NURS 676 WCU Error when Prescribing a Drug to A Patient Discussion Consider the following scenario: You are working as an advanced practice nurse at a com

NURS 676 WCU Error when Prescribing a Drug to A Patient Discussion Consider the following scenario:

You are working as an advanced practice nurse at a community health clinic. You unintentionally make an error when prescribing a drug to a patient. You do not think the patient knows that you made the error.

To prepare:

Consider the ethical implications of disclosure and nondisclosure.
Research federal and state laws for advanced practice nurses. Reflect on the legal implications of disclosure and nondisclosure for you and the health clinic.
Consider what you would do as the advanced practice nurse in this scenario including whether you would disclose your error.
Review the Institute for Safe Medication Practices website. Consider the process of writing prescriptions, and think about strategies to avoid medication errors.

To complete:

Write a minimum 4-page paper in APA format (excluding cover page and references) that addresses the following:

Explain the ethical and legal implications of disclosure and nondisclosure. Be sure to reference laws specific to your state.
Describe what you would do as the advanced practice nurse in this scenario including whether you would disclose your error. Provide evidence for your rationale.
Explain the process of writing prescriptions and include strategies to minimize medication errors.
Include four or more appropriate scholarly sources from the last five years throughout the paper.

Due: Sunday, 11:59 p.m. (Pacific time)

Points: 100 6 Literary theory and digital games
Julian Kücklich
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
Literary theory and criticism have played a significant role in the formation of digital game
studies. Important works such as Espen Aarseth’s (1997) Cybertext and Janet Murray’s (1997)
Hamlet on the Holodeck used the terminology of literary studies – terms such as ‘text’,
‘narrative’, ‘protagonist’ and so forth – to describe digital media. While other theorists have
challenged this approach because of its ‘theoretical imperialism’, this terminology remains
indispensable in the discussion of digital games today.
This chapter introduces these terms as they relate to digital games while at the same time
pointing out the pitfalls of using this terminology. Digital games are a hybrid medium, a
medium in which different traditions and different technologies converge. The literary tradition
is one of those, but by no means the only one. To regard digital games as a storytelling device
is not only an oversimplification but a distortion of the medium. However, literary theory can
be a valuable tool for understanding the inner workings of digital games, the appeal they hold
for players and the significance they have within their cultural context.
This chapter begins with the most basic similarity between digital games and literature: the
fact that, in many cases, they are fiction. The many schools of literary theory can be seen as
different answers to the question of how reality and fiction relate to one another. Generally
speaking, these different schools try to answer this question by determining the rules of a
certain literary genre, by studying the meaning of literary texts or by trying to assess literature’s
effect on the readers. These three approaches – known as poetics, hermeneutics and aesthetics,
respectively – are introduced and discussed in three consecutive sections of this chapter, each
highlighting the possibilities as well as the limitations of these approaches.
Digital games as fiction
‘At End of Road: You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around
you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.’ These are the
opening words of Will Crowther’s and Don Woods’ Adventure (1977), probably the first text
adventure game in digital game history (see Montfort, 2003). At first glance, Adventure
resembles a literary text quite closely, for example, in its use of capitalized chapter headings
and descriptive language. Furthermore, our experience with novels and short stories tells us
that this is the beginning of a story, and once the player starts to play, this suspicion is quickly
confirmed.
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
FIGURE 6.1 Is it a story or is it a game? The ‘storygame’ Adventure (Crowther and Woods, 1997)
BREAKOUT BOX 6.1
Text From Latin texere – ‘to weave’. While this term usually refers to a coherent sequence of two or more
sentences, it is often used in a different sense in literary theory. Due to the writings of the French literary
theorists Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and others, its meaning has expanded and has
come to signify any cultural object. Thus, art, music and architecture, but also cities, fashion and rituals can
be regarded as texts that can be read and interpreted.
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
In contrast, there are some points in which Adventure differs from the vast majority of
literary texts, for example, in its use of the second person singular and the present tense.
Although there are texts that make use of these means to tell a story, such as Tom Robbins’
novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, it is a deviation from the conventions of storytelling.
These rules of storytelling – or narrative – are studied by a branch of literary studies called
narratology, and much narratological research has been directed at digital games.
BREAKOUT BOX 6.2
Narrative From Latin narrare – ‘to tell, relate, report, recount, set forth’. A narrative text is a text that tells a
story. The most common narrative forms in literature are novels and short stories, but narrative is not limited
to the written word. Films, television shows and comic books can also be narrative. Scholars of digital games
generally agree that there is a narrative element in many games, but the significance ascribed to this element
differs widely.
The most remarkable feature of Adventure when compared to a literary text is that it requires
the player to type something into the command line that follows the paragraph quoted above.
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
No literary text demands such a high degree of participation from its readers. While any text
allows the reader to skip certain passages, or read the ending first, and some literary works
even give the reader a choice of different endings (for example, John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman), this form of participation is always voluntary. In Adventure, there is no
choice: in order to read, the reader must participate in constructing the text and vice versa.
Still, the player’s progress in the game is dependent on literary conventions of plot
development and description. While this apparent similarity between Adventure and, say, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seems to warrant a literary analysis of the game, the obvious
differences between the two raise some doubts as to whether such an analysis would produce
valid results.
The matter has become more complicated through the development from text adventure
games to adventure games with graphics. The introduction of animated game characters was a
step further away from a game-world represented by text, and towards the cinematic realism
we find in contemporary digital games such as Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA 3).
FIGURE 6.2 Can you read this? Grand Theft Auto 3 (Rockstar, 2001)
If it seems questionable to subject the rather ‘bookish’ Adventure to literary analysis, it
must seem even more dubious to do so with a game like GTA 3. However, looking at two
games as diverse as Adventure and GTA 3 allows us to see as their common denominator
something so obvious that it is easily overlooked: both games create a fictional world, and
playing these games allows us, however briefly, to inhabit these worlds. This has been
recognized by theorists of digital games such as Barry Atkins, who argues that ‘the computer
game … can also be a form of fiction making’ (2003: 10). One of the advantages of literary
theory is that it has a long history of studying the relationship between the real world and the
fictional worlds of literature.
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
BREAKOUT BOX 6.3
Fictionality From Latin fingere – ‘to shape, form, devise, feign’. Texts that do not claim to refer to reality are
called fictional. Usually, the fictional character of a text is indicated by characteristics such as a formulaic
beginning (‘Once upon a time … ’), the title (Great Expectations. A Novel) or other signals. The reader of a
fictional text is expected to react differently to a fictional text than he or she would react to a true story
(‘willing suspension of disbelief ’).
What is literary theory?
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
Before we explore the possibilities of literary analysis in the study of digital games, we should
be aware of the limitations of this approach. While literary theory might be useful in the
analysis of some games; other games are best studied from a different perspective. A game like
Tetris cannot be said to create a fictional world any more than does Parcheesi or a soccer
game. In other games the fictional world is secondary to the gameplay and is ultimately nothing
but a prop: the racing courses of Gran Turismo might be visually stunning, but they have no
influence upon the player’s interaction with the game.
We should also keep in mind that literary studies is by no means a homogenous discipline.
In fact, much of what is known as literary theory has been borrowed from other disciplines,
such as sociology, philosophy or psychoanalysis. As Jonathan Culler points out, the term
literary theory refers mostly to ‘writings from outside the field of literary studies … taken up by
people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture,
offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters’ (1997: 3).
Here, the term literary theory is used in a different sense: it does not refer to theoretical
imports from other disciplines but rather to the systematic study of literature and the methods
for its analysis. In particular, there are three areas of literary theory that can be said to
constitute the core of the discipline:
Poetics: the study of literary conventions and rules.
Hermeneutics: the study of literature’s meaning.
Aesthetics: the study of literature’s effects.
Each of these areas of literary studies focuses on one element of the process of fiction-making:
poetics is concerned with the act of creation of a literary work, hermeneutics’ interest is in
how the finished work creates meaning and literary aesthetics takes the role of the reader into
account.
Poetics: the rules of the game
Historically, there has been a shift from normative poetics to descriptive poetics in the field of
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
literary theory. While the former were basically guides to writing literature that supplied the
aspiring poet with all the knowledge necessary to write a ballad, a sonnet or an elegy, the latter
are studies of a genre that attempt to extract its rules. An example of normative poetics is the
Poetics of Aristotle in which he gives a detailed account of how a tragedy must be written and
staged to achieve the desired effect of purifying the spectators’ souls. Vladimir Propp’s (1968)
Morphology of the Folk Tale, on the other hand, can be regarded as a descriptive poetics, as
the rules stated there are derived from comparing a large number of texts and noting their
structural resemblances.
An important attempt to extract the intrinsic poetic rules of games by textual analysis is
Espen Aarseth’s (1997) study of adventure games in his book Cybertext. Here, Aarseth regards
digital games as a subset of a larger textual category which he calls ergodic text, a term meant
to signify that non-trivial effort is required to traverse the text. This definition includes most
digital games, since they typically put up some form of resistance against the players’ attempts
to solve the game. Formulated as a rule, this means that digital games must resist the players’
efforts to get to the end by presenting them with barriers against their progress which are
increasingly difficult to overcome.
BREAKOUT BOX 6.4
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
Ergodic text From Greek ergon – ‘work’, and hodos – ‘path’. Espen Aarseth defines cybertext as a concept
that focuses on the ‘mechanical organization of the text’ (1997:1). This organization is such that the user of
cybertext has to make an effort to traverse the text. This effort is not only directed at understanding the text,
but also at constructing it, for example by making decisions, throwing dice, or engaging in some form of
contest.
Books on game design can be seen as the normative poetics of digital gaming, as they
inevitably prescribe rules for designing a good game. For example, in Chapter 6 of The Art of
Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford writes: ‘As a player works with a game, s/he should
show steady and smooth improvement. Beginners should be able to make some progress,
intermediate people should get intermediate scores, and experienced players should get high
scores’ (1982).
Genre
This rule is implemented in almost every digital game today. While this is not necessarily a
result of Crawford’s writing, it draws attention to the fact that normative poetics can amplify
existing trends within a game genre. In all likelihood, Crawford’s rule was derived from
personal experience with games in which the player was given the opportunity for ‘steady and
smooth improvement.’ By observing this trend in game design and stating it as an explicit rule,
Crawford amplified this trend, which in turn gave rise to more and more games with a smooth
learning curve. Thus, games with this feature gained an advantage over other games. (See
Sykes, Chapter 5.)
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
What we can see at work here is the development of conventions within a genre. After all, a
genre is nothing but a general term for a number of texts with similar characteristics. While
these characteristics are not always explicitly formulated, we know what to expect from a first
person shooter or a real-time strategy game, just as we know what to expect from a detective
story or a romantic comedy. Aberrations from these conventions are tolerated to some degree,
but if they go too far the game will not be accepted as a representative of its genre. That one of
the weapons in the shooter-game No-one Lives Forever 2 is a banana is a breach of the genre’s
rules; if a rather subtle one. If the banana were the only weapon, however, this would almost
certainly exceed the tolerance of most players, and the game might fail commercially.
Mark J.P. Wolf suggests classifying digital game genres by their form of interactivity, since
a ‘classification by iconography ignores the fundamental differences and similarities which are
to be found in the player’s experience of the game, … but interactivity will always be an
important factor in the way games are experienced’ (2001: 115). The 39 genres proposed by
Wolf are based on an analysis of several examples in every category and can thus be termed a
descriptive poetics.
FIGURE 6.3 What if the banana was the only weapon? No-one Lives Forever 2 (Monolith, 2002)
When analysing a digital game from a literary viewpoint, the question of genre is an
important one. Usually, the game in question will be an adventure or role-playing game, rather
than a sports or strategy game. If this is not the case, the choice of literary theory as an
approach to the game in question requires explanation. Specifically, it is important to point out
the specific features of the game that justify the application of literary theory and why this
approach is chosen over others. It is crucial to the validity of the argument to address these
questions. Otherwise, the analysis might be misconstrued as ‘theoretical imperialism’
(Aarseth, 1997: 16).
It can often prove fruitful to question the placement of a game within a certain genre.
Popular genre classifications such as the ones found in gaming magazines are likely to be
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
based on intuition rather than careful analysis. Furthermore, popular game criticism is prone to
be influenced by the marketing departments of the games’ publishers. As researchers, it is our
obligation to question genre classifications, even if it seems obvious that a game belongs to a
certain genre. As a rule, a game is rarely a ‘pure’ manifestation of a genre, but will differ from
other games within the same genre in some points.
Conventions
Once the question of genre is clarified, one should be aware of the conventions within this
genre. Specifically, we should try to determine which of these conventions are part of the
genre’s essence and which are merely accidental. For example, in an adventure game such as
Monkey Island, we expect exploration and puzzles to be part of the gameplay. If one of these
elements were missing it would be hard to place the games within its genre. However,
adventure games have also come to be associated with a third-person view rather than the
firstperson view of many action games. We can ask ourselves whether this is part of the genre’s
definition or an arbitrary convention. How about a first person shooter that does not offer a
range of different weapons or an adventure game in which the protagonist can carry only one
item? By asking these questions, we can become aware of what is required in a genre and what
is merely expected.
Deus Ex is a good example for a mix between genres as it is usually classified as an actionadventure game but it has some role-playing elements as well. It is, after all, a matter of
personal style whether a player accomplishes the game’s missions by brute force, or by stealth
and agility. The game’s rudimentary skill system is also reminiscent of the ‘stats’ in roleplaying games (RPGs). While this is clearly an aberration from what is expected in an actionadventure game, it is in no way detrimental to the gameplay. Deus Ex’s rather complicated
plot, on the other hand, would be more befitting for a classic adventure game and is arguably
harder to follow because of the game’s strong action elements.
Copyright © 2006. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
Hermeneutics: making sense of software
In a game like Deus Ex the ‘experience’ of a player relying on stealth might differ dramatically
from that of a player taking a brute-force approach. Thus, the question can be raised whether
the fact that games are interactive means that there is no fixed meaning but rather a range of
meanings depending on the way the game is played. Literary studies face a similar problem:
the meaning of a literary text is not part of the text itself but rather something external to it.
Hermeneutics is the branch of literary studies that tries to solve this problem by determining
dominant aspects in a text that privilege one interpretation over another.
In digital games, hermeneutic interaction is embedded in the process of playing itself since
the player has to interpret the signs on the screen in order to determine their meaning. Only thus
can he or she extract the internal rules by which the game is governed and use this knowledge
to solve the game. In his essay ‘Making sense of software’ (1995), Ted Friedman describes
this as a process of ‘demystification’ since the solution of a game will typically reveal the
Understanding Digital Games, edited by Jason Rutter, and Jo Bryce, SAGE Publications, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=334602.
Created from binghamton on 2019-12-23 06:34:39.
world of the game as governed by a fixed set of rules. Once these rules are revealed the game
is not challenging anymore.
…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment