The JCI Prison Scholars Program

Category: classes

  • History of Economic Thought (4/18/14)

    Rachel Donaldson writes:

    In class we have been reading Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers and this week we read the chapter on Thorstein Veblen. We began by discussing how Veblen’s economic views intersected with earlier economic theorists like Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx.

    Specifically, we examined how Veblen’s view that taking pride in work is a part of human nature shared similarities with Marx’s understanding of labor as the essence of humans’ species being. We then situated Veblen in his historical context, discussing how his views also reflected ideas embedded in the American Populist movement of the late 19th century, particularly the idea of producerism.

    Much of the rest of class was spent discussing the idea of conspicuous consumption as it existed in Veblen’s era and how it is manifested today. Heilbroner referenced Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown in this chapter and I brought in a copy of this study, which we incorporated into our larger discussion. I also passed around a copy of Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America to provide a historical perspective on Veblen’s era and a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt as an example of a cultural commentary on consumption. The student-scholars’ interest in these books has led me to consider the possibility of creating a rotating library of books relevant to the class for my summer course—but I will have to see if this is possible. 

  • Labyrinth Lord (Games and Game Design, 4/11/14)

    This is a bit belated, as it relates to last Friday’s class (but I thought I should write it up before I leave to teach this Friday’s class).

    Josh has already put together a nice write-up of basically what this class is on about. But he’d asked me to write up our particular experience from last week, in which I facilitated a game of Labyrinth Lord (LL). For those of you not hip to the OSR (that’s the “old school revival” for those of you not hip to it), LL is a “retro-clone” – a fan-made version of an older edition of Dungeons and Dragons made possible by the fact that you can only copyright the particular expression of a game and some proper names of things (so no beholders), but not the rules of the game. For anyone reading who is entirely unfamiliar with role-playing games (RPGs), I’m not going to try to explain them here, but you might want to check out the wikipedia entry, or Epidaiah Ravachol’s excellent micro-game, What is a Roleplaying Game?

    These older editions of D&D are long out of print, but there’s a significant constituency of players for them, motivated by some combination of nostalgia and the fact that the earlier games supported a simpler, more player-skill-focused (that is, it matters more whether you, the player, think to describe your character as twisting that strange carving gently or casually than what number is next to her “find traps” skill on her character sheet), and harder (in the sense of “your character is more likely to die”) experience than some of the newer editions.

    Anyway, for us, we wanted to use LL as a way to segue out of abstract and board games into more story-focused games (there’s a whole long argument about the line between games like D&D or LL and “story games” that, if you are likely to be at all interested, you surely already know about, but whatever). RPGs have some of their roots in wargames (like Diplomacy, which we’d already had them play), and the natural thought that it might be cool to, say, act out what that imaginary fleet commander trying to take Sevastopol is thinking about, rather than just treat it like an abstract token on the board. We decided to start with LL both because it shows its roots in these wargames relatively clearly, it’s pretty complex for folks used to simple board games but pretty simple compared to some of its RPG brethren and sistren, and it’s a clone of the version of D&D most folks of my/Josh’s generation discovered RPGs through back in the 1980s.

    The session was a bit chaotic. We had thirteen students show up. And, since they’ve run into some difficulties with playing unfamiliar games on their own during the “study halls” without an instructor present, we’ve decided to use class time to walk at least partially through games rather than just leave them to figure it out. And after all, very few of us who played RPGs learned our first one by sitting down with the massive rule-book. I know for me, I played D&D in the back of Tom Lopez’ van many times before I ever had the books on my own, and most other folks I know have similar stories of being introduced by older siblings, friends of the family, etc.

    The plan was for me to run the beginning of Dyson Logo’s fun little Goblin Gully adventure, doubling the number of creatures so that there’d be some threat to a party of thirteen characters, and with Josh acting as “caller” to try to corral everyone into having a coherent party decision. It didn’t quite work out.

    After the boring preliminaries (what do all these numbers on the sheet mean?), we went with tradition and started them in a tavern. This led into the traditional questions of “why would we go investigate this maybe monster-infested slave pit on the outskirts of town instead of continuing to drink in the tavern?” and “why is this so dumb?” So, I threw them the “there’s maybe a magic axe”rumor, and that was enough to convince most folks that they should head to the gully.

    We got about as far as the tree with the goblin guards. Under the guidance of a guy who’d played D&D before, they decided to have the thieves try to sneak up – but level 1 thieves are really pretty crummy at sneaking, so they were soon facing a bunch of arrows from goblins in the tree. One thief was immediately cut down, and the other started to run away.

    Interestingly, this caused a bit of a split in the group. Some of the guys wanted to regroup and start shooting things at whatever was in the tree shooting at them. A few decided to run away and look for another way in. One guy declared that he was going to throw his spear at the thief who was running, declaring that he was a coward, and shouldn’t have run away.

    This last was the most interesting to me – as it led to a bit of a conversation about the social contract. On the one hand, “I kill that guy” is probably pretty familiar to a lot of people who played these games when they were tweens or teenagers. It’s a pretty natural response, when you’re told that in this game you can do anything you want (that is within the reasonable fictional powers of your character), to try to push the boundaries a bit – my early D&D games were full of stupidity like “I steal from Lydia’s character,” “I kill the bartender,” and “I moon the dragon.” But the man playing the halfling who threw his spear was a bit more sophisticated than that in his motivations – he wasn’t just trolling, and he tried to make the case to the rest of the group that killing one of their mercenary band who showed cowardice in that way was the appropriate thing to do.

    I’m underselling the chaos of this session more than a bit here to pull out the interesting bit (to me) at the end, and I wouldn’t run a thirteen-player game of LL again anytime soon. It also drove home that while, historically, games like this were many current players’ introductions to the genre, they’re not maybe the easiest access point. Play did stop a few times over things like, “so, it says Paralysis/Petrification 16, and I’m a Magic-User, does that mean I can paralyze people?” But I’m hoping to, next time, use the friendly-fire demise of Mr. Hoppe’s cowardly (or perhaps merely reasonable!) thief to start conversations about social contract issues, genre expectations,  and kinds of fun – after all, if everyone knew we were playing a game about a hard-bitten mercenary band that brooks no cowardice, that could be a cool game.

     

  • Advanced Literature (8/15/14)

    Mikita Brottman writes:

     Today we read the murder scene in “Macbeth,” and I was surprised how focused the men were. Each of them was following the text closely; some of them were even running their fingers along the lines and mouthing the words to themselves silently as the readers spoke their parts. The room was unusually quiet and tense as the scene unfolded, the silence outside the room disturbed only by the occasional raised voices and laughter coming from the classroom next door. During the murder itself, the men were alarmed by Macbeth’s jittery behavior, and annoyed with him for forgetting to leave the bloody daggers in Duncan’s chamber with the grooms. As we read, I realized that, although I’d read Macbeth many times in many places with lots of different kinds of students, I’d never read it with people who might very well have experienced such a crime first hand. From this point of view, Macbeth really was making a hash of things.

  • Advanced Literature (4/8/14)

    Mikita Brottman writes:

    In Advanced Literature (Tuesday 2-4pm) we watched Acts IV and V of Polanski’s adaptation of “Macbeth”. When watching the first three acts a week earlier, I’d been surprised the men had found the movie rather dull and slow. This may have been due to the fact that we were watching on a very small screen with the lights on, the door open and noises in the hallway outside, but it may also have been, as one of the men explained, they’re accustomed to watching action movies with fast editing and not much dialogue. Plus, since we’ve been reading the play for the last five weeks, everyone was familiar with the plot and knew what was going to happen. However, this week the men seemed far more engaged and involved, and after the movie was over we had a long discussion about the ethics of fighting a losing battle, as Macbeth does at the end, and about whether Macduff does the right thing in leaving his wife and children to go and defend his country.