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1

Chandra, Yuliyanto. "SKY Castle: Consuming Education from the Cases of Two Tiger Parents." Lingua Cultura 14, no. 2 (December 30, 2020): 151–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.21512/lc.v14i2.6566.

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The research aimed to analyze how the Korean series, SKY Castle, successfully captured the idea that education could becommoditized in consumer culture for ensuring class mobility, which was majorly done by two exemplary tiger parents inKorea. Methodologically, the research applied a qualitative approach and employed a detailed analysis of the main character and one supporting character, Han Suhjin and Cha Minhyuk, respectively. Both characters’ actions and utterances would be selectively used to support the arguments of the research. Their relationship with other characters would also be used as further explanations. The research sheds light on how the two aforementioned characters fervently pursue and spend millions on education as it is perceived to strengthen their position in the social totem pole. The underlying theories to support the discussion are those of cultural and economic capital, consumption, commodification, and tiger parents. These are interconnected in the Korean context, especially due to the shifting value of education in the contemporary era.
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SUN, NAN. "The Migration Theory in 〈SKY Castle〉 and 〈Tiger Mother and Cat Dad〉." Chunwon Research journal 15 (August 31, 2019): 373–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.31809/crj.2019.08.15.373.

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Han, Gwieun. "Desire, Gaze, and Subjectification in the TV Drama Sky Castle(스카이 캐슬)." Korean Language Education 165 (May 31, 2019): 299–329. http://dx.doi.org/10.29401/kle.165.10.

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An, Mi Hwa, and Ae Ran Jang. "The Semiotic Interpretation of Drama Costumes in SKY Castle : A Focus on Peirce’s Semiotics." Journal of the Korean Society of Costume 70, no. 5 (October 31, 2020): 118–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.7233/jksc.2020.70.5.118.

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Seong, Changgyu. "Comparative Study on Characters in the Drama SKY Castle and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath." Journal of East-West Comparative Literature 47 (March 31, 2019): 117–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.29324/jewcl.2019.3.47.117.

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Ryu, Sangjin, Haipeng Zhang, Markeya Peteranetz, and Tareq Daher. "Fluid Mechanics Education Using Japanese Anime: Examples from “Castle in the Sky” by Hayao Miyazaki." Physics Teacher 58, no. 4 (April 2020): 230–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.5145464.

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Tarasenko, M. "SHABTIS IN THE COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF ORIENTAL ART IN ZOLOCHIV CASTLE." Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. History, no. 136 (2018): 74–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2018.136.1.16.

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A group of six shabtis from the collection of the Museum of Oriental Art in Zolochiv Castle, Lviv region, Ukraine are published and analysed in the paper. 1. Green glazed shabti of Psamtek, Late Period, inv. no. 5879. 2. Sky blue glazed faience shabti of Pa-di-Amun, 21st Dynasty, inv. no. 5890. 3. “Female” brown terracotta pseudo-shabti, Roman Period or modern imitation, inv. no. C-I-284. 4. “Female” brown terracotta pseudo-shabti, Roman Period or modern imitation, inv. no. C-I-2286. 5. Small blue glazed faience shabti without inscriptions inv. no. ЕP 7117. 6. Small brown terracotta shabti without inscriptions inv. no. ЕP 5888. At least five of them came from the private collections of the 19th century (Lubomirski, Pininski).
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Szubiakowski, Jacek P., and Jarosław Włodarczyk. "The Solar Dial in the Olsztyn Castle: Its Construction and Relation to Copernicus." Journal for the History of Astronomy 49, no. 2 (May 2018): 158–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021828618776057.

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The article discusses the construction, function, and origin of the solar dial in the Olsztyn Castle, traditionally attributed to Copernicus. The dial, preserved partially on the wall of the cloister and presumably designed to determine the time of equinoxes, served as an astronomical instrument mapping the daily paths of the sun in the sky. The article provides a comprehensive mathematical model of the instrument, taking into account the astronomical and architectural factors which affected its functioning. The analysis allows to alienate the essential properties of the dial as an observational instrument and to contend that measurements were recorded indelibly on the wall and averaged by interpolation. Furthermore, it reconsiders the arguments which support the hypothesis ascribing the construction of the Olsztyn instrument to Copernicus. (Some mathematical appendices appear only in the online issue of the journal.)
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Paik, Jungmi. "A Christian Counseling Approach for the Youth Family through a Family Analysis of Drama SKY Castle." Theological Forum 101 (September 30, 2020): 147–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.17301/tf.2020.09.101.147.

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Denison, Rayna. "Before Ghibli was Ghibli: Analysing the historical discourses surrounding Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986)." East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 4, no. 1 (April 1, 2018): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/eapc.4.1.31_1.

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11

Nam, Mi-Ja, Oh, Su-Kyung, and Bae, Jung Hyun. "Reconsideration of Educational Fever, Meritocracy, and Educational Fairness: focusing on the discourse analysis of drama “SKY castle”." Korean journal of sociology of education 29, no. 2 (June 2019): 131–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.32465/ksocio.2019.29.2.005.

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12

Editors, The. "Forthcoming Conferences." Journal of Skyscape Archaeology 4, no. 1 (August 3, 2018): 151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jsa.36100.

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SEAC 26th meeting27th August-1st September, 2018, Graz, Austriahttp://www.seac2018.org/ European Association of Archaeologists meeting5th-9th September, 2018: EAA 24th Annual Meeting, Barcelona, Spainhttps://www.e-a-a.org/ International Association of Landscape Archaeology17th-20th September, 2018: 5th biennial Landscape Archaeology Conference, Newcastle and Durham, United Kingdom http://www.ncl.ac.uk/mccordcentre/lac2018/ Archaeology Ireland: Pathways to the Cosmos15th September, 2018, Dublin Castle, Irelandhttps://www.eventbrite.ie/e/pathways-to-the-cosmos-tickets-45383757039 SIAC conference2nd week of October, 2018. "Water and Sky", VII Escuela Interamericana de Astronomía Cultural and VI Jornadas Interamericanas de Astronomía Cultural, Samaipata, Boliviahttp://siac.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar/jornadas-bolivia.html Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting40th Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, 17th-19th December, 2018, University of Chester, Chester, UK
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Kimanthi, Hellen, and Paul Hebinck. "‘Castle in the sky’: The anomaly of the millennium villages project fixing food and markets in Sauri, western Kenya." Journal of Rural Studies 57 (January 2018): 157–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.019.

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14

Ann, Myung-Suk. "A Study on Audiences' Response to Family Crisis Drama: Focusing on Social Big Data Analysis on TV Drama “Sky Castle”." Society of Korean Literary Therapy 56 (July 30, 2020): 179–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.20907/kslt.2020.56.179.

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15

Bae, Sung Hyun, and Mi Hyun Kim. "A Study on the Color Symbolism of the Clothes According to the Character Type of the TV Drama 'SKY Castle'." Journal of Cultural Product & Design 61 (June 30, 2020): 21–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.18555/kicpd.2020.61.03.

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Fang, Xiao. "A Study on the Intercultural Communication Characteristics of Korean TV Drama - Focusd on the Communication of SKY Castle in China -." Journal of acting studies 16 (December 31, 2019): 161–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.26764/jaa.2019.16.10.

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17

Swier, Stanley R., Alan Rollins, and Bryan Carney. "Comparison of Two Nematode Formulations for Black Turfgrass Ataenius Control, 1996." Arthropod Management Tests 22, no. 1 (January 1, 1997): 371. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/amt/22.1.371.

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Abstract This trial was conducted at Wentworth-By-The-Sea Country Club, New Castle, NH. All treatments were applied to a fairway on 15 Jul on 7 X 7 ft plots, 5 replicates per treatment, using an RCB design with 1 -ft buffers between plots. Treatments were applied with a 2-wheel bicycle-type CO2 boom sprayer equipped with 4 spray heads, fitted with a 50-mesh strainer and an 8004 fan-type nozzle. The volume of water and insecticide mix per plot was 2 gal/1000 ft2 delivered at 40 psi. The entire trial was irrigated with 1/2 inch of water immediately after application. Weather conditions at time of application were as follows: air temp, 72°F; sky, cloudy; wind, strong breeze. Soil conditions were as follows: surface temp, 70°F; at 1-inch depth, 71°F; at 2-inch depth, 71°F; texture, sandy loam; sand, 67%; silt, 27%; clay, 6%, soil pH, 6.0; dry matter, 74%; moisture, 26%; organic matter, 12%; thatch depth, 1/4 inch. The trial was rated on 5 Aug. A Ryan 12” sod cutter was used to cut a strip to a depth of 3/4 inch. A 1 ft2 piece of sod was pealed back, and live grubs were counted.
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18

Lavarone, Giulia, and Marco Bellano. "Anime tourism in Italy: Travelling to the locations of the Studio Ghibli films." Mutual Images Journal, no. 10 (December 20, 2021): 217–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.32926/2021.10.lav.italy.

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Film-induced tourism, intended as travelling to places where films and TV series have been shot or set, has been extensively studied in the last two decades in several disciplinary fields. For example, the term ‘media pilgrimage’ emerged in media sociology to highlight the sacred dimension these practices may assume, while fan studies have focused on the narrative of affection built upon specific places. Calling forth the relationship between film and landscape, these phenomena have been also explored in the light of film semiotics and media geography. In the past decade, the representation of landscape and the construction of the sense of place in animation benefited from increased scholarly attention; however, the links between tourism and animation still appear under-explored. Japanese animation, because of its prominent use of real locations as the basis for the building of its worlds and the tendency of its fanbases to take action (even in the form of animation-oriented tourism), is an especially promising field, in this respect. In the last fifteen years, a debate on ‘content(s) tourism’ has involved the Japanese government as well as academic scholarship, referring to a wide variety of contents, from novels to films and TV series, anime, manga, and games. The article presents a case study: a discussion of the experience of anime tourists who visited the Italian locations featured in the films by the world-famous animator and director Miyazaki Hayao, especially in Castle in the Sky (1986) and Porco Rosso (1992). The experiences of anime tourists were collected from images and texts shared through the social network Twitter.
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19

Calderaro, Monica, and Marta Senesi. "Disney: crime in fairy tales*." Rivista di Psicopatologia Forense, Medicina Legale, Criminologia 22, no. 1-2-3 (December 27, 2017): 27–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.4081/psyco.2017.10.

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The screen is colored by a celestial sky and begins to outline a castle under whose white gold stands the "Walt Disney Pictures", a semi-crown crown all and the doors of the fantasy are ready to open to the spectators. This is the classic presentation of a Disney Movie that at least once in a lifetime will happen to each of us to attend and accompany the childhood of millions of children. But what is waiting behind that castle? Charming spells and sparks of magic? Absolutely. Princesses to save and charming princes to dream? Absolutely yes. Speaking animals and an Never Land? All this and much more. But if we looked at that castle from a different perspective, and if we shifted our attention from the precious robe of the protagonist, to what deeply motivates her choices and the dynamics surrounding her, we could notice dark shadows, concealed by glittering jewels and unnatural sunsets, so brilliant to blind. The work will focus on those heaviest nuances, analyzing and deepening scenes and themes of Disney Movies where it will be possible to find criminological and psychopathological aspects, thus trying to connect two worlds so distant that for a moment they will intersect as well as in a palette of a painter you can mix white and black. ---------- Lo schermo si colora di un celeste cielo, e comincia a delinearsi un castello sotto la cui bianca aurea si staglia la sigla “Walt Disney Pictures”, un semiarco corona il tutto e le porte della fantasia sono pronte a schiudersi per gli spettatori. Questa è la classica presentazione di un Film Disney a cui almeno una volta nella vita sarà capitato a ciascuno di noi di assistere, e che accompagna l’infanzia di milioni di bambini. Ma cosa ci aspetta dietro quel castello? Affascinanti incantesimi e scintille di magia? Senz’altro. Principesse da salvare e principi azzurri da sognare? Assolutamente sì. Animali parlanti e un’isola che non c’è? Tutto questo e molto di più. Se guardassimo, però, quel castello da una prospettiva diversa, e se spostassimo l’attenzione dal vestito prezioso della protagonista, a ciò che motiva in profondità le sue scelte e alle dinamiche che la circondano, potremmo notare delle sfumature oscure, celate da sfavillanti gioielli ed innaturali tramonti, tanto brillanti da accecarci. È proprio su quelle sfumature più tetre che si concentrerà il lavoro, analizzando e approfondendo scene e temi dei Film Disney in cui sarà possibile riscontrare aspetti criminologici e psicopatologici, cercando così di connettere due mondi tanto distanti che per un attimo si intersecheranno, cosi come in una tavolozza di un pittore è possibile mescolare il bianco e il nero. ---------- La pantalla es de color azul claro del cielo, y comienza a tomar forma un castillo bajo cuyo blanco de oro se coloca la abreviatura "de Walt Disney Pictures", un semi-arco rodea el todo y las puertas de la imaginación están listos para salir del cascarón para los espectadores. Esta es la presentación clásica de una Película de Disney que al menos una vez en la vida nos ha sucedido a cada uno de nosotros para asistir, y que acompaña a millones de niños. Pero, ¿qué está esperando detrás de ese castillo? Encantadores hechizos y chispas de magia? Absolutamente. ¿Princesas para salvar y príncipes azules para soñar? Absolutamente sí ¿Animales que hablan y una isla que no está allí? Todo esto y mucho más. Si observamos, sin embargo, que el castillo desde una perspectiva diferente, y si a mitad de camino a través de la atención por parte del precioso vestido el personaje principal, lo que motiva profundamente en sus elecciones y la dinámica que lo rodean, se puede notar las sombras oscuras, ocultas por las joyas espumoso y puestas de sol antinaturales, tan brillantes para cegar. Es precisamente en los tonos más sombríos que se centrarán los trabajos, analizando y profundizando escenas y películas temas de Disney, donde se pueden encontrar aspectos criminológicos y psicopatológicas, tratando así de conectar dos mundos tan lejos que un momento se cruzará, así como en una paleta de un pintor puede mezclar blanco y negro.
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Kuardhani, Hirwan. "Potehi Puppet (布袋戲) in Java." Dance & Theatre Review 1, no. 1 (May 7, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.24821/dtr.v1i1.2247.

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AbstractPotehi (布袋戏) puppet theater in Java is called as Chinese puppet and originated from Fujian (福建) and Guangdong (广东) Province. Chinese puppets that were allegedly meant here is Potehi because the forms of other kinds of puppet theater from China was not discovered the traces. Leather puppet, such as Purwa, or string puppet (marionette), or even Rod puppet is not recognized by the Javanese people, most of them are only familiar with Potehi Chinese puppet. This is confirmed by the data that most Chinese emigrants who came to Java is the Hokkien (Fujian) who owned Potehi puppet theater. Some of Potehi playhouse stage are in the form of permanent building of a brick wall that has been decorated with images of deities or knock -down building which is similar to ronda substations that can be assembled. When Potehi stage is used for shows in pagoda, it will be included in the playhouse stage. It is different if the shows take place outside the pagoda, such as in malls, galleries, churches, festivals and so on, then it will be without the playhouse stage. Potehi stage shaped like a castle building with division of imaginary spaces. The upper part is the sky or deities’ palace, and the bottom is the human castle. It can also be interpreted as two natures; macrocosm and microcosm. The Sky Palace keep supervising the administration of human castles that have been mandated to regulate human. General grip of Potehi Puppet Theatre in Java includes: material story and a common way of presenting the general grip of the story of Potehi Puppet Theatre in Java that include: materials and way of presenting sequence actions stories that are taken by sehu and the board of pagoda when holding Potehi show in pagoda are as follow: 1 Sehu prepares the figures. 2. Sehu with Lauw Cu (the board of pagoda) perform Puak Poe rituals. 3. Sehu prepare the staging equipment. 4. The show is based on the agreed time with pagoda sides. Potehi shows for the Chinese community carry out ritual, social, and educational functions.Keywords: puppet theater; Potehi; Javanese performanceAbstrakWayang Potehi di Jawa. Teater Boneka Potehi di Jawa disebut sebagai pertunjukan boneka Cina yang berasal dari Provinsi Fujian dan Guandong. Diduga pertunjukan Potehi datang ke Pulau Jawa pada abad ke-16. Wayang Potehi dikenal sebagai wayang Cina karena bentuknya tidak ditemukan di wilayah Jawa. Wayang kulit di Jawa sama dengan wayang Purwa, wayang bertangkai di Jawa dikenal dengan wayang golek. Teater boneka Potehi dibawa para emigran Hokkian (Fujian) ke Jawa, dan dimainkan pada panggung permanen ataupun panggung yang berpindah. Ketika pertunjukan Potehi dimainkan di Kelenteng, digunakan stage yang permanen berbentuk rumah-rumahan. Hal demikian berbeda dengan pertunjukan yang dimainkan di luar Kelenteng, seperti di mal, galeri seni, gereja, atau festival-festival. Panggung Potehimerupakan perwujudan simbol dunia, yakni paling atas adalah istana langit yangmerupakan tempat para dewa, sementara bagian bawah adalah istana manusiabiasa atau tempat masyarakat biasa. Hal tersebut dapat digambarkan sebagaialam makrokosmos dan alam mikrokosmos. Secara keseluruhan, pementasanPotehi di Jawa masih mengikuti patokan, lakon, tatacara Potehi asalnya, yaitu:1. Sehu atau dalang menyiapkan lakon dan mengajukan judul lakon yang akandibawakan. 2. Sehu bersama Lauw Cu (petugas upacara) melakukan ritual PuakPoe. 3. Sehu mendapatkan persetujuan mengenai lakon yang akan dibawakan. 4. Pertunjukan digelar berdasarkan lakon yang telah disetujui dewa. PertunjukanPotehi bagi komunitas masyarakat Tionghoa membawa serta fungsi sosial, ritual,dan pendidikan.Kata kunci: teater boneka; Potehi; pertunjukan Jawa
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21

Mercer, Erin. "“A deluge of shrieking unreason”: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction." M/C Journal 17, no. 4 (July 24, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.846.

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Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. Mihawhenua: The Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1888. Cresswell-Moorcock, Alyson. “Never Go Tramping Along.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 63-71. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Fagan, D. W. O. Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1952. Gee, Maurice. The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Penguin, 1986. Gunn, Kirsty. Rain. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Hardy, Linda. “Natural Occupancy.” Meridian 14.2 (October 1995): 213-25. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic. PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University, 2010. King, Edmund G. C. “Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28.2 (2010): 35-57. “Kiwi Gothic.” Massey (Nov. 2001). 8 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/magazine/2001_Nov/stories/gothic.html›. Maning, F. E. Old New Zealand and Other Writings. Ed. Alex Calder. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Marriott Watson, H. B. The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure. London: Hutchinson, 1891. Nicks, Oliver. “The House.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 8-20. Rendle, Steve. “Entertaining Trip to the Dark Side.” Rev. of Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side, ed. Stephen Cain. The Evening Post. 17 Jan. 1997: 5. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Steer, Philip. “History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 114-37. Virtue, Noel. The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 2010. Wevers, Lydia. “The Short Story.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991: 203–70.
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Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me." M/C Journal 6, no. 1 (February 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2134.

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Abstract:
I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html
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