Academic literature on the topic '1943 (Video game)'

Video game “authors” use procedural rhetoric to make specific arguments within the narratives of their games. As a result, they, either purposefully or incidentally, contribute to the creation and maintenance of collective/cultural memory. This process can be identified within the directorial works of Shinji Mikami that include a set of similar general themes. Though the settings of these games differ, they include several related plot elements. These include: 1) depictions of physical and emotional trauma, 2) the large-scale destruction of cities, and 3) distrust of those in power. This paper argues that Mikami, through processes of procedural rhetoric/ authorship, can be understood as an “author” of video games that fall into the larger tradition of war and atomic bomb memory in Japan. (Also known as hibakusha (bomb-affected persons) literature). As a result, his games can be understood as a part of Japan’s larger collective/cultural memory practices surrounding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945). In the case of Mikami, the narratives of his games follow what Akiko Hashimoto labels as the “Long Defeat”, in which Japanese collective/cultural memory struggles to cope with the cultural trauma of the Pacific War (1931-1945). To illustrate this argument the paper engages in a close reading of Mikami’s Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil 4, Vanquish and The Evil Within and identifies tropes that are common to Japanese war memory and hibakusha literature.

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Background The World Health Organization announced the inclusion of gaming disorder (GD) in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision, despite some concerns. However, video gaming has been associated with the enhancement of cognitive function. Moreover, despite comparable extensive video gaming, pro gamers have not shown any of the negative symptoms that individuals with GD have reported. It is important to understand the association between extensive video gaming and alterations in brain regions more objectively. Objective This study aimed to systematically explore the association between extensive video gaming and changes in cognitive function by focusing on pro gamers and individuals with GD. Methods Studies about pro gamers and individuals with GD were searched for in the PubMed and Web of Science databases using relevant search terms, for example, “pro-gamers” and “(Internet) gaming disorder.” While studies for pro gamers were searched for without date restrictions, only studies published since 2013 about individuals with GD were included in search results. Article selection was conducted by following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. Results By following the PRISMA guidelines, 1903 records with unique titles were identified. Through the screening process of titles and abstracts, 86 full-text articles were accessed to determine their eligibility. A total of 18 studies were included in this systematic review. Among the included 18 studies, six studies included pro gamers as participants, one study included both pro gamers and individuals with GD, and 11 studies included individuals with GD. Pro gamers showed structural and functional alterations in brain regions (eg, the left cingulate cortex, the insula subregions, and the prefrontal regions). Cognitive function (eg, attention and sensorimotor function) and cognitive control improved in pro gamers. Individuals with GD showed structural and functional alterations in brain regions (eg, the striatum, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the amygdala) that were associated with impaired cognitive control and higher levels of craving video game playing. They also showed increased cortical thickness in the middle temporal cortex, which indicated the acquisition of better skills. Moreover, it was suggested that various factors (eg, gaming expertise, duration or severity of GD, and level of self-control) seemed to modulate the association of extensive video game playing with changes in cognitive function. Conclusions Although a limited number of studies were identified that included pro gamers and/or individuals who reported showing symptoms of GD for more than 1 year, this review contributed to the objective understanding of the association between extensive video game playing and changes in cognitive function. Conducting studies with a longitudinal design or with various comparison groups in the future would be helpful in deepening the understanding of this association.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

This master's thesis deals with development of indie game - independently-developed game. It describes important moments in computer games history. It clarifies terms like golden age of video arcade games and video game crash of 1983. Further it explains history and origin of indie game phenomenon. It describes some of the differences between independent and commercial game development. In next chapter it presents some game engines which are suitable for independent game development. And in the last chapter it describes the design and implementation of game engine and game running on it.

This thesis focuses on the work of policing, regulating and monitoring of New Zealand public censorship classifications. It follows the processes and agents involved in the day-to-day practices of the enforcement of the classifications given to objects by the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Responsibility for the enforcement of the classification decisions of the Office is delegated to private agents and agencies involved in supplying audiences with classified media products - cinemas, video stores, bookstores and libraries. The thesis also documents enforcement undertaken directly by public agents of the Censorship Compliance Unit. In this case enforcement is concerned with unclassified publications circulating on the Internet. The thesis argues that the networks of agents assembled for the practices of enforcement evolve as the forms of media evolve or change. The thesis focuses on the modes of interaction between agents, media and publics enacted in the different sites of the cinema, the bookstore, the video store, the library and the Internet. It documents the work of enforcement involved in the purchase of images for a fixed period of time in the fixed site of the cinema; the purchase of books from the fixed site of the bookstore; the hire of video films and video games from the fixed site of the video store; and the borrowing of books and videos from the fixed site of the public library. It contrasts the work of enforcement in these different sites with the development of new work practices involved in the interactive, fluid and seemingly intangible yet still policed site of the Internet. It documents how the responsibilities for, and the practices of, enforcement shift between public sites of enforcement to the increasingly difficult public monitoring of the private consumption of images distributed through the media of the Internet. It pays attention to how different methods and strategies of enforcement have been developed in response to both the classification and consumption of the expanding variety of mobile media and the proliferation and consumption of images in the unclassified and fluid world of the Internet.

Esta tesis realiza una profunda y exhaustiva mirada histórica sobre el surgimiento y posterior difusión de los videojuegos de 8 bits en España entre los años 1983 a 1992, un periodo conocido popularmente como la “Edad de oro del software español”. La tesis permite cuestionar los argumentos que hasta ahora sostenían una visión única y poco crítica sobre esta etapa, conformada básicamente alrededor de las vivencias de las primeras empresas y programadores del sector que diseñaron y comercializaron los primeros juegos para ordenadores. Centrándose más en el conocimiento de los usos y prácticas alrededor de las tecnologías en los diferentes contextos de la cotidianidad de las personas, esta tesis muestra que en el desarrollo del sector de los videojuegos en España intervinieron en realidad una mayor diversidad de actores, procesos y espacios de los mencionados habitualmente. El desarrollo del sector de los videojuegos en España coincidió con los procesos de negociación por el control, implantación y difusión de la tecnología informática en todo tipo de espacios: administración pública, universidades, escuelas, hospitales, fábricas, laboratorios, oficinas y también hogares. Los debates públicos acerca de la llamada IT Revolution que se estaba produciendo en otros países no hicieron más que incentivar la voluntad por parte del Estado de abanderar este proceso, bajo el pretexto de que el único camino para modernizar el país pasaba por conseguir su informatización. De esta manera, las tecnologías informáticas y electrónicas se identificaron como uno de los elementos clave para conseguir el desarrollo económico del país ante su inminente entrada a la Comunidad Económica Europea a partir del año 1986. Al mismo tiempo, el Estado contempló la necesidad de llevar a cabo acciones e iniciativas para familiarizar a los ciudadanos con la informática y el uso de los primeros ordenadores domésticos como herramientas educativas y de trabajo. En aquellos años se solía difundir que la informatización del país transformaría radicalmente los sectores productivos y de trabajo, así que desde el sector público se enfatizó la necesidad de adquirir las nuevas competencias relacionadas con el sector informático de cara a encontrar un trabajo estable en el futuro. Respecto a esto, el sector público percibía a la población española como a una sociedad masa de individuos totalmente desconocedora de la disciplina informática y a la que había que instruir para que emplearan los ordenadores con una finalidad utilitaria. No obstante, esta tesis también revela una inesperada agencia activa por parte de los primeros usuarios y aficionados informáticos. Con el acceso y la posibilidad de juguetear y experimentar qué se podía hacer con los primeros ordenadores, estos usuarios empezaron a hacer circular unas determinadas formas de conocimiento y prácticas que no encajaban con las utilidades “serias” inicialmente asociadas a la disciplina informática. Como resultado, el uso de los ordenadores como tecnologías de entretenimiento promovió prácticas alternativas de consumo relacionadas con el sector informático y que acabaron extendiéndose socialmente.
This thesis contributes a multifaceted and exhaustive historical account of the emergence and subsequent diffusion and circulation of 8-bit video games in Spain between 1983 and 1992, a period known, in this sense, as the “Golden Age of Spanish software”. In doing so, it problematizes the claims that have hitherto sustained a flat and one-dimensional view of this period, a perspective built essentially around the experiences of the first companies and programmers of the sector who designed and commercialized the first computer games. By focusing on probing people’s uses and practices with and around technology in their different everyday contexts, this thesis shows that a larger diversity of actors, processes and spaces than those usually pointed out were actually involved in the development of the video games sector in Spain. Such development of this industrial and technological sector concurred, in that particular context and period, with key processes of negotiation concerning the implementation, diffusion and control of computing technology in a wide range of contexts: the public administration, universities, schools, hospitals, factories, laboratories, offices and also households. The public debates around the so-called IT Revolution that was also taking place in other countries encouraged the State’s will to take a leading role these processes under the pretext of considering widespread computerization as the only way to modernize the country. In this way, computing and electronic technologies were deemed as one of the key elements to achieve the economic development of the country, even more with regards to its then impending entry in the European Economic Community in 1986. At the same time, the State pondered the need to carry out actions and initiatives aimed at familiarizing citizens with computing and the use of the first home computers as educational and work tools. In those years, it was typically publicized that the country’s computerization would lead to a radical transformation of the productive and work sectors; therefore, the public administration stressed the need for people to acquire the new skills linked to the computing sector in order to have the chance to land a steady job in the future. In this respect, the public sector considered Spanish people as a mass society of individuals ignorant of the computing field and thus in need of instruction allowing them to usefully operate computers. However, this thesis also reveals an initially unexpected active agency on the part of the first computing users and enthusiasts. Given the access and the possibility to tinker and experiment what could be done with the first computers, these users started circulating certain kinds of knowledge and practices that did not match the “serious” usages at first associated with computing. As a result, the use of computers as entertainment technologies fostered alternative consumption practices related to the computing sector that in the end permeated society at large.

As the United States shifted toward a service-based economy and an increasingly digital media environment, American youth -- particularly young men and boys -- found an opportunity to play with these values in the then-novel video game arcade. The video game industry first came of age between the successful commercialization of Pong in 1972 and the U.S. gaming industry crash of 1983. In the interim, economic and play practices in the arcade itself and media representations of the arcade and its habitués shaped and responded to the economic and cultural upheavals of the period. Arcade machines were the first computers many Americans confronted. Through public discourse about gaming and gamers, Americans engaged in a critical debate about computerization, the move to digital media culture, the restructuring of the U.S. labor economy, and the competitiveness of American youth -- particularly boys -- in a Cold War culture conceived as both hostile and technologically oriented. This study demonstrates that video gaming was an arena in which Americans grappled with larger tensions about masculinity, globalization, labor, and digitalization. By analyzing gaming as a practice of everyday life, this work not only offers a cultural history of this period of gaming, but critical insights into the crystallization of masculine identity in a postindustrial, postmodern economy.
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This study sought to understand: Why do young men play online games? How are the social aspects of the online gaming community governed? How is this virtual gaming world connected to the real world? The study explored the motivations and social conventions in online first person shooter games, and how they impact each other. As well, this study examined the relationship between this virtual world and the real physical world. A group of six young males between the ages of 18-30 years shared, in-depth, their opinions during individual interviews and a focus group discussion. First hand data were observed and collected during live online video gaming sessions. The data were coded and sorted according to themes in order to identify coding groups. The data revealed several motivating factors to play online first person shooter games, which are discussed in detail. As well, the research provided a better understanding of the social conventions in the online gaming community and how motivating factors and social conventions influence and impact one another. Many different ways in which this virtual environment is connected to the real world were discovered and many different factors can carry over into real life, such as relationships and money.

Therefore, this chapter will explore the vast world of video games and the opportunities for instructors to incorporate them into lesson planning. The basis of this empirical work is to align the guiding principles of STEM with the identification of accessible games, based upon learning principles and assessment strategies. The challenge for 21st century educators will be how to bridge the gap between the traditional development of skill sets to meet workforce demands in a dynamically changing global economy that simultaneously creates employees who are capable of innovation, collaboration, and deep critical thinking.

This chapter reflects on John McDaid’s author traversal of his 1993 hypermedia novel, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a groundbreaking work not just for its comprehensive exploration of Apple’s HyperCard authoring system, but also because of its principle of “modally appropriate” presentation, involving non-digital artifacts as well. Built around the science-fictional notion of time travel and multiverses, the Funhouse thus invites consideration of his own curious history, in which it figures as a kind of broken time machine. Comparing McDaid’s work with later, similar projects from the video game world, the chapter argues for an understanding of digital culture that moves beyond the harsh binaries of obsolescence. As McDaid says: “We win by losing.”

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

European users have eagerly adopted novel forms of digital media and related information and communications technologies (Stanton, 2001), making them a part of their increasingly varied and segmented cultures (Brown, Green, & Harper, 2001). For example, the young are active consumers of music, videos, movies, and games; businessmen on the other hand need more and more working tools and applications that enable connectivity when they are on the move. A not very dissimilar scenario is envisaged on troops in action where work on tactical and strategic information and mission management, command, and control, including real-time mission replanning, are essential. All these users rely on the Internet, i-TV, and mobile phones, and they have adapted all of these into the fabric of their lifestyles, or in short, their mobile life. But, functionality cannot be the main driver for design as mobile life is also deeply founded upon shared values and worldviews of the users, pleasure, enjoyment, culture, safety, trust, desire, and so forth (Rheingold, 1993). For example, WAP (wireless application protocol) technologies seemed to provide a powerful tool to the mobile worker. However, it is well known the fraud of WAP mainly due to the scarce usability, high usage cost, and inadequate range of the services provided together with intrinsic limitations of the device itself (insufficient memory storage, low battery autonomy, poor screen resolution, etc. [Cereijo Roibás, 2001]). However, some WAP applications have been widely used by Italian users. The success of this system of applications is due to its efficiency, effectiveness, and relevance for some specific work purposes. Each of the services will be analysed, describing the expected use of each service and the actual use of it by Italian users.

Information and communication technologies have played a fundamental role in teaching and learning for many years. Technologies, such as radio and TV, were used during the 50s and 60s for delivering instructional material in audio and/or video format. More recently, the spread of computer-based educational systems has transformed the processes of teaching and learning (Squires, Conole, & Jacobs, 2000). Potential benefits to learners include richer and more effective learning resources using multimedia and a more flexible pace of learning. In the last few years, the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have offered users a new instructional delivery system that connects learners with educational resources and has led to a tremendous growth in Web-based instruction. Web-based instruction (WBI) can be defined as using the WWW as the medium to deliver course material, manage a course (registrations, supervision, etc.), and communicate with learners. A more elaborate definition is due to Khan (1997), who defines a Web-based instructional system (WIS) as “...a hypermedia-based instructional program which utilises the attributes and resources of the World Wide Web to create a meaningful learning environment where learning is fostered and supported.” Relan and Gillani (1997) have also provided an alternative definition that incorporates pedagogical elements by considering WBI as “...the application of a repertoire of cognitively oriented instructional strategies within a constructivist and collaborative learning environment, utilising the attributes and resources of the World Wide Web.” Nowadays, WISs can take various forms depending on the aim they serve: • Distance-learning (DL) systems’ goal is providing remote access to learning resources at a reduced cost. The concept of DL (Rowntree, 1993) is based on: (i) learning alone, or in small groups, at the learner’s pace and in their own time and place, and (ii) providing active learning rather than passive with less frequent help from a teacher. • Web-based systems, such as intelligent tutoring systems (Wenger, 1987), educational hypermedia, games and simulators (Granlund, Berglund, & Eriksson, 2000), aim at improving the learning experience by offering a high level of interactivity and exploratory activities, but require a significant amount of time for development. The inherent interactivity of this approach leads learners to analyse material at a deeper conceptual level than would normally follow from just studying the theory and generates frequently cognitive conflicts that help learners to discover their possible misunderstandings and reconstruct their own cognitive models of the task under consideration. • Electronic books provide a convenient way to structure learning materials and reach a large market (Eklund & Brusilovsky, 1999). • Providers of training aim to offer innovative educational services to organisations for workplace training and learning, such as to supplement and support training in advance of live training, update employee skills, develop new skills.