories within the appropriate historical context." He tells his readers that condemning Christians are followers of the Bible rather than followers of Jesus who preached love and compassion and acceptance.

My denomination, the United Methodist Church, is embroiled in a huge controversy over gay marriage and the acceptance of LGBT people into ministry. A recent AP news story explains it better than I could write it. You can find it here. The crux of the matter is that Methodism is a world-wide religion, and Methodists in the United States are open to gay marriage and a change in the church discipline that would allow the acceptance of the LGBT community to happen. However, the members of the world denomination in Africa and Asia are unwilling to make that move. It is anybody's guess where the controversy will end. My guess is that the denomination will split into two parts, but most Methodists don't want to see this happen. It is very disconcerting to see the denomination that I have been part of all my life in this huge quandary. Most people understand that the issue of the place of the LGBT community in society to be the civil rights issue of our generation. 

  I received this book from the publicist, and I appreciated receiving it because it helped me put my own church's agony into a very personal context.

Rizi Timane's website: http://www.rizixaviertimane.com/default.html

Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

 Random House   2014

385 pages     Fiction

I began Perfect by Rachel Joyce with a great deal of anticipation. I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Joyce this spring and I loved it because it fit me exactly where I was at that moment in time. Somehow I got bogged down in Perfect early on, and it took me much longer to read than I had anticipated. I am glad that I stuck with it because once I figured out where the book was headed, I found great meaning in the story line.

The two themes that run through Perfect are time and perfection. The Globe and Mail describes the three conceptions of time that are important to understand as you undertake to read Perfect. They are: "the subjective present, which cannot be contained and therefore may not actually exist; the past, which has already happened, so it ceases to be; and the future, which hovers away at a distance, never actualizing into being." This theme is important to the story because the plot hinges on two seconds of time that apparently were added to the clocks in 1972 to make up for an anomaly in the rotation of the earth. Byron the young protagonist in the story is totally freaked out by the thought of those two seconds, and he blames all the subsequent misfortune in his family's life on that incident.

The second theme is the concept of perfection. Byron is a close observer of life, and particularly his mother, who he believes to be perfect. He adores his mother, as does his school friend James. The theme of perfection is presented early in the book but we soon find that Joyce means not to emphasize the concept of perfection but, alas, the loss of perfection and its close relative--control. Byron and James soon find that they cannot control the circumstances that set their worlds spinning and their perception of perfection soon becomes lost in a morass of circumstances and tragedy.

There is a secondary plot line, occurring in the present, in which a middle-aged man named Jim struggles to find his sanity. He has been in and out of a mental hospital most of his adult life. He tries to find order for his meager life through a series of obsessive compulsive behaviors. He is able to hold a menial job during the day, but his nights are spent obsessively taking care of his mobile home. He begins to recover when he meets a woman named Eileen, who befriends him, nurtures him, and helps him come to a better sense of himself. 

The connection of the two plots is quite shockingly revealed. It wasn't what I had expected at all, because while I knew there must be some connection between plot lines, I had it all figured out wrong. This is truly the beautiful part of the novel because now the themes of redemption and forgiveness enter in and it ends in a lovely glow. I was aided in my search for the origin of the meaning of Perfect by a letter that Rachel Joyce wrote to her readers about how she conceived of this novel. You can find her letter here. 

As in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,

Joyce's writing just escapes being cute or trite. It has twinges of the profound with an interesting set of characters and a plot that we haven't read before. To Joyce, perfection cannot ever be achieved and time is but an illusion. The Washington Post says that the slow tendencies of the book are redeemed by "moments of loveliness and insight" and the book has a "gentle ring of truth" to it.

The review in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/perfect-by-rachel-joyce-a-dark-quiet-follow-up-to-harold-fry/2014/01/14/bbf36738-73d0-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html

The review in the Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/perfect-rachel-joyces-new-novel-considers-the-weight-of-two-extra-seconds/article15484038/

Rachel Joyce's website: http://www.racheljoycebooks.com

Glitter and Glue

by Kelly Corrigan

Ballentine Books 2014

224 pages     Memoir

I am in love with Glitter and Glue. I am in love with Kelly Corrigan. Those who know my reviews know that I am prone to finding the good in the books that I read, but Glitter and Glue is profound in ways that stretches beyond the page into the memory and psyches of the reader.

Corrigan puts on paper the memory of a summer in her life during the 1990s when she and a friend were backpacking in Australia and ran out of money. They each take a nanny job with a Sydney family to earn enough money to finish their trip. Corrigan's job is with an extended family, a father and two young children who have just lost their mother to cancer. The household also includes the mother's father and her young adult son from a former marriage. 

Like most 20-somethings, Corrigan is feeling very independent from her parents, especially from her mother, who she feels to be too no-nonsense, too demanding, too abrupt, too matter-of-fact. Father, who is called Greenie, is everything that Mary, her mother, is not. He is positive, loving, supportive, and encouraging. (Apparently, a previous memoir called The Middle Place is about her father.) "If my mother thought of me as someone to guide, my father thought of me as someone to cheer." Her mother told her once, "You father is the glitter; I am the glue."

Corrigan arrives at the Tanner house when the household is at their most vulnerable; their mother Ellie has just died and no one knows quite how to handle things--emotions are still too raw. The seven-year-old daughter Millie wants nothing to do with her and the five-year-old Martin just wants someone to be his Mommy. 

During the months that Corrigan works for the Tanner family, she learns so much about mothering, but more importantly about her own mother. She learns to appreciate her mother in new ways. After a particularly bad day with Martin and Millie, she muses: "I see that, sturdy though my mother was, she must have been gutted by the sound and sight and sheer vibration of her rabid daughter roaring, I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOU FOR EVER!.

I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day." She learns that she will never have a girly-girl relationship with her mother, but as she tries to mother these motherless children, she finds herself wondering about what her mother would do in any of a number of situations. As she works to help these children through this crisis in their lives, she grows in innumerable ways and becomes a woman rather than a girl. 

As much as we think we know about our mothers, I am not sure that any of us truly ever knew our mothers, although my mother revealed more of herself than some other mothers I knew. My favorite sentence in the book says as much: "But now I see there's no such thing as a woman, one woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should've figured this out sooner, but what child can see the woman inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else." 

Sometimes I think to myself, "I'm becoming my mother." And then I feel pride, because my mother was a remarkable woman, and I would love to "be" my mother.

I hadn't picked up Gllitter and Glue yet when I saw the following video on Facebook. I remembered that the publisher had sent me the book to review. I dug it out of the pile and finished it in a few hours. I cried over the video and I cried over the book. That in itself may not be an endorsement, but besides all the emotion, there are some extremely funny moments. Kelly Corrigan is full of good humor and ascerbic wit. The combination makes for a great read! Newsday calls it a "Valentine to Mom."

Kelly Corrigan's website: http://www.kellycorrigan.com/

Newsday review: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/kelly-corrigan-s-glitter-and-glue-valentine-to-mom-1.6912046