Post Graduation Level Essay Sample

Post Graduation Level Essay

Critique Essay Outline Template

Please note:

1. You can write in complete sentences or bullet point form. Please make sure that your ideas are clearly laid out for your instructor if you are using point form.

2. Where necessary, use transitional words to connect ideas.

Sample Essay
Play for pay
Alang, Navneet . Maclean's ; Toronto (May 2022).
ProQuest document link

ABSTRACT (ENGLISH)

The digital card game is best compared to Pokémon, or a sci-fi version of chess: colourful character cards face off on a virtual playing field. Kohji Nagata, the head of games at Parallel Studios, often compares his company’s game Parallel Life to Magic: The Gathering, its analog predecessor. Subjects include his experience of having “Blackness” thrust upon him at age 12, when he moved from Sudan to Canada; the social possibilities provided by pro wrestling; and what the international stardom of Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah means to Muslim children living in the West.

FULL TEXT

As I play another turn in Skyweaver, I watch helplessly as my avatar is defeated yet again—probably by someone half my age. The digital card game is best compared to Pokémon, or a sci-fi version of chess: colourful character cards face off on a virtual playing field. There are formidable opponents and plenty of strategic challenges. The twist is that while the game is free to join, rare cards will cost you—assuming you consider cryptocurrency to be real money.

In recent years, online gaming has evolved from a niche nerdy pursuit into a mainstream cultural touchstone.

Crypto, on the other hand, remains an opaque concept to most people. Skyweaver is part of a growing trend in gaming: it incorporates blockchain technology in the form of non-fungible tokens. Skyweaver’s NFTs, which are essentially digital certificates of ownership, give users the rights to characters, cards and even digital outfits—all of which would have been one-time purchases in the past. This means that today’s players don’t just own pieces of their go-to games. They can actually profit from them.

There is big, real money floating around the field. Last year, Parallel Studios, a blockchain-centric entertainment company headquartered in Toronto, raised $50 million in funding; YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley is one of their advisers. Around the same time, Vancouver’s Dapper Labs, which created NBA Top Shot and has well over a million users, raised $250 million.

Kohji Nagata, the head of games at Parallel Studios, often compares his company’s game Parallel Life to Magic: The Gathering, its analog predecessor. The game’s cards double as NFTs, which means they can be traded on a Parallel-hosted marketplace, allowing players to offload virtual items or earn crypto from rare finds. Ordinary cards sell for around the cost of a latte, but harder-to-find ones have fetched an eye-watering $350,000.

Trading virtual goods is already possible on traditional gaming platforms, like the massively popular Steam, but crypto boosters claim that their version is more democratic. “Our aim is to allow people to own the assets they have in-game, and just do whatever they’d like with them,” Nagata says. “On a grander scale, we want to create a blockchain-gaming ecosystem that other games can fit into, without having to build all the infrastructure themselves.” If Nagata has his way, the precious characters players collect in one game could easily be transferred to another.

Skyweaver co-founder Michael Sanders, who has worked in gaming since 2010, sees the blockchain revolution as part of a broader shift toward Web3, the catch-all term for the internet’s next, crypto-enabled phase. “In Web 2.0, you have sites like Facebook or YouTube, where people can interact with one another,” Sanders says. “In Web3, you get the internet of value—a full-blown digital economy with more ownership and community control.”

Switching from Web 2.0’s corporate-gatekeeper model to one where people own a piece of the networks they participate in seems like a noble goal. There is a reason, though, that blockchain gaming is mainly being adopted by collectible-card games: it arguably isn’t very good for much else yet.

Brendan Sinclair, the managing editor of GamesIndustry.biz, is deeply skeptical of blockchain gaming. “Proponents are promising to revolutionize the video game space,” he says. “But most of the many companies that are pursuing it are very fuzzy on the details, and on what they think blockchain technology can bring to games that can’t already be done.” Sinclair points to the potential problems of transferring items from one game to another: companies are
constantly editing software, so simply plunking down a new thing from another game could upend that careful curation.

If you think one of the issues with the modern world is that everything is commodified, Web3 and blockchain gaming’s promise of user-focused commerce could easily become part of the problem. It’s hard not to feel a bit wistful about rifling through the detritus of childhood—trading cards, action figures and other collectibles—in our extremely online times. But as we’ve shifted our entertainment from physical goods to the virtual sort, the integration of NFTs means we get to keep a sense of ownership. We used to buy games just to enjoy them, but now they have the potential to become an income stream. BOOKS three to read

THIS IS HOW WE LOVE

by Lisa Moore

House of Anansi, May 3

The Newfoundland novelist writes characters who specialize in pithy, needle-sharp assessments of one another.

But Moore reaches another level in this gritty and compelling story of a mother, her stabbed and beaten son, and a cascade of memories. It features relationships wanted and unwanted, and love that’s unforgettable—all set against the 2020 Snowmageddon, a record-breaking blizzard for St. John’s.
SON OF ELSEWHERE: A MEMOIR IN PIECES
by Elamin Abdelmahmoud

McClelland &Stewart, May 17

In essays as arresting as his subtitle, the host of the popular CBC podcast Pop Chat revisits the building blocks that shaped his sense of self. Subjects include his experience of having “Blackness” thrust upon him at age 12, when he moved from Sudan to Canada; the social possibilities provided by pro wrestling; and what the international stardom of Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah means to Muslim children living in the West.
MANSIONS OF THE MOON by Shyam Selvadurai

Knopf Canada, May 3

According to Indian lore, Siddhartha Gautama abandoned his family to go in search of enlightenment on the night his wife, Yasodhara, gave birth to their son. Within a few years, he was known as the Buddha. Selvadurai’s tale of emotionally torn star-crossed lovers—and the aftermath of their parting—is subtle, absorbing and thoroughly modern.

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Critique Essay Outline Template

References

Bariso, J. (2022). This Is What Elon Musk Did the Day He Bought Twitter. It’s an Amazing Lesson in Productivity. [online] Inc.com. Available at: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/elon-musk-twitter-multitasking-productivity-how-to-solve-problems.html [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].

Chiu, J. (2022). Musk’s Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council. [online] NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1142399312/twitter-trust-and-safety-council-elon-musk#:~:text=%2C%20Friday%2C%20Nov.-,18%2C%202022.,other%20problems%20on%20the%20platform. [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].