IMG Review of Avadon

[The Ratt]

I thought people would be interested to see what's being said about Avadon.

 

http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=1127&Page=1

[Locmaar]

Wow, he seems to have liked it a lot. That's one hell of a review.

[Alorael at Large]

I can't help but hold the errors against the reviewer. There's no character named Sevilyn, Shima isn't really a mysterious assassin, and not all Spiderweb games are real-time outside of combat (most aren't!).

 

—Alorael, who is generally unimpressed with the review. It's nice to know that someone likes the game, but reading that doesn't actually really explain why it's fun to play. What's combat like? What's the story like?

[Dintiradan]

A lot of those errors were present in this 'sneak preview' review by the same author, with a lot of the text being copied over. Apparently self-plagiarism isn't a big deal outside of academia.

[othersean]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Apparently self-plagiarism isn't a big deal outside of academia.

Or inside it. If you don't "revise and extend" your conference paper into a journal paper, you're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to add to your CV.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: othersean

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Apparently self-plagiarism isn't a big deal outside of academia.

Or inside it. If you don't "revise and extend" your conference paper into a journal paper, you're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to add to your CV.

And if you don't reference all your previous works as footnotes then you can't inflate the prestige of your earlier works by pointing out how frequently they are being referenced.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Originally Posted By: othersean

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Apparently self-plagiarism isn't a big deal outside of academia.

Or inside it. If you don't "revise and extend" your conference paper into a journal paper, you're wasting a perfectly good opportunity to add to your CV.

And if you don't reference all your previous works as footnotes then you can't inflate the prestige of your earlier works by pointing out how frequently they are being referenced.

I always got the impression it was a big deal - I know I'm only an undergraduate, but I'm not allowed to quote myself (even with footnoted references) at all. I know first-years (who are usually given quite a bit of leeway with plagiarism/poor referencing) who have been kicked off courses for referencing their own essays.

I suppose once you're published it's a different kettle of fish, and I do only have a very narrow experience of this.

[Dintiradan]

The thing with undergraduate assignments, at least here, is that you can't hand in work you've done for a different class. This gives you an unfair advantage over your classmates, both timewise and because you've had your work previously graded. Is that the issue you're talking about?

 

But I don't see the problem if, say, you worked as an undergrad summer student, got co-authorship on a paper for some reason, then used that work as a reference for a assignment that does more than just duplicate the previous work. There shouldn't be anything wrong with saying "Here I talked about this, but now I'm going to talk about this related thing over here."

[Ceiling Durkheim]

Things do change with published work. I don't know the specifics of your the situation at your school, but the above point about duplicate work for multiple classes is an important one. Also, unless one is citing one's own work for the same class/professor, professors don't have access to one's prior work the way they do with published articles/books.

 

As far as I can tell, the purposes of citations in most forms of academic writing are:

1. Giving credit where credit is due/avoiding plagiarism.

2. Recommendations for further reading on topics within the field that the work in question doesn't cover.

3. 'Prooftexting' by pointing readers toward more in-depth analyses of various points in the work in question, which are significant to the topic at hand but not so much so as to merit exhaustive explanation. This saves authors from reinventing the wheel when making arguments that already appear in other works.

 

Obviously the first is not a concern for one's own work. #2-3 are apposite, especially 3. Individual academics tend to focus on relatively small fields of study. As such, it's not uncommon for a given author to make argument a in paper x, then use argument a as a premise for argument b in paper y.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I've heard stories of a college/grad student being brought before the honor board of his school for failing to cite a previous paper he had written. Apparently, not citing yourself throws your entire non-plagiarism-credibility out the window.

 

I personally think that the strict rules and everything for citation in academia are a little over the top. Why does it matter what exact form of citation I use as long as the reader can identify which work is being cited and find that work if he or she so desires?

[Dantius]

I think we need a poll: What is your favorite method of academic citation? MLA? APA? Chicago/Turabian? Vancouver? Those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head...

[Niemand]

From what I've seen in scientific papers the format of citations doesn't follow strict rules in near the way that my high-school english teachers wanted it done. Within the text there are only numbers, referring to the items in the numbered bibliography at the end. The bibliography items are sometimes incredibly cryptic, like using apparently unique (or nearly so) abbreviations for journal titles. Even the non-cryptic entries always virtually always omit the title of the work being cited, in order to save space. Most of the citations follow a standard format, but there are a good fraction that don't, and I have on some occasions encountered bibliography entries which I was unable to decode. One of the more odd cases I recently encountered was a paper in which the authors mixed footnotes into the bibliography.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I think we need a poll: What is your favorite method of academic citation? MLA? APA? Chicago/Turabian? Vancouver? Those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head...

For three of my modules I have to use MHRA, and for one I can use either MHRA or Harvard. I don't tend to use Harvard, because it makes less sense to, but I am familiar with it.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

That last one sounds bizarre. HSS and humanities seem to have more consistent standards for citations. As for my own preferences, I go for Chicago since it's what my department used.

[Dintiradan]

Back when I was in English and philosophy classes I used MLA. Nowadays I just BibTex 'em all and let Knuth sort them out.

[VCH]

I don't see a problem with expressing your opinions the same way in different places.

[Alorael at Large]

Self-reference and self-plagiarism are very different. If you write something and then use that same text again, you're not producing new work. For a school paper, that's dodging at least part of the purpose of the assignment. For other uses, it depends, but you almost never want to repeat yourself (or anyone else) without pointing out that you're reusing words.

 

Originally Posted By: Master1

I've heard stories of a college/grad student being brought before the honor board of his school for failing to cite a previous paper he had written. Apparently, not citing yourself throws your entire non-plagiarism-credibility out the window.

 

Maybe that's excessive, but failing to cite, even if it's your own work, is "academic dishonesty," which really just means that you're not giving credit where it's due. Even if the credit is yours, you have to give it so that your ideas can be traced back to their original context.

 

 

Beyond the realm of teachers, who can insist on whatever citation format they like, and who will insist on mutually exclusive formats, you can do as you like. As noted, the purpose is to point readers at further reading, either because it's interesting and relevant or because you're taking what they said and working with or against it.

 

—Alorael, who likes formats that make information relatively clear. Scientific papers tend to have very concise references, but they're often nearly impenetrable if you don't know the journal codes, and it's not always even clear which works are of what importance. Humanities papers seem to do much better in having good bibliographies, but they often mix them in with descriptive footnotes.

[Slawbug]

Style manuals seem to be split up largely by field. Even at Chicago, not every department demanded Chicago style; some demanded others, particularly MLA.

[VCH]

Quote:

 

—Alorael, who likes formats that make information relatively clear. Scientific papers tend to have very concise references, but they're often nearly impenetrable if you don't know the journal codes, and it's not always even clear which works are of what importance. Humanities papers seem to do much better in having good bibliographies, but they often mix them in with descriptive footnotes.

 

 

The only journals I have a problem with are the big ones like Science, where they are trying to save space. Then again, Science isn't a traditional science journal, it's more of a pseudo-magazine. But overall, most ecology journals have easily interpreted references.

 

For example

 

Abdul-Salam, J. & Sreelatha, B. S. 1998 A list of larval digenetic trematodes parasitizing some marine invertebrates in Kuwait Bay. Kuwait Journal of Science & Engineering 25, 409- 434.

 

Hechinger, R. F. 2007 Annotated key to the trematode species infecting Batillaria attramentaria (Prosobranchia: Batillariidae) as first intermediate host. Parasitology International 56, 287-296.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

Also, I like how discussions of academia gradually metastasize from the general forum to...well, everywhere else. We do seem a pretty nerdy bunch*, even for a gaming forum.

 

*If it isn't obvious, I mean this as a compliment.

[VCH]

Yeah I agree, most you are complete nerds.

[Locmaar]

Apart from this major spindrift that seems innate to everything Spiderweb Software (as a business) related, I was thinking in terms of "Wow, this is mighty good PR for Jeff!"

[Student of Trinity]

I think that plagiarizing yourself is at most a minor fault, from an academic point of view. If you give the false impression that you just produced these words now, rather than on some earlier occasion, then that's slightly misleading or confusing. But you're not stealing credit from anyone else, so it's not such a big deal.

 

In fact, if you copy and paste an entire paragraph from yourself, but there's nothing particularly credit-worthy in the text — you're just saving yourself the time it takes to compose new boilerplate — then I really see no problem with this. In cases where you might want to do this, you would quite likely be referencing your previous work anyway, since you're obviously treating a related topic. But even if you didn't, I wouldn't see any problem with this at all.

 

Trying to publish the same significant thing twice, as opposed to just repeating a few tiny bits or boilerplate text, is a whole other story. All scientific and scholarly works are published on the understanding that they are new. The entire academic system is designed to discourage reinventing the wheel. Known results do get republished all the time, inadvertently, just because nobody noticed in time. But if you yourself did the previous work, then you obviously know that it's already been done, and you're deliberately misrepresenting your current work as new.

 

I suppose there's a continuum of skullduggery possible. By repeating enough bits of earlier work you might be able to stretch the content of N papers into N+M. This is not as bad as wholesale plagiarism, but it is deceptive, because it falsely inflates your productivity. Even if you cite yourself when you do it, this is wrong. Based on your padded track record, you might get a conference invitation, or conceivably even a job, that someone else deserved more. That's a form of theft. But repeating a few lines here and there, well below the level that would generate any entire extra works, is not this at all.

 

If you fail to cite yourself when you quote yourself, you do do a small disservice to whatever journal or company published your earlier work. Their impact factor will fail to receive the little boost it should have gotten, from having one of their articles cited in another article. So also will your own citation index suffer, not getting that one more reference that it could have had. Hey, that one citation might be the one you need to lift your Hirsch index. (I expect some people self-cite carefully with this in mind, though some measurements exclude self-citations.) So you should cite yourself even for little quotes, if they're at all significant.

 

And of course, if you actually signed over copyright to your original words to them, then I suppose you'd be infringing. To be honest, though, nobody thinks about this much, where academic journals are concerned.

 

If your original words were from a joint publication with other authors, and it was a different author set from the one in which you are now quoting yourself, then you'll be seen to be misattributing credit if you don't cite the original work, even if the particular words you're using happen to be some that you personally wrote all alone. So this is a serious no-no.

 

I don't really see the problem with submitting your own earlier work to fulfill a new school assignment. It's nice to take advantage of the opportunity to revise it, but if you're willing to submit older stuff as representative of your current ability, I don't see how this is anyone else's business. When generations of students are assigned the same topics year after year, there is obviously no commitment to accepting only new results. In fact, the flip side of the insistence on newness for academic publications is that It's an absolutely basic part of scholarship and science, that what's done once is done, and doesn't have to be done again. It's not performance art. It's producing a product that can, in principle, literally last forever. If you already have the product in your drawer, you can take it out whenever you want, and if it's good, it's good.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

I disagree on the subject of school assignments. The thing is, at the undergraduate level and below (which I take to be what you mean by "school" here), faculty have no serious expectation that students will contribute to the field in question. This is most obvious in math and the natural sciences, which at the undergrad level (a few major assignments excepted) are just problem sets and repetition of known experiments. As such, the importance of turning in separate work for different classes and assignments is not based on the need to generate novel work, and indeed relatively little outside of undergraduate theses and such is novel in any meaningful way: because most undergraduate work of necessity deals with relatively basic questions, and draws on a smaller pool of knowledge than grad and post-grad level stuff, it's difficult to say things that are both novel and not clearly wrong. To my knowledge, the main purpose of school work is more as an exercise, a way to learn skills in academic writing, research, experimental technique, and so on. In this conception of things, each separate assignment is useful in that it allows for the acquisition of more academia-related XP*, and thus turning in separate work for each assignment is important in that it allows additional opportunities for learning and skill-building, and in a more oblique sense does not give employers and graduate schools a false impression of the level of academic competence that one's degree purports to communicate.

 

That said, your treatment of the importance of novelty in professional academia is interesting and articulate.

 

*Topic drift or no topic drift, if the RPG metaphor fits, wear it.

[Student of Trinity]

Sure, but if you've already completed an assignment, because it's the same as something you've already done, there's nothing to be learned by repeating the exercise. Ideally you might take the opportunity to do it again differently, and gain fresh XP. But whether you want to farm that boss for XP, by fighting it over again, is up to you. If you already killed it on an earlier quest, I'd say you can just walk over the corpse and move on, this time around.

[Locmaar]

In absence of a "like"-button I wish to state my explicit "like" towards SoT's posting.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Locmaar

In absence of a "like"-button I wish to state my explicit "like" towards SoT's posting.

QFT

I spend too much time on Facebokk, I tried to like SoT's comment when I first saw it, and I just tried to like yours.

[Dantius]

I dislike the concept of a "like" button without the existence of an equally weighted "dislike" button. Delivering meaningless praise without equal avenue to criticize is just hollow and pointless. Besides, I've always found it far more useful to be unnecessarily harsh on mediocre work than overly praiseworthy- it tends to motivate more, and a superior product thought to be horrifyingly bad by its author is better than over complacent mediocrity thought to be brilliant by its author.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Facebook probably wants to stay away from "dislikes" to avoid harassment issues. Given how touchy people can be, it wouldn't take more than a day for someone to get offended by a comical "dislike" on their status before Facebook was dealing with a whole new swarm of complaints.

 

I'd still like to see a "dislike" button, but I'd like a lot of things that I'll never get.

[Goldengirl]

I used to think that having a dislike button on Facebook would be cool, too, but Jeff persuaded me away from that line of thought. It's true, too; people are too sensitive about their material to want to take any serious amount of criticism.

[Student of Trinity]

I think most people are really sensitive to criticism, even people that seem very hard-shelled. So I'm not sure that harsh judgement is the way to improve mediocrity. I figure that people who are confident enough to respond well to harsh criticism are usually either morons or geniuses, and it's probably a waste of time to criticize them in any case.

 

It might be that there is a small pool of underperforming geniuses who can be goaded by harsh reactions into realizing their potential. Conceivably the brilliant productions of these few are worth more than all the moderately good results that can be coaxed out by encouraging the ordinarily mediocre. So maybe harsh criticism is a more efficient strategy, from some points of view.

 

But I think that the best strategy is to go beyond blanket 'like/dislike' judgements, and give more specific criticism. Criticism should be a plan for improvement, not a final judgement. It's worth limiting the amount of negative criticism, and including some praise, just so that people have some sense of what to fix first, and where best to start. The formula I learned in the military was to mention the three worst problems and the three best strengths, and leave everything else for next time.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

How do we define "the same as something you've already done," though? I grant it can be pretty frustrating to write on what is essentially the same prompt twice, but in my experience in college that didn't come up much. Especially in classes with open-ended paper topics, several papers could conceivably be 'the same assignment' in some meaningful sense (they're all something to the effect of 'advance and support an argument regarding the content/relationships of a work/works on the syllabus'), but can result in papers on dramatically different topics, all of which are of didactic use. I'll agree that I'd be disinclined to write two papers on, say, personal responsibility in the Iliad based on Agamemnon's speech in book 19. In such a situation, I would probably go to the second professor*, explain the situation, and ask to work on a different topic.

 

*Assuming these are for two different classes. Were they the same class, that would mean the professor is either a complete hack, or interested in teaching students to argue both sides of an issue.

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I dislike the concept of a "like" button without the existence of an equally weighted "dislike" button. Delivering meaningless praise without equal avenue to criticize is just hollow and pointless. Besides, I've always found it far more useful to be unnecessarily harsh on mediocre work than overly praiseworthy- it tends to motivate more, and a superior product thought to be horrifyingly bad by its author is better than over complacent mediocrity thought to be brilliant by its author.

That is your valid opinion, but I don't think it works for many people in this way. Encouraging people or giving them attention (that's what a 'like' button is for btw) works well as a motivator. Openly disliking their contributions to anything tends to be very intimidating, especially in semi-anonymous environments, and will just stop people from posting. I can imagine an environment though, where a culture of harsh criticism would work. Some of my Creative Writing classes or theater workshops come to mind...

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I dislike the concept of a "like" button without the existence of an equally weighted "dislike" button.

I feel the same way about elections. (meaning that elections are similar to people pressing "like" buttons for their favorite party/ies, I instead of placing a white ballot would like to put a canceling ballot for the party I feel is the most objectionable)

[Eldibs]

I dislike the concept of a "dislike button" for one reason only - negative attention is still attention, and thus it won't demotivate any attention seekers. Look at that atrocity of a video that is Rebecca Black's "Friday." Near-universally hated, but still incredibly famous. If everyone who saw it would've been silent about their hatred, it wouldn't have gotten so big. Things that are awful should not be well-known just for being awful, they should be hidden in a corner to die silently.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Eldibs

I dislike the concept of a "dislike button" for one reason only - negative attention is still attention, and thus it won't demotivate any attention seekers. Look at that atrocity of a video that is Rebecca Black's "Friday." Near-universally hated, but still incredibly famous. If everyone who saw it would've been silent about their hatred, it wouldn't have gotten so big. Things that are awful should not be well-known just for being awful, they should be hidden in a corner to die silently.

I bet she wishes she was enrolled in the youtube partners plan. That video would have made her a lot of money.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: FnordCola

How do we define "the same as something you've already done," though? I grant it can be pretty frustrating to write on what is essentially the same prompt twice, but in my experience in college that didn't come up much.

Well, yeah. I can't say I ever got the same assignment twice, either. But the topic came up somehow, as a hypothetical question.

[nikki.]

I'm actually writing (avoiding) an essay now on identity within two second-generation black British novels. For a previous essay in this module, I wrote about identity and culture within first-generation black British literature.

[A less presumptuous name.]

In high school, it's not uncommon for certain topics to come up repeatedly. English teachers like to make us write persuasive speeches on (relatively) popular or relevant topics, and it's possible to get the same one twice, even though they tell you not to do so.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Master1

In high school, it's not uncommon for certain topics to come up repeatedly. English teachers like to make us write persuasive speeches on (relatively) popular or relevant topics, and it's possible to get the same one twice, even though they tell you not to do so.

That'd be lovely, but I'm not in high school. I'm doing my BA.

[Slawbug]

Congratulations. You have discovered that the field of English is really the field of, well -- the kind of words TM drops.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Impudent Strumpet!

Originally Posted By: Master1

In high school, it's not uncommon for certain topics to come up repeatedly. English teachers like to make us write persuasive speeches on (relatively) popular or relevant topics, and it's possible to get the same one twice, even though they tell you not to do so.

That'd be lovely, but I'm not in high school. I'm doing my BA.

I wasn't talking about you specifically, just mentioning that, in my experience, high school provides situations that had been under discussion.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Congratulations. You have discovered that the field of English is really the field of, well -- the kind of words TM drops.

And just how far is English from Linguistics

Ok, so they're really not that similar, just give me this one!

[Ceiling Durkheim]

As in pretentious? Because if so I think the humanities and some of the social sciences do a lot of that as well. (And I say this as a person whose major, religious studies, was a mix of humanities and social sciences.)

 

Ah well. Why use a long word when a diminutive one would suffice?