Microethology

"This paper discusses how practicing teachers conceptualize commercial off the shelf (COTS) videogames within classroom-based English language arts instruction. Understanding how today’s teachers perceive virtual worlds and videogames
as an instructional tool for schema building within literacy development will help researchers better understand ways to structure games-based learning in classroom environments. Data for this study were drawn from case study research of a graduate pilot course focusing on the intersections of virtual worlds, popular
culture, and literacy instruction. Findings indicate that a limited understanding of videogames and virtual worlds does not hinder practicing teachers from desiring to create engaging units of study using videogames as a schema building tool. However, teachers feel that using videogames for schema building in the classroom will lead to negative perceptions of how they are viewed as teachers. This is compounded by the perception that they will not receive adequate financial support in the form of professional development from administration, nor will they receive monies for technological support to implement within instruction. However, despite these findings, teachers desire to use games-based learning and implement it as a schema building exercises with their students."

This paper critically analyzes the real money market place, a feature of the game Diablo 3. To do so I compare the concepts of the audience commodity, prosumption, produsage and playbour to the model of Diablo’s real money market place. The conclusion is that the market place is not fully described by any of the proposed models but is something in-between. Using interview, participant observation and online media this paper then explains the consequences of this feature on the game and the emerging game culture of Diablo. With letting the business model of Diablo 3 influence the game design Blizzard is not acting according to its own core value but instead following suggestions from marketing research and let the design follow the business model. (Hamari and Lehdonvirtä, 2010)
This behavior of a company does fit the first filter of the propaganda model. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) Game companies as media producers are in a capitalist system forced to act according to financial considerations and not artistic or ethical ones. It marks the departure of even AAA games from a focus on producing the best possible product for their audience to abusing audience labor and to forging games after a monetization model instead of vice versa.

Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency,capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date,in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable,safe,and pleasurable,the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society.

In this paper we articulate an empirical approach to the study of social action in digitallymediated contexts. Our approach extends Carl Couch’s theory of cooperative action, which is based on a set of “elements of sociation”: acknowledged attentiveness, mutual responsiveness, congruent functional identities, shared focus, and social objective. Three additional elements of sociation, adapted from studies of jazz performance, are added to the list of elements that characterize coordinated action: a formal theory of task performance, an informal theory of task performance, and synchronicity of individual actions. Using audio-visual recordings of gameplay, the minutiae of social action were captured and subjected to repetitive, reflexive and collaborative analysis in order to identify these patterns, including their potential causes and consequences. We use data from two games—the single-player real-time strategy game Eufloria and the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft...

Stereotypical portrayals of race are common in many modern video games. However, research on games and
game environments has often overlooked race as an important consideration when evaluating games for their
educational potential. This is particularly true of the educational literature on online games, which has tended
to emphasize virtual game spaces as intrinsically exemplary learning environments while deemphasizing the
narrative content of the games themselves. This article addresses this oversight. Through a close reading of
game communications and fan-created content, the authors examined how developer-produced racial narratives
influence players’ experience of the game world. The authors find that players and player communities
reproduce and reinforce narrow developer-produced interpretations of race during in-game interactions as
well as in player forums and virtual communities beyond the confines of the game world. Because the game
environment is not conducive to players’ critical examination of race, the authors conclude that the game does
not intrinsically provide a means for players to engage critically with game content. They further conclude
that as educational environments these games must be situated and contextualized within the ideologies and
discourses of the physical world.

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of “posthumanism.” This essay examines some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. I explore the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behavior and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.

While many strategy games (both real-time- and turn-based-) use a fictionalized Earth history as a backdrop for their ludic elements, few seek to faithfully represent the progression of music history via the use of pre-existing music. Soren Johnson’s Civilization IV stands alone as it presents a thorough retelling of music history, with representative works from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern Eras, including works by Josquin, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and American minimalist composer, John Adams. The game’s lead designer and AI programmer, Soren Johnson, personally selected each track included in the underscoring playlists. Drawing heavily upon new interviews with the game designers, this paper explores Soren Johnson’s personal representation of music history, analyzing in particular his use of John Sheppard’s Media Vita, Saint-Säens’s Cello Concerto No.1,  Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and the works of John Adams. I also discuss the implications of Johnson’s personalized version of history and argue that we can identify him with auteur film directors. The paper also addresses the potential for Civilization IV to educate its players in genres they may have been unfamiliar with, helping them contextualize and appreciate previously unfamiliar musics.

The focus of this paper is on the potential challenges and opportunities that might emerge as a result of the continuing development and proliferation of so-called 3D printing technology. In particular, it is interested in looking at how society would cope if 3D printing (or some other form of comparable replicating technology) advanced to such a stage that it became possible to accurately and cheaply replicate any commodity or currency-form many times over. As many readers will no doubt be aware, these are issues that have gained increased traction in recent times, with countless articles and opinion-pieces having been printed on the so-called ‘3D printing revolution’ in the last couple of years. However, whilst the technology underpinning the latest cluster of 3D printers may be ground-breaking, the idea itself is far from new. Indeed, the concept of replicating technology actually has a fairly long intellectual history, with a number of past writers and thinkers having devoted a great deal of time to considering the effects that might result from the (potential) emergence of mass 3D printing capabilities. In this paper, the focus will be on one such text; namely, George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral series (1942–1945). Looking both at the fictionalised replicating technologies outlined by Smith and the uses they were put to by his protagonists, this paper will offer a critical reading of Smith’s work, with a particular emphasis on his treatment of the 3D printing phenomenon. Likewise, it will also look at how Smith tried to incorporate the idea of mass replicating technology into a wider socio-economic framework, along with his attempts to produce working economic models based on this postulated mode of production. Ultimately, what it shows is that, whilst Smith’s fictionalised technologies may today seem farcically outdated, his reflections and insights on the potential social ruptures and cultural transformations that might unfold as a result of the emergence of mass replicating technology remain as pertinent and as relevant as ever.

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts (literary, cinematic, and new media) which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects. Understanding these effects is ecologically crucial, because technovirtual interfaces profoundly alter one’s experience of nature, corporeality, and relationships. Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses.

The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. Drawing from Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, it responds to the “interface anxiety” evinced by environmental writers and ecocritics by arguing that nostalgia for an “authentic,” supplement-free mode of “contact” is itself a pastoral fiction.

Chapter I examines virtuality’s relationship with nature in both virtual reality and mixed reality paradigms, beginning with nineteenth-century decadence and aestheticism — Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890)—before moving to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), and Vinge’s Synthetic Serendipity (2004).

Chapter II questions the attempt to evade virtuality and machinery in order to reclaim “unmediated contact” through the “natural” body in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Chapter III looks at the liberation offered by the virtual body, as well as its liabilities, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

Chapter IV scrutinizes the authenticity of virtual relationships in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940) and Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005).

Chapter V inquires into how a virtual sense of place is evoked in Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century railway sketches and in 21st-century digital interactive narratives.

The Conclusion examines the film Avatar (2009) and explores the possibilities (and problems) that arise in attempting to make audiences “see” with ecological vision through the lenses of virtuality."

The question of how and why people adopt technologies is an area that has received great scrutiny, but less attention is given to those who willingly choose to avoid particular technologies. This article considers current models of technology adoption and explores how technology influences us as a society and individually, paying special attention to how large-scale shifts in technological change come to bear on individuals who choose not to adopt specific technologies. By combining scholarship in the information sciences with observations from media ecology theorists, this article proposes a more nuanced view of technology adoption and resistance.

The first exhibition of its kind, ‘Hand in Hand’ featured Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Maori, Samoan, Niuean and Fijian Artists based in Aotearoa, USA and Australia.

The 2008 annual Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative’s Sydney Mardi Gras exhibition was an opportunity for Indigenous artists across the Pacific to participate in a celebration of international standing through a program that openly challenged dominant views on sexuality.

The exhibition was also held in collaboration with the Performance Space @ CarriageWorks in Australia.

The artwork featured was a focus on non-conventional media including: the moving image, installation and also inter-disciplinary media including performance art, music and adornment. The artists: Jeffery Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Arone Raymond Meeks, r e a, Darrell Sibosado, Clinton Nain, Adrian Wills, Dianne Jones, Gary Lee, Moana Nepia, Niwhai Tupaea, Sionelagi Falemaka, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Claudine Sartain, Salote Tawale & artist / curator: Jenny Fraser (AUS) & invited guest artist / curator Shigeyuki Kihara (NZ).

Desde el psicoanálisis y la psicología histórico-cultural el trabajo avanza en la pregunta por los sentidos de cuerpo manifestados por videojugadores de la serie Halo. Metodológicamente, se hace uso del análisis del discurso y la observación participante para analizar foros de discusión, juegos en campaña y sesiones multijugador. Las categorías de análisis de la información fueron las imágenes del cuerpo donde aparece la prevalencia sensorial y la ausencia de una imagen completa del cuerpo que permita procesos de identificación; Usos que se hacen del cuerpo, donde la muerte propia y la del otro centraliza la atención; y el lazo social donde se propone una lógica dicótoma de “buenos o malos”.
Keywords: Cuerpo, Videojuegos, Psicoanálisis

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexpose´” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive”
consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race
operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her
“oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.

"The paper draws on the author’s research into podcasting, especially in relation to its uptake by public service radios, which may be constituting a revitalising of the public radio voice. Invoking historian, John Durham Peters discussion of the merits of dissemination and dialogue, and critical theorist Bertolt Brecht’s disappointment with “one way” broadcast radio in the 1930s, the author explores podcasting as a new form of broadcast dissemination which draws on radio’s past dreamings of “eros and democracy” (Peters 1999). The significance of this time-shifted and ever expanding distribution of voice and its acousmatic presence creating a new media 'pod-ecology' is also discussed in the context of amateur and citizen media.

Reference; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, University of Chicago Press, 1999.""

The realities of new technological and social conditions since the 1990s demand a new approach to literacy teaching. Looking onward from the original statement of aims of the multiliteracies movement in 1996, this volume brings together top-quality scholarship and research that has embraced the notion and features new contributions by many of the originators of this approach to literacy.

Drawing on large research projects and empirical evidence, the authors explore practical and educational issues that relate to multiliteracies, such as assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. The viewpoint taken is that multiliteracies is a complementary socio-cultural approach to the new literacies that includes pedagogy and learning. The differences are addressed from a multiliteracies perspective – one that does not discount or undermine the new literacies, but shows new ways in which they are complementary.

Computers and the internet are transforming the way we work and communicate and the very notion of literacy itself. This volume offers frontline information and a vital update for those wishing to understand the evolution of multiliteracies and the current state of literacy theory in relation to it.

By their nature, digital games facilitate surveillance. They allow for the compilation of statistics, internal states, and rules to be recorded, thus hiding many of the internal workings from the players and making the games much more complex. This digitization makes it much easier to collect player data and metrics, and then, as a process of function creep, to use this data in new and innovative ways, such as improving the user experience, or subtly shaping users' in-game desires and behaviours. Increasingly, these practices have moved from non-game spaces into social networking sites and spaces of play.

The "gamification" movement is benefiting from the increasing sophistication of such metrics. Gamification combines the playful design and feedback mechanisms from games with users' social profiles (e.g. Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn) in non-game applications explicitly geared to drive behavioural change (e.g. weight loss, workplace productivity, educational tools, and consumer loyalty). As critics point out, gamified applications rely on the points, leaderboards, and badges often seen in games, but are not games in themselves (Deterding 2010; Bogost 2011). Advocates of the gamification movement - including Al Gore in a recent Games for Change keynote - argue that this monitoring and feedback makes difficult tasks more playful and enjoyable (McGonigal 2011; Gore 2011). However, the marketing and political discourse of using games to change behaviour in positive ways is quite different from messy actualities rooted in advertising, consumption, and intrusive user monitoring. The current potentials to ‘gamify’ life have incited debate on whether the spread of these points based systems heralds playful utopias or dystopic surveillant societies run by corporations and advertisers.

This paper highlights the rise of gamification and the implications for surveillance studies. In particular, it focuses on describing the increasingly intrusive monitoring practices are propagated under the banner of fun and play.

Kozinets’ Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online is a strong introductory text for those seeking to conduct Internet-based social research. It provides the reader with recommended steps to follow in formulating their own ‘netnographies’ (p. 4) from conception and design to implementation, making it a handy how-to-do guide geared towards students and practitioners who are mostly new to web-based ethnographic inquiry. Sections on research planning, methods and ethics serve to further ongoing debates among media ethnographers.

In worship several elements may be distinguished, among them are love, admiration, wonder and adoration. Though they may not be experienced in that order, a little thought will reveal those elements as being present wherever true worship is found.

"As Georges Méliès discovered to his astonished glee in the late nineteenth century, moving pictures do more than just record reality—they create one. Through stop-trick substitutions, multiple exposures, and splices, celluloid becomes a portal translucent not only to the projector’s bulb, but to the projections of the fantastic. For Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, such cinematic sleights-of-hand become so compelling that they promise to substitute a special effect for all of reality itself. In his 1940 novel The Invention of Morel, Bioy Casares represents two dissociated worlds that, although temporally estranged, are spliced together spatially through layered technological projections—creating the illusion of two lovers immortalized in a virtual union, played back without end. This Borgesian splicing of virtual and actual demonstrates the fantastical possibilities—and tremendous manipulative power—of the splice and the image overlay. In so doing, Bioy Casares raises striking questions about our ability to embrace fantastical projections and attempt to achieve satisfaction from virtual liaisons."

En los últimos años los videojuegos han propuesto nuevos personajes femeninos dotados de una fuerte complejidad psicológica y alejados de la tradicional y exclusiva exaltación física de la mujer. En esta ponencia se examina la elaboración psicológica de las heroínas a partir de la articulación de sus mundos posibles mentales y su impacto en la estructura y experiencia de juego en el caso de Dragon Age: Origins

The art historical notion of 'the original' continues to inflect games history and game preservation work. This paper notes the persistence of this concept particularly in the game lover's invocation of 'the original experience'. The paper first traces the game lover's notions of history and preservation, recognizing their commitment to games, before noting that the appeal to original experience is problematic for more critical historical and scholarly perspectives. It suggests that there is a need to liberate critical thought from this paradigm and ask different questions, such as how exhibitions of 1980s games and gaming culture might be assembled for future audiences with no memory of this period. The model proposed by net art preservationist, Anne Laforet, of the Archaeological Museum offers a way for thinking about such exhibits of game history and visitors' encounters with these, whilst moving beyond the notion that games must play exactly as they o...

This special issue of Reconstruction is one of its largest because the roster was actually put together in the hopes of producing a printed, spin-off volume. That never happened, but we are all better for it since the contributors held firm. As such you'll find all manner of papers (19 of them) on all sorts of games (too many to name). The best thing to do is to list the sub-headings and let readers move from there: a) Evolutions/Migrations, b) Social Bodies, c) Regimes of Spectatorship, d) Ethics, Ideology and Morality.

As medical technology continues to progress, we are able to correct deficiencies in the body through means such as cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. This has led some scholars to argue that we are creating technologized, cyborg bodies. However, these technologies have also enabled us to correct perceived cultural flaws in the body. This article explores the nature of the body through the lens of posthumanism, examining ways that individuals attempt to reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification. Specifically, this article examines the practice of hymen restoration, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artistic endeavours in cosmetic surgery and Stelarc’s cybernetic experimentations. These cases yield three potential visions of the body: the body must be restored; bodies must be unified; and the body must evolve. Such visions have consequences; the ways in which the body is rhetorically constructed influence how people choose to alter their own bodies. By considering the body itself as medium and as an interface with other technologies, we can better theorize what it truly means to be human.

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts.

The art historical notion of ‘the original’ continues to inflect games history and game preservation work. This paper notes the persistence of this concept particularly in the game lover’s invocation of ‘the original experience’. The paper first traces the game lover’s notions of history and preservation, recognizing their commitment to games, before noting that the appeal to original experience is problematic for more critical historical and scholarly perspectives. It suggests that there is a need to liberate critical thought from this paradigm and ask different questions, such as how exhibitions of 1980s games and gaming culture might be assembled for future audiences with no memory of this period. The model proposed by net art preservationist, Anne Laforet, of the Archaeological Museum offers a way for thinking about such exhibits of game history and visitors’ encounters with these, whilst moving beyond the notion that games must play exactly as they once did.

As video games have become an important economic and cultural force, scholars are increasingly trying to better understand the ways that engagement with games may drive learning, literacy, and social participation in the 21st century. In this book, the authors consider games and just as importantly, the social interactions around games, not in terms of how they should be managed or incorporated into existing educational structures, but for what they tell us about the forms of learning and literacy that are already instantiated within the use of these media.  To this end, this book delves deeply into James Paul Gee’s (2004) productive and influential concept of the affinity space — briefly defined here and in this book as the physical or virtual locations (or some combination of the two) where people come together around a shared interest or “affinity.” The most prominent examples discussed in this volume are online fan sites organized around video gaming, where fans share everything from game play strategies to fan fiction to complex technical modifications of the game itself. With investigations of learning and literacy practices within affinity spaces around The Sims, Neopets, World of Warcraft, Civilization, and other contemporary video games, the authors set out to uncover how learning and literacy are fostered and challenged by the forms of engagement that typify gaming culture. By explicating how and why engaged fans of digital media do what they do in online spaces, the authors hope to cast a light, like Gee did, on the promise of these media and the problems facing current educational systems.

This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Hjarvard's theory of the mediatisation of religion.  By suggesting actor-network-theory as a methodological approach to the study of the mediatisation of religion, this article proposes a case study of the viral wedding video, J K wedding entrance dance, to highlight problems with the assertion that media are replacing or displacing religion's authoritative role in society.  Drawing upon recent theories of how digital and mobile media are reshaping society by enabling participation, remediation and bricolage, I suggest instead that the media do not bring about secularization, but rather the media are contributing to a personalization of what it means to be religious (or not). The article thus introduces an alternative definition to the concept of mediatisation: that mediatisation may be understood as the process by which collective uses of communication media extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of narratives, contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world and give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world.