Journal articles on the topic 'Real Escape Game'

The Archivist’s Dream („Der Traum der Archivarin“) is a Live Escape Room Game that has been developed by the University of Krems’ Center for Applied Game Studies on behalf of the Archives of Contemporary Arts in Krems, Austria, which are dedicated to collecting pre-mortem bequests and post-mortem estates of outstanding artists. Located in the underground facilities of the archive, the Escape Room interweaves selected archival materials, historic media devices and archivist approaches to form an interactive puzzle experience. However, it is not an interactive exhibition showcasing the archives’ contents; and while the Escape Room incorporates elements of educational game design, it is an example for a less common application of (Escape Room) Games: the use of game design in the field of cultural mediation (Kulturvermittlung). Instead of following an educational goal in the narrower sense, the Escape Room is designed to turn aspects of cultural mediation and archival practice into gameplay principles, focusing on letting players explore the tenets of archival thinking rather than on “teachable” content. This is achieved by establishing different levels of (un-)reality players have to travers within the game: players follow a fictional archivist into her dreams, which merge with the real-life archives. In order to “escape” this dream world, players combine archival practices with dream logic to solve a secret tied to actual archival materials, while at the same time dissolving the borders between real life, dream and game.

Escape Rooms are presently considered a very popular social entertainment activity, with increasing popularity in education field, since they are considered capable of stimulating the interest of players/students and enhancing learning. The combined game mechanics have led to blended forms of Escape Rooms, the Serious Escape Games (SEGs) and the hybrid type of Escape Rooms that uses Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality technology, a type that is expected to be widely used in the future. In the current study, the MillSecret is presented, a multi-player Serious Escape Game about local cultural heritage, where the players must solve a riddle about the cultural asset of watermills. MillSecret uses AR technology and it was designed to be conducted in the real-physical environment and in an informal educational context. The paper describes the game, its implementation, the playing process, and its evaluation, which aimed to study the feasibility of game conduction in outdoor settings and the views and experience of players with the game, the local cultural heritage and local history. Evaluation results reveal, among other findings, a very positive first feedback from players that allows us to further evolve the development of the game.

Video games are (also) real-time interactive graphic simulations: hence, providing a convincing physics simulation for each specific game environment is of paramount importance in the process of achieving a satisfying player experience. While the existing game engines appropriately address many aspects of physics simulation, some others are still in need of improvements. In particular, several specific physics properties of bodies not usually involved in the main game mechanics (e.g., properties useful to represent systems composed by soft bodies), are often poorly rendered by general-purpose engines. This issue may limit game designers when imagining innovative and compelling video games and game mechanics. For this reason, we dug into the problem of appropriately representing soft bodies. Subsequently, we have extended the approach developed for soft bodies to rigid ones, proposing and developing a unified approach in a game engine: Sulfur. To test the engine, we have also designed and developed “Escape from Quaoar,” a prototypal video game whose main game mechanic exploits an elastic rope, and a level editor for the game.

This article analyzes the first video game in theZettai Zetsumei Toshi(2002, Disaster Report) series for Sony's PlayStation 2 console against the backdrop of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. In the game, players must use limited resources to escape from an earthquake-stricken city while rescuing other survivors. The article argues that the game makes visible the marginal victims and narratives of survival often erased under the collective rhetoric of national trauma. This is explored in relation to disaster photography and artistic representations of 3.11. The article suggests that the game's narrative rejects governmental rhetoric about nuclear energy and that the gameplay mechanisms utilize “limited engagement” or a form of operationalized weakness in order to communicate victimhood to players. The article concludes with an examination of how the in-game disaster photography inscribes players’ actions, making it more difficult to subsume these images into a generalized account of natural disaster trauma.

Game and creation are activities which have good potential for computational thinking skills. In this paper we present T-Maze, an economical tangible programming tool for children aged 5–9 to build computer programs in maze games by placing wooden blocks. Through the use of computer vision technology, T-Maze provides a live programming interface with real-time graphical and voice feedback. We conducted a user study with 7 children using T-Maze to play two levels of maze-escape games and create their own mazes. The results show that T-Maze is not only easy to use, but also has the potential to help children cultivate computational thinking like abstraction, problem decomposition, and creativity.

Previous studies have examined media portrayals of total control and institutionalization in prison, and a few studies have considered the connection between media portrayals and depictions of prison escape attempts. The current inquiry seeks to fill this gap in the literature through an autoethnographic case study of the video game The Escapists, in which players assume the role of an inmate whose ultimate goal is to escape prison amid an environment populated by other nonplayer character inmates and guards. In this inquiry, specific attention is paid to the player’s experiences as a subject of control from guards, inmates, surveillance systems, and the prison construct, and how these interactions contextualize and potentially motivate the player to attempt escape. Connections between virtual and real-world escape attempts are discussed. Conceptual and theoretical links between total control and interactive experiences of simulated prison life, as well as implications of this study, are examined.

This article proposes the possibility of an attunement to the environment through media. The aim of this work is to observe how one might attune and re-tune their consideration of the environment, and environmental issues, through the media they make and consume. It does so by examining the short video Memories of Australia, made by Andrew Svanberg Hamilton. The video was crafted in the digital game development software Unreal Engine 4, and this is addressed in part via a discussion of Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulation, considering the idea of a lack of real-world referentials. This lack of geographic specificity is latterly considered through Timothy Morton’s notion of nonlocality, and Marc Augé’s concept of non-places. Primarily, though, a formal analysis of Hamilton’s piece is considered alongside digital game studies research, specifically models of player involvement and the concept of embodied textuality as means of measuring and modelling engagement not just with videogames, but with media more broadly. Hamilton’s video uses elements captured using photogrammetry, but he has replicated these pieces multiple times in order to craft a three-dimensional world. The idea of attunement is drawn from Kathleen Stewart’s work, and is re-offered here as a means of engaging with media and surviving the uncertain times to come. The article considers how a digitally constructed environment might be attuned to by the viewer, through Hamilton’s creation of a world based on memory and sensation, rather than any real-world geographical elements; this emotional resonance is proffered not only as an example of incorporation, but also as a tool for communicating other environmental attunements and issues.

A primary goal of the Virtual Reality ( VR ) community is to build fully immersive and presence-inducing environments with seamless and natural interactions. To reach this goal, researchers are investigating how to best directly use our hands to interact with a virtual environment using hand tracking. Most studies in this field require participants to perform repetitive tasks. In this article, we investigate if results of such studies translate into a real application and game-like experience. We designed a virtual escape room in which participants interact with various objects to gather clues and complete puzzles. In a between-subjects study, we examine the effects of two input modalities (controllers vs. hand tracking) and two grasping visualizations (continuously tracked hands vs. virtual hands that disappear when grasping) on ownership, realism, efficiency, enjoyment, and presence. Our results show that ownership, realism, enjoyment, and presence increased when using hand tracking compared to controllers. Visualizing the tracked hands during grasps leads to higher ratings in one of our ownership questions and one of our enjoyment questions compared to having the virtual hands disappear during grasps as is common in many applications. We also confirm some of the main results of two studies that have a repetitive design in a more realistic gaming scenario that might be closer to a typical user experience.

In the scientific work has been carried out an interpretation of Hermann Hesse’s novels «Steppenwolf» and «The Game of Beads» on the basis of the dialogue «author – hero – reader», built on the principles of intellectual play. It has been illustrated that the category of play – as an artistic, magical element of creativity, as a means of creating and functioning of cultural values, as an artistic communication – is conceptual for the artist. The purpose of this game is the reader endowed with rich imagination. The model of the ideal reader, who is able to co-create and agrees to accept all the rules of the proposed game, laid down in the literary texts by H. Hesse. Emphasis is placed on the fact that philosophy and aesthetics are the basic, integral principles of Hesse’s game concept. The artist proceeds from the standpoint of aesthetics (as a way of escape from reality), and thanks to this aesthetics seeks a philosophical understanding of the depths of his own subconscious and conscious, solving this problem by the act of creation. Hesse’s literary works were a kind of playful communication with his own depths, which the author was not afraid to make «on people». The constant duality of the characters, the study of variations in life paths, the formation of a spiritual personality, the search for truth – the problems that most concerned Hesse, and therefore were covered in his works. The author «played» in the construction of his own personality, not forgetting for a moment about the annoying reality that was the source of his real «I». The game helps him to overcome this reality, gives him the opportunity to be «who the soul wants to be» and «where» he aspires. Most of the writer’s works are based on the game of intellect, but Hesse needs the reader’s trust, he does not intend to deceive him, on the contrary – the author wants to make him his partner in creating the world of novels: he plays «beauty» and offers to do so to his readers. It is proved that the concept of the game for Hesse is the principle of organization of the literary text and the basis of literary communication. The game is the main basis of the dialogue «author – hero – reader». Keywords: Hermann Hesse, «Steppenwolf», «The Game of Beads», dialogue «author – hero – reader», intellectual game.

Netaji’s Secret Service ‘Indian National Army’ essentially revolutionary organisation. It is well known the leftist played a crucial role in Subhas Bose getting elected as the President of the Tripuri Congress. In 1939 found the Left Consolidation Committee (LCC), but the tenuous coalition of the leftists in the Committee soon broke but CPI remained with Bose. However, after the Second World War broke out, Bose decided to leave India. The Communists helped Subhas in his escape; the main operator was Achhar Singh Chhina, who was best known by the Soviets as Larkin, Akbar Mia of Forward Bloc and Ajoy Ghosh of CPI. Bose’s after the escape to contact the Soviet leaders for enlisting them as India’s ally, was also helped by the communists. In the War theatre, Subhas Bose Was in favour of Link. Before his departure, All India Revolutionary Committee code-named ‘MARY’ in Delhi communicated with Kabul link station codenamed ‘OlIVER’ and with German link codenamed ‘TOM’. T. Holt Writes ‘channel “SILVER” was one of the great deception double agent channels of the war, real name Bhagat Ram Talwar’. 1 ‘SILVER’ the game Master, one of the closest person of Bose, was a communist, a Master of disguise, Knowledgeable about the various revolutionaries Movements in India. Silver kept the soviet posted on his work as the Link between the Axis legation in Kabul and Bose sympathisers in India. Silver’s intelligence system as a high-grade source. But Silver remained a Communist first and foremost, and whenever he entered Afghanistan, practical control passed to the Soviets. Eventually Bose could make his way to Rangoon where a new arrangement was made by the Axis. Subhas codenamed ‘RHINO’ sponsored by the Japanese and codename ‘ELEPHANT’ sponsored by the Germans to remain in touch with ‘MARY’ in Delhi. Netaji set up a pro-Axis Provisional Government of Free India in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. PG operated successfully military deception plans with military intelligent tactics. Netaji began to broadcast anti-British Propaganda as the Voice of Azad Hind. He made it clear that neither his armed forces nor his Azad Hind Radio Service could be used for anti-Soviet purposes. Unfortunately, the strategic deception role of Netaji remained secret for decades.

The Polish avant-garde, as is well known, was eager to activate colonial and racial fantasies. For example, the figure of the “white Negro” was used by the Futurists as a figure signaling – at first glance invisible, but real – foreignness, non-privilegedness and anti-systemicity. “The Negro” in the Futurist narrative was an unidentified Other. His only distinguishing feature was his racial identity associated with a state of uncivilization. From the perspective of today’s sensibilities, shaped by years of development and application of postcolonial theories, this was an ambiguous figure: politically and ethically suspect. In this text, I argue that in order to understand it well and avoid presentist readings, it is necessary to see, if only in a brief and selective approximation, the discursive field of the scientific press and journalism of the time. The avant-garde and, more specifically, Witkacy’s tropical fantasies were provocations whose scale and nature may escape the modern viewer. Therefore, based on the sketchily reconstructed discursive background of the Polish interwar period, and the issues of race and European colonialism present in it, I will attempt to reach the meaning of these provocations at that time and understand the perverse game that the Polish avant-garde undertook with these themes. And against this background – to show the uniqueness of Witkacy, who, unlike his avant-garde contemporaries, showed the political nature of the opposition of civilization and savagery, complicating the colonial imaginary of his own era and formulating catastrophic predictions for the European future.

Privacy Policies inform users about how their personal data is managed while fulfilling the obligatory requirements. Past studies have shown that users often do not read privacy policies, cannot comprehend the long and complex policy documents, and resort to providing their consent without knowledge. To enable users to make an informed decision, we explored serious games as a new medium to improve their understanding of privacy policies. In a mobile escape room game, users engage with the data collection and processing by solving different puzzles. We validated the game concept in a user study by comparing it to a conventional textual policy. Our findings show that the game promoted greater information recall in users. However, a trade-off seems to exist between frustration, duration and understanding. We show strategies for turning a privacy policy into game elements for a mobile escape room game and incorporating privacy information into different puzzles. We recommend that the choice of a privacy policy format should vary in a case-by-case scenario and should accommodate different target audiences.

The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience." In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can be described as "immersive" and possessing a sense of presence signals a concentrated effort aimed at what might be described as a colonization of the senses – a digital Manifest Destiny that envisions the mind as capital, a condition I am calling military utopias of mind and machine. Military utopias of mind and machine aspire to have all the warfare without the trauma by instrumentalizing the senses within a closed system. In the paper, I argue that such utopias of control and containment are fragile and volatile fantasies that suffer from the potential repudiation of their very aims. I turn to storytelling, listening, and conversations as avenues towards healing, allowing people to ascribe meaning to difficult life experiences, affirm social relationships, and escape containment within a closed language system.

Massively Multiplayer Online Economic Games involving the creation and trade of virtual goods are rapidly gaining in popularity. Although most individuals participate for their own social or entertainment purposes, a substantial number of participants rely on the sale of virtual goods as an important source of real wealth. To date, these economic returns have largely escaped taxation due to the lack of a well-developed body of tax law in this area. This paper examines whether and when taxes should be assessed on virtual world income. We conclude that an in-game sale of a virtual asset constitutes an income realization event for federal income tax purposes. In contrast to prior research, we also suggest that members be allowed to defer recognizing their virtual earnings until they are converted into real world currency.

Real-life room-escape games are ludic activities in which participants enter a room in order to get out of it only after solving some riddles. In this paper, we explain a Room Escape teaching experience developed in the Engineering School at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The goal of this activity is to increase student’s motivation and to improve their learning on two courses of the second year in the Computer Engineering degree: Computer Networksand Information and Security.

O objetivo do estudo foi realizar revisão sistemática com metanálise dos efeitos fisiológicos da prática de exergames em comparação com as mesmas atividades realizadas de maneira convencional. Para tal, foram utilizadas as bases de dados PubMed, Science Direct, Google Scholar e a revista Games For Health Journal, utilizando os seguintes descritores ou termos: “health video game” OR “active video game” AND “energy expenditure”; exergam* AND “physical activity”; exergam* AND comparison; exergam* compared to real; exergam* AND “real game”; exergam* AND “real sports”. Para serem incluídos, as pesquisas necessitavam ser originais e comparar atividades realizadas com exergame (EXG) com as mesmas atividades tradicionais. Os estudos que passaram pelos filtros de busca foram submetidos à escala PEDro de qualidade metodológica. Foram encontrados 2928 estudos potencialmente relevantes. Após avaliação por títulos, foram lidos 33 resumos, sendo que 13 artigos foram excluídos por serem duplicatas. Após avaliação dos resumos dos estudos considerados incluídos, sete foram selecionados para entrar na revisão, e três estudos localizados na literatura cinza foram incluídos. A metanálise apontou não haver diferença significativa para frequência cardíaca (p=0,248), percepção subjetiva de esforço (p=0,295), gasto energético (p=0,664) e consumo de oxigênio (p=0,455) entre atividades com EXG e atividades convencionais. Conclui-se que não há diferença entre EXG e atividades convencionais nas variáveis fisiológicas.

Escape rooms exist in various forms, including real-life facilities, board games, and digital implementations. The underlying idea is always the same: players have to solve many diverse puzzles to (virtually) escape from a locked room. Within the last decade, we witnessed a rapidly increasing popularity of such games, which also amplified the amount of related research. However, the respective academic landscape is mostly fragmented in its current state, lacking a common model and vocabulary that would withstand these games' variety. This manuscript aims to establish such a foundation for the analysis and construction of escape rooms. In a first step, we derive a high-level design framework from prior literature. Then, as our main contribution, we establish an atomic puzzle taxonomy that closes the gap between the analog and digital domains. The taxonomy is developed in multiple steps: we compose a basic structure based on previous literature and systematically refine it by analyzing 39 analog and digital escape room games, including recent virtual reality representatives. The final taxonomy consists of mental, physical, and emotional challenges, thereby providing a robust and approachable basis for future works across all application domains that deal with escape rooms or puzzles in general.

Real-time adaptive sampling is a new technique recently proposed for efficient importance sampling in realtime Monte Carlo sampling in subsurface scattering. It adaptively places samples based on variance tracking to help escape the uncanny valley of subsurface rendering. However, the occasional performance drop due to temporal lighting dynamics (e.g., guns or lights turning on and off) could hinder adoption in games or other applications where smooth high frame rate is preferred. In this paper we propose a novel usage of Control Variates (CV) in the sample domain instead of shading domain to maintain a consistent low pass time. Our algorithm seamlessly reduces to diffuse with zero scattering samples for sub-pixel scattering. We propose a novel joint-optimization algorithm for sample count and CV coefficient estimation. The main enabler is our novel time-variant covariance updating method that helps remove the effect of recent temporal dynamics from variance tracking. Since bandwidth is critical in real-time rendering, a solution without adding any extra textures is also provided.

In a classical random walk model, a walker moves through a deterministic d-dimensional integer lattice in one step at a time, without drifting in any direction. In a more advanced setting, a walker randomly moves over a randomly configured (non equidistant) lattice jumping a random number of steps. In some further variants, there is a limited access walker’s moves. That is, the walker’s movements are not available in real time. Instead, the observations are limited to some random epochs resulting in a delayed information about the real-time position of the walker, its escape time, and location outside a bounded subset of the real space. In this case we target the virtual first passage (or escape) time. Thus, unlike standard random walk problems, rather than crossing the boundary, we deal with the walker’s escape location arbitrarily distant from the boundary. In this paper, we give a short historical background on random walk, discuss various directions in the development of random walk theory, and survey most of our results obtained in the last 25–30 years, including the very recent ones dated 2020–21. Among different applications of such random walks, we discuss stock markets, stochastic networks, games, and queueing.

A seca agrícola está diretamente relacionada ao déficit entre o valor de evapotranspiração real (ETR) estimado em um certo período e o valor climatologicamente esperado desse parâmetro no mesmo período. Conseqüentemente, tais valores esperados de ETR são dependentes das características climáticas de cada região. Assim, esse estudo objetivou verificar, por meio do teste Kolmogorov-Smirnov, o ajuste de séries de ETR decendias no estado de São Paulo às distribuições gama, normal, log-normal e beta. O cálculo dos balanços hídricos climáticos teve como base dados diários de temperatura do ar e precipitação pluvial de 13 localidades do estado. O uso da função densidade probabilidade beta é recomendado para a caracterização da variabilidade temporal do regime de ETR e, portanto, para o desenvolvimento de um índice de seca padronizado que permita monitorar a evolução desse fenômeno em escala temporal e espacial.

Augmented reality (AR) immersion enables virtual objects and real environments to coexist and encourage experimentation with phenomena that are not possible in the real world. Augmented reality is generating new opportunities for the development of ubiquity within educational environments. The objective of this study was to analyze the impact that the integration of ubiquitous game approaches with augmented reality has on learning. A quasi-experimental study was carried out with 91 sixth-grade primary school students; the learning scenario was designed and the augmented reality application “WallaMe” was selected for use in five sessions of a didactic unit in Art Education. Through pretest and posttest procedures, academic performance and information search skills were evaluated, and, a Likert scale analyzed the motivation and collaboration variables among the students. The results showed that the experimental group obtained statistically significant improvements in the academic performance of the subject, motivation, in the search for, and analysis of, information, level of fun and collaboration. The conclusion is that the dynamic activities managed in the intervention, which made use of augmented reality and localization, benefit teaching-learning processes, and encourage innovation and improvement through educational technology. La inmersión de la realidad aumentada (RA) propicia la coexistencia de objetos virtuales y entornos reales que permiten la experimentación con fenómenos que no son posibles en el mundo real. La realidad aumentada está generando una nueva oportunidad de crecimiento de la ubicuidad en los entornos educativos. El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el impacto que tiene sobre el aprendizaje la integración educativa de los enfoques de juego ubicuo con realidad aumentada. Se realizó un estudio cuasi experimental con 91 alumnos de sexto curso de Educación Primaria, se diseñó el escenario de aprendizaje y se seleccionó la aplicación de realidad aumentada «WallaMe», que fue utilizada en cinco sesiones de una unidad didáctica del área de Educación Artística. Mediante el procedimiento de pretest y postest se evaluaron el rendimiento académico y las habilidades de búsqueda de información, y una escala Likert analizó las variables motivación y colaboración entre los estudiantes. Los resultados mostraron que el grupo experimental obtiene mejoras estadísticamente significativas en la motivación hacia el aprendizaje, el rendimiento académico de la materia y en la competencia digital. En definitiva, se concluye que las actividades dinámicas manejadas en la intervención, que hacen uso de realidad aumentada y localización, aportan beneficios en los procesos de enseñanza aprendizaje, y propician una innovación y mejora educativa con el uso de la tecnología educativa.

Crowd simulations have many benefits over real-life research such as in computer games, architecture and entertainment. One of the key elements in this study is to include elements of decision-making into the crowd. The aim of this simulator is to simulate the features of an intelligent agent to escape from crowded environments especially in one-way corridor, two-way corridor and four-way intersection. The addition of the graphical user interface enables intuitive and fast handling in all settings and features of the Intelligent Agent Simulator and allows convenient research in the field of intelligent behaviour in massive crowd. This paper describes the development of a simulator by using the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL), starting from the production of training data, the simulation process, until the simulation results. The Social Force Model (SFM) is used to generate the motion of agents and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to predict the next step for intelligent agent.

Duringthesecond decadeof theIndependence, i.e. at thebeginningof thetwenty-first centurythe increasing number of performances trying to escape the tradition of anti-mimeticrepresentation and to re-engage with reality appeared on the Lithuanian theatre stage.Fragments of everyday reality, ?real?personalities onstage, autobiographic narratives, historicdocuments, authentic spaces were becoming increasingly popular, allowing some critics toproclaim theeagerly awaited ?return to realism?. However, acloser analysisof thistendency ofcontemporary Lithuanian theatre can lead one to believe that such performances do notdemonstratetheurgeto return to thetraditional notion of realist representation, but rather toplayfully flirt with reality and its reception in the fictional world of theatre. In the light oftheoretical and practical revisions of the concepts of reality and its representation, youngLithuanian theatrecreatorsarenot somuch interested in truthful representation of reality, butrather in a performative investigation of processes of representation and their effects onaudience perception. One might add that while engaging with the codes of reality or ?real?material onstage, contemporary Lithuanian artists try to dismantle the binary oppositionbetween realistic representation and anti-realistic playfulness, which dominated the symbolicmentality of modern Lithuanian theatre. Various forms of playing with reality and fiction onthe Lithuanian theatre stage, their underlying principles and wider cultural implications ofsuch games are the object of investigation of this article. A comparative analysis ofperformances from Lithuania and Estonia will help to highlight the specific character ofLithuanian theatre as well as to define the patterns of playing with reality present on thepost-Soviet Lithuanian stage.

The number of new COVID-19 cases continues to rise rapidly in many countries despite vaccination. The best way to counter the spread of COVID-19 is self-protection. This study documents the development of a web-based serious game (WSG-COVID-19.SP) to promote effective learning strategies for self-protection against COVID-19 and to test the game’s content validity and usability. WSG-COVID-19.SP was developed using situated learning theory and diagnostic feedback mechanism. The game includes six situation storylines with 17 learning objectives. It uses a problem-solving approach to foster practices such as wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing. Portfolio analysis was used to diagnose learning problems and report on the learning process. An overall summary index—the scale-level content validity index (S-CVI)—was used to evaluate content validity. Usability was tested through a website survey from 71 students from one university to gauge their technological acceptance and the game’s capability to promote future self-protection behaviors. The S-CVI was 0.81. Usability and acceptability were neither related to the users’ college major (whether it is information technology-related) nor to gender. Among the respondents, 84.5% agreed to continue with the self-protection practice as they were motivated by the real-time diagnostic function. The WSG-COVID-19.SP game system has adequate content validity and a high user satisfaction rating. Los casos de COVID-19 siguen aumentando rápidamente en muchos países a pesar de la vacunación. La mejor forma de combatirlo es la protección personal. En este estudio desarrollamos un juego serio de la web (WSG-COVID-19.SP) para promover las estrategias de aprendizaje para protegerse contra el COVID-19. También probamos la validez y usabilidad del sistema. WSG-COVID-19.SP fue desarrollado de acuerdo a la teoría situada de aprendizaje y retroalimentación diagnóstica. Contiene seis historias con 17 objetivos de aprendizaje. Se usa un enfoque de resolución de problemas para promover el uso de mascarillas, lavado de manos y distanciamiento social. Se usó el análisis de portafolio para identificar los problemas y el proceso de aprendizaje. El índice global de validez de contenido de la escala (S-CVI) fue utilizado para evaluar su eficacia. La usabilidad fue probada mediante una encuesta de web de 71 estudiantes de una universidad para evaluar su aceptación tecnológica y la capacidad del juego para promover la protección personal. El S-CVI era 0,81. La usabilidad y aceptabilidad no correspondían con la especialización del usuario (ya sea que esté relacionada con la tecnología de la información) ni con el género. Un 84,5% de los usuarios quería continuar la práctica porque estaban motivados por los resultados diagnósticos. WSG-COVID-19.SP exhibe un contenido válido y una alta satisfacción del usuario.

Abstract Progress toward a revolutionary metaverse is currently underway, but it is being led by large tech companies, like Meta, who aim to build on their current platforms and extend their already exploitative internet products. These efforts dominate the conversation around what the metaverse can be and whether it can be conceived as a collection of viable as spaces designed for collaboration, agency, and empathy. Metaverse projects led by individual artists are small in scope but powerful as alternatives to mainstream efforts in their ability to effect change, making them important case studies for what is possible for the making of the metaverse. This article offers a working definition for the imagined metaverse and the current proto metaverse and shifts the focus away from mainstream tech products and toward individual artistic experiments to highlight the lesser-known experiments that are shaping the metaverse in meaningful ways. It discusses the metaverse as a form of escape and counters the idea that it is thus limited to a social space that defaults to phatic communication about important issues. By drawing on theories of play and critically examining metaverse-based artworks that have a social mission, this article aims to show that, precisely because they are like computer games, metaverse projects are separate from but integrated with reality and allow imagination and experimentation to come together. Worlds created in the metaverse can be inspiring and resourceful sites for political activist ideas and knowledge-based understandings of the real world. Finally, it identifies three key attributes of the proto metaverse that allow for purposeful interaction and the possibility of knowledge acquisition. Four projects based in the proto metaverse are closely analyzed and evaluated against these observations to demonstrate examples of artistic practice grounded in the use of a kind of virtual flânerie – a reimagining of the cyberflâneur whose self-guided traversal through unknown digital territories is encouraged by curiosity and purpose – to experience, learn about, and feel inspired by the work’s overarching social activist message.

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar as potencialidades da utilização de um documento eclesiástico como fonte de reflexões para temática das sensibilidades religiosas brasileiras oitocentistas. Para tal, utilizo uma correspondência, enviada em 1851, assinada pelo Padre Católico Secular: João Batista da Mota Veloso (1818 – 1882), destinada ao Governo da Província do Rio Grande do Sul. A investigação seguiu modelos metodológicos da História Social, recorrendo ao método da busca onomástica, a reconstrução de micro-trajetórias, e aos jogos de escala. Assim, devido ao ineditismo deste tipo de aporte teórico-metodológico e documental, leremos uma microanálise do “texto-chave” da correspondência. O resultado da investigação, por fim, fomenta discussões sobre alguns conceitos e contextos que se referem à história religiosa brasileira oitocentista.Palavras-chave: João Batista da Mota Veloso; Sensibilidades; Conflitos religiosos; Cachoeira do Sul. AbstractThis paper intends to analyze the potential uses of an ecclesiastical document as a source of reflections on the theme of 19th-century Brazilian religious sensibilities. To this aim, I use a correspondence, sent in 1851, signed by the Secular Catholic Father: João Batista da Mota Veloso (1818 - 1882), addressed to the Government of the Province of Rio Grande do Sul. The investigation followed theoretical and methodological models of Social History, using the method of onomastic search, the reconstruction of micro-trajectories, and games of scale. Thus, due to the unprecedented nature of this type of theoretical, methodological, and documentary contribution, we will read a microanalysis of the “key text” of correspondence. The result of the investigation, finally, fosters discussions about some concepts and contexts concerning to 19th-century Brazilian religious history.Keywords: João Batista da Mota Veloso; Sensibilities; Religious conflicts; Cachoeira do Sul.

Introduction Such symptoms as hard, complex, bodily or mental feelings, that turn our everyday life into a hell, at first, lead us to a doctor, and then - to a psychotherapist. A sick man is keen to get rid of a symptom. A doctor prescribes medication, that is ought to eliminate a symptom. A psychotherapist searches for a reason of the problem that needs to be removed. There is such an idea that a neurotic symptom, in particular, an anxiety - is a pathological (spare or extra) response of a body. It is generally believed that such anxiety doesn’t have some real, objective reasons and that it is the result of a nervous system disorder, or some disruption of a cognitive sphere etc. Meanwhile, it is known that in the majority of cases, medical examinations of anxious people show that they don’t have any organic damages, including nervous system. It often happens that patients even wish doctors have found at least any pathology and have begun its treatment. And yet - there is no pathology. All examinations indicate a high level of functionality of a body and great performance of the brain's work. Doctors throw their hands up, as they can't cure healthy people. One of my clients told me her story of such medical examinations (which I’ll tell you with her permission). She said that it was more than 10 years ago. So, when she told her doctor all of her symptoms - he seemed very interested in it. He placed a helmet with electrodes on her head and wore some special glasses, when, according to her words, he created some kind of stressful situation for her brain, as she was seeing some flashings of bright pictures in her eyes. She said that he had been bothered with her for quite a long time, and at the end of it he had told her that her brain had been performing the best results in all respects. He noted that he’d rarely got patients with such great health indicators. My client asked the doctor how rare that was. And he answered: “one client in two or three months.” At that moment my client didn’t know whether to be relieved, flattered or sad. But since then, when someone told her that anxiety was a certain sign of mental problems, or problems with the nervous system, or with a body in general, she answered that people who had anxiety usually had already got all the required medical examinations sufficiently, and gave them the advice to go through medical screening by themselves before saying something like that. Therefore, we see a paradoxical situation, when some experts point to a neurotic anxiety as if it is a kind of pathology, in other words - some result of a nervous system disorder. Other specialists in the same situation talk about cognitive impairments. And some, after all the examinations, are ready to send such patients into space Main text I don’t agree with the statement that any neurotic anxiety that happens is excessive and unfounded. It often happens that there is objective, specific and real causes for appearance of anxiety conditions. And these causes require solutions. And it’s not about some organic damages of the brain or nervous system. The precondition that may give a rise to anxiety disorder is the development of such a life story that at some stage becomes too toxic - when, on the one hand, a person interacts with the outside world in a way that destroys his or her personality, and, on the other hand, this person uses repression and accepts such situation as common and normal. Repression - is an essential condition for the development of a neurotic symptom. Sigmund Freud was the first who pointed this out. Repression is such a defense mechanism that helps people separate themselves from some unpleasant feelings of discomfort (pain) while having (external or internal) irritations. It is the situation when, despite the presence of irritations and painful feelings, a person, however, doesn't feel any of it and is not aware of them in his or her conscious mind. Repression creates the situation of so-called emotional anesthesia. As a result, a displacement takes place, so a body starts to signal about the existing toxic life situation via a symptom. Anxiety disorder is usually an appropriate response (symptom) of a healthy body to an unhealthy life situation, which is seen by a person as normal. And it’s common when such a person is surrounded by others (close people), who tend to benefit from such situation, and so they actively maintain this state of affairs, whether it is conscious for them or not. At the beginning of a psychotherapy almost all clients insist that everything is good in their lives, even great, as it is like in everyone else’s life. They say that they have only one problem, which is that goddamn symptom. So they focus all of their attention on that symptom. They are not interested in all the other aspects of their life, and they show their irritation when it comes to talking about it. People want to get rid of it, whatever it takes, but they often tend to keep their lives the way that it was. In such cases a psychotherapist is dealing with the resistance of clients, trying to turn their attention from a symptom to their everyday situation that includes their way of thinking, interactions with themselves and with others and with the external world in order to have the opportunity to see the real problem, to live it through, to rethink and to change the story of their lives. For better understanding about how it works I want to tell you three allegorical tales. The name of the first tale is “A frog in boiling water”. There is one scientific anecdote and an assumption (however, it is noted that such experiments were held in 19 century), that if we put a frog in a pot with warm water and start to slowly heat the water, then this frog get used to the temperature rise and stays in a hot water, the frog doesn’t fight the situation, slowly begins to lose its energy and at the last moment it couldn’t find enough strength and energy to get out of that pot. But if we throw a frog abruptly in hot water - it jumps out very quickly. It is likely that a frog, that is seating in boiling water, will have some responses of the body (symptoms). For example, the temperature of its body will rise, the same as the color of it, etc., that is an absolutely normal body response to the existing situation. But let us keep fantasizing further. Imagine a cartoon where such a frog is the magical cartoon hero, that comes to some magical cartoon doctor, shows its skin, that has changed the color, to the doctor, and asks to change the situation by removing this unpleasant symptom. So the doctor prescribes some medication to return the natural green color of the frog’s skin back. The frog gets back in its hot water. For some period of time this medication helps. But then, after a while, the frog’s body gets over the situation, and the redness of the frog's skin gets back. And the magical cartoon doctor states that the resistance of the body to this medication has increased, and each time prescribes some more and more strong drugs. In this example with the frog it is perfectly clear that the true solution of the problem requires the reduction of the water temperature in that pot. We could propose that magical cartoon frog to think and try to realize that: 1) the water in that pot is hot, and that is the reason why the skin is red; 2) the frog got used to this situation and that is why it is so unnoticeably for this frog; 3) if the temperature of the water in the pot still stay so hot, without any temperature drop, then all the medication works only temporarily; 4) if we lower the temperature in that pot - the redness disappears on its own, automatically and without any medication. Also this cartoon frog, that will go after the doctor to some cartoon physiotherapist, will face the necessity to give itself some answers for such questions as: 1) What is going on? Who has put this frog in that pot? Who is raising the temperature progressively? Who needs it? And what is the purpose or benefit for this person in that? Who benefits? 2) Why did the frog get into the pot? What are the benefits in it for the frog? Or why did the frog agree to that? 3) What does the frog lose when it gets out of this pot? What are the consequences of it for the frog? What does the frog have to face? What are the possible difficulties on the way? Who would be against the changes? With whom the frog may confront? 4) Is the frog ready to take control over its own pot in its own hands and start to regulate the temperature of the water by itself, so to make this temperature comfortable for itself? Is this frog ready to influence by itself on its own living space, to take the responsibility for it to itself? The example “A frog in boiling water” is often used as a metaphorical portrayal of the inability of people to respond (or fight back) to significant changes that slowly happen in their lives. Also this tale shows that a body, while trying to adjust to unfavorable living conditions, will react with a symptom. And it is very important to understand this symptom. Symptom - is the response of a body, it’s a way a body adjusts to some unfriendly environment. Symptom, on the one hand, informs about the existence of a problem, and from the other hand - tries to regulate this problem, at least in some way (like, to remove or reduce), at the level on which it can do it. The process is similar to those when, for example, in a body, while it suffers from some infectious disease, the temperature rises. Thus, on the one hand, the temperature informs about the existence of some infection. On the other hand, the temperature increase creates in a body the situation that is damaging for the infection. So, it would be good to think about in what way does an anxiety symptom help a body that is surrounded by some toxic life situation. And this is a good topic for another article. Here I want to emphasize that all the attempts to remove a symptom without a removal of a problem, without changing the everyday life story, may lead to strengthening of the symptom in the body. Even though the removal of a symptom without elimination of its cause has shown success, it only means that the situation was changed into the condition of asymptomatic existence of a problem. And it is, in its essence, a worse situation. For example, it can cause an occurrence of cancer. The tale “A frog in boiling water” is about the tendency of people to treat a symptom, instead of seeing their real problems, as its cause, and trying to solve it. People don’t want to see their problems, but it doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist. The problem does exist and it continues to destroy a person, unnoticeably for him or her. A person with panic disorder could show us anxiety that is out of control (fear, panic), which, by its essence, seems to exist without any logical reason. Meanwhile the body of such a person could be in such processes that are similar to those that occur in the conditions of some real dangers, when the instinct for self-preservation is triggered and an automatic response of a body to fight or flight implements for its full potential. We can see or feel signs of this response, for example, in cases when some person tries to avoid some real or imaginary danger via attempts to escape (the feeling of fear), or tries to handle the situation by some attempts to fight (the feeling of anger). As I mentioned before, many doctors believe that such fear is pathological, as there is no real reason for such intense anxiety. They may see the cause of the problem in worrisome temper, so they try to remove specifically anxiety rather than help such patients to understand specific reason of their anxiety, they use special psychotherapeutic methods that are designed to help clients to develop logical thinking, so it must help them to realize the groundlessness of their anxiety. In my point of view, such anxiety often has specific, real reasons, when this response of a body, fight or flight, is absolutely appropriate, but not excessive or pathological. Inadequacy, in fact, is in the unconsciousness, but not in the reactions of a body. For a better understanding of the role of anxiety in some toxic environment, that isn’t realized, I want to tell you another allegorical tale called “The wolf and the hare”. Let us imagine that two cages were brought together in one room. The wolf was inside one cage and the hare was in another. The cages were divided by some kind of curtain that makes it impossible for them to see each other. At this point a question arises whether the animals react to each other in some way in such a situation, or not? I think that yes, they will. Since there are a lot of other receptors that participate in the receiving and processing of the sensory information. As well as sight and hearing, we have of course a range of other senses. For example, animals have a strong sense of smell. It is well known that people, along with verbal methods of communicating information, like language and speaking, also have other means of transmitting information - non-verbal, such as tone of voice, intonation, look, gestures, body language, facial expressions etc., that gives us the opportunity to receive additional information from each other. The lie detector works by using this principle: due to detecting non-verbal signals, it distinguishes the level of the accuracy of information that is transmitted. It is assumed, that about 30% of information, that we receive from the environment, comes through words, vision, hearing, touches etc. This is the information that we are aware of in our consciousness, so we could consciously (logically) use it to be guided by. And approximately 70% of everyday information about the reality around us we receive non-verbally, and this information in the majority of cases could remain in us without any recognition. It is the situation when we’ve already known something, and we even have already started to respond to it via our body, but we still don’t know logically and consciously that we know it. We can observe the responses of our own body without understanding what are the reasons for such responses. We can recognize this unconscious information through certain pictures, associations, dreams, or with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a great tool that can help to recognize the information from the unconscious mind, so that it can be logically processed further on, in other words, a person then receives the opportunity to indicate the real problems and to make right decisions. But let us return to the tale where the hare and the wolf stay in one room and don’t see each other, and, maybe, don’t hear, though - feel. These feelings (in other words - non-verbal information that the hare receives) activate a certain response in the hare’s body. And it reacts properly and adequately to the situation, for instance, the body starts to produce adrenaline and runs the response “fight or flight”. So the hare starts to behave accordingly and we could see the following symptoms: the hare is running around his cage, fussing, having some tremor and an increased heart rate, etc.. And now let us imagine this tale in some cartoon. The hare stays in its house, and the wolf wanders about this house. But the hare doesn’t see the wolf. Though the body of the hare gives some appropriate responses. And then that cartoon hare goes to a cartoon doctor and asks that doctor to give it some pill from its tremor and the increased heart rate. And in general asks to treat in some way this incomprehensible, confusing, totally unreasonable severe anxiety. If we try to replace the situation from this fairy-tale to a life story, we could see that it fits well to the script of interdependent relationships, where there are a couple “a victim and an aggressor”, and where such common for our traditional families’ occurrences as a domestic family violence, psychological and physical abuse take place. Only in 2019 a law was passed that follows the European norms and gives a legislative definition of such concepts as psychological domestic abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, bullying, that criminalizes all of these occurrences, establishes the punishment and directly points to people that could be a potential abuser. Among them are: a husband towards his wife, parents towards their children, a wife towards her husband, a superior towards a subordinate, a teacher towards his or her students, children towards each other etc.. When it comes to recognition of something as unacceptable, it seems more easy to put to that category such occurrences as physical and sexual abuse, as we could see here some obvious events. For example, beating or sexual harassment. Our society is ready to respond to these incidents in more or less adequate way, and to recognize them as a crime. But it is harder to deal with the recognition of psychological abuse as an offence. Psychological abuse in our families is common. Psychological abuse occurs through such situations, when one person, while using different psychological manipulations, such as violation of psychological borders, imposition of feeling of guilty or shame, etc., force another person to give up his or her needs and desires, and so in such a way make this person live another’s life. Such actions have an extremely negative effect on the mental health of these people, just as much as physical abuse. It can destroy a person from the inside, ruin self-esteem and a feeling of self-worth, create the situation of absolute dependence such victim from an abuser, including financial dependence etc.. It often happens that psychological abuse takes place against the backdrop of demonstrations of care and love. So you've got this story about the wolf and the hare, that are right next to each other, and the shield between two of them is a repression - a psychological defense mechanism, when a person turns a blind eye to such offences, that take place in his or her own life and towards him or her. And this person considers this as normal, doesn't realize, doesn't have a resource to realize, that it is a crime. Most importantly - doesn’t feel anything, as a repression takes place. But a body responds in a right way - from a certain point of the existence of such a toxic situation the response “fight or flight” is launched in a body at full, in other words - the fear and anxiety with the associated symptoms. The third allegorical tale I called “Defective suit”, which I read in the book of Clarissa Pinkola Estés with the name “Running With the Wolves". “Once one man came to a tailor and started to try on a suit. When he was standing in front of a mirror, he saw that the costume had uneven edges. - Don’t worry, - said the tailor. - If you hold the short edge of the suit by your left hand - nobody notices it. But then the man saw that a lapel of a jacket folded up a little bit. - It's nothing. You only need to turn your head and to nail it by your chin. The customer obeyed, but when he put on trousers, he saw that they were pulling. - All right, so just hold your trousers like this by your right hand - and everything will be fine, - the tailor comforts him. The client agreed with him and took the suit. The next day he put on his new suit and went for a walk, while doing everything exactly in the way that the tailor told him to. He waddled in a park, while holding the lapel by his chin, and holding the short edge of the suit by his left hand, and holding his trousers by his right hand. Two old men, who were playing checkers, left the game and started to watch him. - Oh, God! - said one of them. - Look at that poor cripple. - Oh, yes - the limp - is a disaster. But I'm wondering, where did he get such a nice suit?” Clarissa wrote: “The commentary of the second old man reflects the common response of the society to a woman, who built a great reputation for herself, but turned into a cripple, while trying to save it. “Yes, she is a cripple, but look how great her life is and how lovely she looks.” When the “skin” that we put on ourselves towards society is small, we become cripples, but try to hide it. While fading away, we try to waddle perky, so everyone could see that we are doing really well, everything is great, everything is fine”. As for me, this tale is also about the process of forming a symptom in a situation when one person tries very hard to match to another one, whether it is a husband, a wife or parents. It’s about a situation when such a person always tries to support the other one, while giving up his or her own needs and causing oneself harm in such a way by feeling a tension every day, that becomes an inner normality. And so this person doesn’t give oneself a possibility to relax, to be herself (or himself), to be spontaneous, free. As a result, in this situation the person, who was supported, looks perfect from the outside, but those who tried to match, arises some visible defect, like a limp - a symptom. And so this person lives like a cripple, under everyday stress and tension, trying to handle it, while sacrificing herself (or himself) and trying to maintain this situation, so not to lose the general picture of a beautiful family and to avoid shame. The tailor, who made this defective suit and tells how to wear the suit properly, in order to keep things going as they are going, often is a mother who raised a problematic child and then tells another person how to deal with her child in the right way. It is the situation when a mother-in-law tells her daughter-in-law how to treat her son properly. In other words, how to support him, when to keep silent, to handle, how to fit in, so that her problematic son and this relationship in general looks perfect. Or vice versa, when a mother-in-law tells her son-in-law how to support her problematic daughter, how to fit in etc.. When, for example, a woman acts like this in her marriage and with her husband, with these excessive efforts to fit in - then after a while everybody will talk like: “Look at this lovely man: he lives with his sick wife, and their family seems perfect!”. But when such a woman becomes brave enough to relax and to just let the whole thing go, everybody will see that the relationship in her marriage isn’t perfect, and it is the other one who has problems. Each time when someone tries excessively to match up to another one, while turning oneself in some kind of a cripple, - he or she, on the one hand, supports the comfort of that person, to whom he or she tries to match up, and on the other hand - such a situation always arises in that person such conditions as a continuous tension, anxiety, fear to act spontaneously. A symptom - is like a visible defect, that shows itself through the body (and may look like some kind of injury). It is the result of a hidden inner prison. As a result of evolution, a pain tells us about a problem that is needed to be solved. When we repress our pain we can’t see our needs and our problems at full. And then a body starts to talk to us via a symptom. Psychotherapy aims for providing a movement from a symptom to a resumption of sensitivity to feelings, a resumption of the ability to feel your psychological pain, so you can realize your own toxic story. In this perspective another fairy-tale looks interesting to analyze - it is Andersen's fairytale “Princess and the Pea”. In the tale a prince wanted to find a princess to marry. There was one requirement for women candidates, so the prince could select her among commoner - high level of sensitivity, as the real princess would feel a pea through the mountain of mattresses, and so she could have the ability to feel discomfort, to be in a good contact with her body, to tell about her discomfort without such feeling as shame and guilt, and to refuse that discomfort, so to have the readiness to solve her problems and to demand from others the respect for her needs. It is common for our culture that the expression “a princess on a pea” very often uses for a negative meaning. So people who are in good contact with their body and who can demand comfort for themselves are often called capricious. At the same time the heroes who are ready to suffer and to tolerate their pain, who are able to repress (stop to feel) their pain represents a good example to be followed in our society. So, we may see the next algorithm in cases of various anxiety disorders: the existence of some toxic situation that brings some danger to a person. And we need not to be confused: a danger exists not for a body, but for a personality. A toxic live situation as well as having a panic attack is not a threat for the health of a body (that is what medical examinations show), and vice versa - it’s like every day intensive sport training, that could be good for your health only to some degree. A toxic situation destroys a person as a personality, who longs for one self’s expression; the existence of such a defense mechanism as repression - it’s a life with closed eyes, in pink glasses, when there is inability (or the absence of the desire) to see its own toxic story; 3.the presence of a symptom - a healthy response of a body “fight or flight” to some toxic situation; displacement - it’s replacement of the attention from the situation to a symptom, when a person starts to see and search for the problem in some other place, not where it really is. A symptom takes as some spare, pathological reaction that we need to get rid of. The readiness to fight the symptom arises, and that is the goal of such methods of therapy as pharmacological therapy, CBT and many others; the absence of adequate actions that are directed towards the change of a toxic situation itself. The absence of the readiness to show aggression when it comes to protect its space. All of it is a mechanism of formation of primary anxiety and preparation for launch of secondary anxiety. A complete anxiety disorder is the interaction between a primary and a secondary anxiety.

El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar el nivel de formación integral logrado en los estudiantes de educación media desde el área de educación física con base en la valoración de sus percepciones, si bien es cierto que actualmente existen numerosos estudios relacionados con el tema se encuentra que, no se aborda la manera como se debe desarrollar la formación integral y al plantear las estrategias se traza un horizonte para su ejecución. Se utilizó un diseño cuasiexperimental, en el que se aplicó un instrumento tipo escala Likert con 57 ítems como diagnóstico, validado estadísticamente (alfa de Cronbach 0.92) y por expertos, posteriormente se implementaron estrategias pedagógico-didácticas (juegos tradicionales, expresa lo que piensas, recreo-natación, práctica en gimnasio y Munzee entre otras), encaminadas al desarrollo integral, finalmente se aplicó el instrumento como postest y se estableció la significancia de las diferencias con la prueba de Wilcoxon. La muestra se configuró con 180 estudiantes de la Institución Educativa San Isidoro del municipio de Espinal, de carácter público. Los resultados de las dimensiones reflejaron cambios estadísticos significativos desde el panorama de los estudiantes, los rangos positivos son indicadores de mejor percepción sobre la formación integral desde el área de educación física. Se concluye, que la implementación de las estrategias pedagógico-didácticas desde la educación física, contribuye a la formación integral de los estudiantes, la dimensión ética y socioemocional aportan sustancialmente. Abstract. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the holistic education achieved in high school students from the area of physical education based on the assessment of their perceptions, although it is true that currently there are numerous studies related to the subject, it is found that the way in which integral training should be developed is not addressed and when proposing the strategies, a horizon is drawn for its execution. A quasi-experimental design was used, in which a Likert scale instrument was applied with 57 items as diagnosis, statistically validated (Cronbach's alpha 0.92) and by experts, later pedagogical-didactic strategies were implemented (traditional games, express what you think, recreation-swimming, gym practice and Munzee among others), aimed at integral development, finally the instrument was applied as a post-test and the significance of the differences was established with the Wilcoxon test. The sample was carried out with 180 students from San Isidro school from Espinal, which is a public school. The results of the dimensions showed significant statistical changes from the students' point of view, the positive ranges are indicators regarding a better perception of the holistic education taught in PE (physical education). In conclusion, the implementation of didactic and pedagogical strategies of PE contribute to the students' holistic education, ethical and socioemotional realm, which represent a substantial contribution.

SYSTEM ERROR: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021. 352 pages. Hardcover; $27.99. ISBN: 9780063064881. *Remember when digital technology and the internet were our favorite things? When free Facebook accounts connected us with our friends, and the internet facilitated democracy movements overseas, including the Arab Spring? So do the authors of this comprehensive book. "We shifted from a wide-eyed optimism about technology's liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots" (p. 237). *This transition has not escaped the notice of the students and faculty of Stanford University, the elite institution most associated with the rise (and sustainment) of Silicon Valley. The three authors of this book teach a popular course at Stanford on the ethics and politics of technological change, and this book effectively brings their work to the public. Rob Reich is a philosopher who is associated with Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence as well as their Center for Ethics in Society. Mehran Sahami is a computer science professor who was with Google during the startup years. Jeremy Weinstein is a political science professor with experience in government during the Obama administration. *The book is breathtakingly broad, explaining the main technical and business issues concisely but not oversimplifying, and providing the history and philosophy for context. It accomplishes all this in 264 pages, but also provides thirty-six pages of notes and references for those who want to dive deeper into some topics. The most important section is doubtless the last chapter dealing with solutions, which may be politically controversial but are well supported by the remainder of the book. *Modern computer processors have enormous computational power, and a good way to take advantage of that is to do optimization, the subject of the first chapter. Engineers love optimization, but not everything should be done as quickly and cheaply as possible! Optimization requires the choice of some quantifiable metric, but often available metrics do not exactly represent the true goal of an organization. In this case, optimizers will choose a proxy metric which they feel logically or intuitively should be correlated with their goal. The authors describe the problems which result when the wrong proxy is selected, and then excessive optimization drives that measure to the exclusion of other possibly more important factors. For example, social media companies that try to increase user numbers to the exclusion of other factors may experience serious side effects, such as the promotion of toxic content. *After that discussion on the pros and cons of optimization, the book dives into the effects of optimizing money. Venture capitalists (VCs) have been around for years, but recent tech booms have swelled their numbers. The methodology of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), originally developed by Andy Grove of Intel, became popular among the VCs of Silicon Valley, whose client firms, including Google, Twitter, and Uber, adopted it. OKR enabled most of the employees to be evaluated against some metric which management believed captured the essence of their job, so naturally the employees worked hard to optimize this quantity. Again, such a narrow view of the job has led to significant unexpected and sometimes unwanted side effects. *The big tech companies are threatened by legislation designed to mitigate some of the harm they have created. They have hired a great many lobbyists, and even overtly entered the political process where possible. In California, when Assembly Bill 5 reclassified many independent contractors as employees, the affected tech companies struck back with Proposition 22 to overturn the law. An avalanche of very expensive promotion of Proposition 22 resulted in its passage by a large margin. *It is well known that very few politicians have a technical background, and the authors speculate that this probably contributes to the libertarian leaning prominent in the tech industry. The authors go back in history to show how regulation has lagged behind technology and industrial practice. An interesting chapter addresses the philosophical question of whether democracy is up to the task of governing, or whether government by experts, or Plato's "philosopher kings" would be better. *Part II of the book is the longest, addressing the fairness of algorithms, privacy, automation and human job replacement, and free speech. The authors point out some epic algorithm failures, such as Amazon being unable to automate resumé screening to find the best candidates, and Google identifying Black users as gorillas. The big advances in deep learning neural nets result from clever algorithms plus the availability of very large databases, but if you've got a database showing that you've historically hired 95% white men for a position, training an algorithm with that database is hardly going to move you into a future with greater diversity. Even more concerning are proprietary black-box algorithms used in the legal system, such as for probation recommendations. Why not just let humans have the last word, and be advised by the algorithms? The authors remind us that one of the selling points of algorithmic decision making is to remove human bias; returning the humans to power returns that bias as well. *Defining fairness is yet another ethical and philosophical question. The authors give a good overview of privacy, which is protected by law in the European Union by the General Data Protection Regulation. Although there is no such federal law in America, California has passed a similar regulation called the California Consumer Privacy Act. At this point, it's too soon to evaluate the effect of such regulations. *The automation chapter is entitled "Can humans flourish in a world of smart machines?" and it covers many philosophical and ethical issues after providing a valuable summary of the current state of AI. Although machines are able to defeat humans in games like chess, go, and even Jeopardy, more useful abilities such as self-driving cars are not yet to that level. The utopian predictions of AGI (artificial general intelligence, or strong AI), in which the machine can set its own goals in a reasonable facsimile of a human, seem quite far off. But the current state of AI (weak AI) is able to perform many tasks usefully, and automation is already displacing some human labor. The authors discuss the economics, ethics, and psychology of automation, as human flourishing involves more than financial stability. The self-esteem associated with gainful employment is not a trivial thing. The chapter raises many more important issues than can be mentioned here. *The chapter on free speech also casts a wide net. Free speech as we experience it on the internet is vastly different from the free speech of yore, standing on a soap box in the public square. The sheer volume of speech today is incredible, and the power of the social media giants to edit it or ban individuals is also great. Disinformation, misinformation, and harassment are rampant, and polarization is increasing. *Direct incitement of violence, child pornography, and video of terrorist attacks are taken down as soon as the internet publishers are able, but hate speech is more difficult to define and detect. Can AI help? As with most things, AI can detect the easier cases, but it is not effective with the more difficult ones. From a regulatory standpoint, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA 230) immunizes the platforms from legal liability due to the actions of users. Repealing or repairing CDA 230 may be difficult, but the authors make a good case that "it is realistic to think that we can pursue some commonsense reforms" (p. 225). *The final part of the book is relatively short, but addresses the very important question: "Can Democracies Rise to the Challenge?" The authors draw on the history of medicine in the US as an example of government regulation that might be used to reign in the tech giants. Digital technology does not have as long a history as medicine, so few efforts have been made to regulate it. The authors mention the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software Engineering Code of Ethics, but point out that there are no real penalties for violation besides presumably being expelled from the ACM. Efforts to license software engineers have not borne fruit to date. *The authors argue that the path forward requires progress on several fronts. First, discussion of values must take place at the early stages of development of any new technology. Second, professional societies should renew their efforts to increase the professionalism of software engineering, including strengthened codes of ethics. Finally, computer science education should be overhauled to incorporate this material into the training of technologists and aspiring entrepreneurs. *The authors conclude with the recent history of attempts to regulate technology, and the associated political failures, such as the defunding of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. It will never be easy to regulate powerful political contributors who hold out the prospect of jobs to politicians, but the authors make a persuasive case that it is necessary. China employs a very different authoritarian model of technical governance, which challenges us to show that democracy works better. *This volume is an excellent reference on the very active debate on the activities of the tech giants and their appropriate regulation. It describes many of the most relevant events of the recent past and provides good arguments for some proposed solutions. We need to be thinking and talking about these issues, and this book is a great conversation starter. *Reviewed by Tim Wallace, a retired member of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA 02421.

An escape room is a game that requires a group of players to solve a variety of tasks within a given amount of time in order to fulfill a specific goal, typically escaping a locked room. Despite gaining tremendous popularity of the game in Malaysia, there is no study being conducted in this area. Existing customer experience frameworks offer a limited explanation of this rising phenomena due to the unique inherent nature of Escape Room. Towards this end, the present paper aims to identify the key constructs of Malaysian Escape Room customer experience and determinants of the players revisit intention with respect to the Escape Room. The research is conducted on 20 players who have played at least one game in any Escape Room establishment in Malaysia. This study adopts the sequential incident technique, a qualitative approach to unearth the hidden perception of players. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to analyse the data which revealed fifteen determinants of which 9 are related to the model of goal-directed behaviour. Our research contributes to the body of knowledge in mapping customer experience in this fair nascent industry. Insights from this study are aimed at benefiting Malaysian Escape Room business operators in designing and enhancing the customer experience in their escape rooms.

Over the last decade, escape rooms have taken the entertainment industry by storm. Contenders sign up willingly, to be virtually locked up in unfamiliar rooms, with the understanding that they are in for an adventure of unravelling clues, puzzles and riddles as the clock ticks on them. While this phenomenon takes entertainment to the next level, the presence of escape rooms is extremely challenging in terms of continually catering to the appetites of a varied customer base. There are existing frameworks which touch on customer services, but unfortunately, none on this trade, which in fact, requires a lot of attention to ensure continuous growth and long term sustainability. This paper is an effort made to review our customers’ experiences in our escape rooms in Malaysia, to determine the constructs that are fundamental to enhancing customer experience in escape rooms in Malaysia. In addition, it functions to improve and design games suitable to their needs and most important for their frequent comebacks. This research was carried out in two establishments situated in Klang Valley, Malaysia. There were twenty contenders and they have met the criteria of at least a one-time involvement in the game. The study is qualitative in nature and it is advocated by using the sequential incident technique to excavate the customers’ perceptions which could be the base of our future Malaysian escape games. The analysis utilized is thematic and the results unearthed fifteen determinants in which nine are closely mirrored to the goaldirected behaviour model. The research benefits the discipline of customer experience mapping in this unique industry and the future escape room designs and enhancement for our escape rooms’ entrepreneurs.

Ben Brooks of the Becker Friedman Institute reviews “Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations”, by David McAdams. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Introduces the reader to a game-theory approach to life, including business, and presents six ways to change games that people are confronted with. Discusses commitment; inviting regulation; merging or ""colluding"; enabling retaliation; building trust; leveraging relationships; how to escape the prisoners' dilemma; price comparison sites; the Newfoundland cod collapse; the real estate agency; addicts in the emergency department; eBay reputation; and antibiotic resistance. McAdams is Professor in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.”

Background. Cardiovascular content is challenging for students to master in the undergraduate nursing curriculum. Educational escape rooms have been shown to be useful in increasing student knowledge, immersing students in the learning process, and facilitating the growth of soft skills among learners. Aim. This article details a cardiovascular educational escape room in an undergraduate nursing course, including educational objectives, design considerations, and all materials for seamless transferability into other curricula. Methods. Faculty designed, implemented, evaluated, and revised a nursing cardiovascular escape room over three years. In this sequential-style escape room, junior-level students worked together in groups to complete nine puzzles and activities. The student teams solved puzzles during the allotted 60 minutes to save a fictional patient at risk for further clinical deterioration related to cardiogenic shock. Participants complete activities including drug dosage calculations, rebus puzzles, multiple choice items, and clinical reasoning activities based around course and licensing objectives for the content area in nursing education. Upon game conclusion, faculty lead a guided debriefing to close the loop of learning. The escape room has been implemented for groups ranging from 31 to 68 students in each cohort. Results. Previously published results on this topic indicate that student content knowledge improved after the event. Students also reflected growth in confidence, critical thinking, and teamwork and also appreciated the real-life nature of the activity. The educational game can be adapted and transferred to other schools of nursing or clinical sites.

Abdullah Karam, who escapes the Syrian Civil War in 2014, transforms the difficult migration and escape process he experienced into an autobiographical adventure game with Path Out (2017). The aim of the article is to examine the gamification of this escape process as a critical game design. Also, the article assesses Path Out (2017) as an interactive counter documentary as the inserted video clips by Karam foster a mode of listening to the experience from the first hand. The article analyzes the game with the close reading technique and the researcher uses her own observations and experiences as a player. With the concept of critical play, Mary Flanagan points out that a game can interact with important social issues, such as immigration and war. Accordingly, as a critical play, Path Out (2017) enables the players to have knowledge of socio-political realities and cultural dynamics and to become conscious by following the experiences of a civilian and young individual during the civil war. Thus, can games be an alternative method of documenting real-life events? Or can the plays reveal the subjective aspects of the documentary and criticize the genre? The article examines the short videos that Karam has embedded in the game, reminding of the live and interactive game commentary. Karam's in-game interventions allow the player to connect and criticize both reality and the virtual environment in the game. The video method used in the game documents Karam's memories and experiences as a counter mode of archiving. With these self-recorded video interventions, Karam comments on themes such as war, displacement, identity, death, family, and daily life, and gives information to the player. Karam wears the same sweatshirt as the character in the game world and calls out directly to the players, "You are playing me in this game". Thus, the physical separation between the players and the game character becomes evident with the appearance of Karam. The game Path Out (2017) becomes a useful tool for Karam to tell his story with his own voice. Making oneself visible and audible are key positions Karam takes regarding exposure to displacement. To put it in Flanagan's words, Path Out (2017) can also function as a tool to understand the players themselves. With the crossing of the border in the last part of the game, Karam tries not to get caught in the mines and not to be killed by the border troops. The game ends when Karam successfully crosses the border. However, each time the player dies, they get a new chance to cross the border because the real Karam is alive, and dead at the border of the game is experienced temporarily. For this reason, the player's desire to play again turns into an uneasy experiment. The dark atmosphere of the border evokes the unknown after crossing the border. Besides, with each experience of temporary death in the game, players are encouraged to rethink the issue of numerous and out-of-the-record migrant deaths passing the borders.

In case of fires in high-rise buildings, appropriate safe behaviors for leaving the high floors are the key to reducing injuries and increasing the chance of survival. Traditional training methods are often used to provide knowledge about a fire escape but may become ineffective in terms of knowledge acquisition and internalization. Serious games are an innovative teaching method, aiming at training and educating people in game environments. In recent years, immersive virtual reality has become popular in many educational environments. Various educational training programs are combined with serious games and attract more and more attention because they can make users feel highly involved and promote learning cognition. Therefore, this study proposed the fire safety training of high-rise building fire escape based on virtual reality and invited 140 college students to make explorations through this virtual situation. In addition, deep learning was integrated into the recommended safety training system, so that students could be trained in areas where concepts were ill-defined. According to the results, through the high-rise building fire escape training based on virtual reality, students’ fire safety skills were significantly improved and most students could use their behavioral skills in real situations, which has positive effects on promoting the development of fire escape knowledge. Finally, according to the analysis on the results of the DL-assisted learning system, some suggestions were made in this study on behavioral skills training for professional firefighters and researchers.

Das Projekt Escape the Room 2.0 – Unlearn racism, verlerne Diskriminierung und Vorurteile fand als digitales Real-Life Game zum Thema Diskrimierungserfahrungen im Alltag von Jugendlichen im Rahmen des KRASS Kultur Crash Festivals auf Kampnagel statt. Der Artikel lässt die Leser:innen selbst an die Stelle der Entscheidungstragenden im Produktionsteam treten und aktiv Szenarien durchspielen, die im Umgang mit Besetzungs- und Inszenierungsfragen in der Theaterarbeit auftauchten.

Purpose – This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach – This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings – Delve into current business literature and it is almost impossible to escape assertions about the importance of such as leadership, globalization and sustainability. Certain other words and phrases appear with similar frequency. Innovation can claim to be the daddy of them all though. Any discussion about organizational growth and success does not progress far without mentioning the inimitable “i” word. Being able to develop and implement novel ideas is widely regarded as essential if any competitive edge is to be attained. If you believe everything you read, take innovation out of the game and achievements of any real note will remain elusive. Creativity is touted as being the game-breaker that is able to set an organization apart from its rivals. Practical implications – The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations. Originality/value – The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Abstract: The blog postings of “EA Spouse,” partner of an exhausted video game programmer, have catalyzed discussion of epidemic overwork in the digital play industry. This paper analyzes the crisis of labour in this glamorous new medium. After a brief overview of the industry and its production process, we discuss its labour conditions under four headings. “Enjoyment” examines the real pleasures game workers find at their jobs. “Exclusion” discusses the gendering of game work. “Exploitation” investigates the corporate processes that drive toward a work culture of extreme hours and the consequences game workers suffer. “Exodus” looks at current attempts by workers to escape this predicament — attempts including legal action, educational efforts, entrepreneurial flight, and union organizing. Résumé : Le blogue de « EA Spouse », conjointe d’un programmeur de jeux vidéo épuisé professionnellement, a inspiré bon nombre de discussions sur le surmenage qui sévit dans l’industrie du jeu vidéo. Cet article analyse la crise de la main-d’œuvre dans ce nouveau secteur glamour. Suivant un bref exposé général de l’industrie et de son mode de production, nous discutons en quatre étapes les conditions de travail qui y règnent. « Plaisir » porte sur les vrais plaisirs qu’éprouvent les travailleurs dans ce secteur. « Exclusion » porte sur la proportion trop faible de femmes qui y œuvrent. « Exploitation » explore la culture organisationnelle qui contraint les programmeurs à travailler pendant de très longues heures et les conséquences du surmenage sur ceux-ci. « Exode » observe comment les travailleurs tentent actuellement d’échapper à cette situation. Ces tentatives comprennent l’action judiciaire, l’éducation des travailleurs, l’exode des entrepreneurs et l’organisation de syndicats.

The Issue of Gaming in Contemporary Culture "Are we still in the game?" This banal phrase gains a terrifying meaning in the last scene of Cronenberg's film eXistenZ, when a puzzled character, on the verge of being murdered, asks his potential killer if they are still inside a virtual reality game. The scene denotes the crucial place the issue of gaming is occupying in contemporary culture. If we take sci-fi movies less as an exercise of future divination and more as symptom of our current feelings projected into the future, we can easily see how games are becoming a frequent metaphor that sums up our fear of a world dominated by technology. Matrix, eXistenZ and quite a few other films draw on this haunting idea that technology can be evil and that reality may be just a high-tech game of which we are not aware. In fact, life has often been thought of as a kind of 'divine play', with God either playing dice to decide our destiny or acting almighty over millions of voodoo dolls. The key difference in contemporary imaginary is that it is no longer God, but human beings (or machines and creatures designed by them) in charge of the game. Moreover, it is interesting to notice that this attachment of nightmarish meanings to games is happening exactly at a time when computers are becoming more than an ubiquitous tool for any purpose, and are acquiring an astonishing ability to accurately describe our environments and convincingly reproduce our bodily senses. The prospect of having a full, working, machinic simulation of the now-called 'real world', no matter how unattainable it might be, is giving a new face to the old free will dilemma: to what extent is life predeterminate and what is our space for creativity inside God's plot? In this context, the otherwise ancient and apparently innocent cultural activity of playing games has turned into this biased metaphor, in which the blurring of the borderline between life and game becomes a sinister menace. The Nature of Games, Their Cultural Role and the Four Categories of Games The question that crops up is why games were chosen to re-enact this ever-present human fear before the mysteries of the given world of nature. We know for sure that there is a convergence between game and culture, and that game principles are at the foundation of social institutions, as Huizinga has shown (46). He does not propose that culture is derived from games, but maintains that play is a key element at the beginning of culture, and continues to be an important feature as culture develops. But it is the French sociologist Roger Caillois who has devised a framework in which to approach play and games that can help us, contemporary gamers, to shed light on this question. Caillois proposed four categories in which every known game can fit: games of chance, where the outcome results from fate rather than player's skills; games of vertigo, that aim to impose a disorder in the bodily senses; games of competition, in which adversaries are provided with an artificial equality at the outset and compete to show their superiority; and games of simulation, in which players create an imaginary universe and see themselves as someone else. However, games don't have to fit into one category only. Several games present a combination between the different types, though they always present one fundamental aspect that overshadows the others. These four categories can easily be extended to the field of computerised games: games of chance -- random devices are simulated in the computer (dice, roulette etc); games of vertigo -- games that draw on the use of metaphors such as the labyrinth and detective role-play, in which the player has to pursue a task through winding ways. Browsing and surfing are also frequent metaphors for this type of game; games of competition -- the usual fighting and 'shoot-and-kill' games; games of simulation -- use of development and management metaphor scenarios in which the player can nurture and manage the development of a system such as a town, a civilisation, or even a child as in some Japanese games. A psychoanalytic interpretation of these four categories helps to get an even clearer picture of the role of games in contemporary culture. According to this theory, playing is a response to unconscious motivations, and games could fulfil a function similar to that of dreams, slips of the tongue and actions alike. Abadi proposes a direct psychoanalytic correlation for Caillois's categories: games of chance symbolise the death drive since it is a bet against destiny; games of vertigo, by pushing the senses to a radical level of disarrangement and ecstasy, denote the symbolisation of sexual intercourse; games of competition are related to the Oedipus complex -- the rivalry between parents and children, or amongst siblings; and games of simulation refers to the construction of identity, an occasion when players work out a way to shape their own identity roles (Abadi 85-93). While Caillois's classification organises games in a more legible way, to read them through a psychoanalytic framework is to bring them into the realm of desire, or we could say, to the realm of language, or yet to be more precise, to the realm of language as the discourse of a desiring subject. But as an inhabitant of language "the subject is not; he makes and unmakes himself in a complex topology where the other and his discourse are included" (Kristeva 274). So as game and language converge, with this underlying presence of the Other, we can paraphrase Julia Kristeva and consider games as a signifying system in which, through demarcation, signification and communication, the player makes and unmakes him- or herself; in other words, a kind of radical rehearsal terrain where players can experiment with a playful reinvention of themselves. In this light it is no surprise that games in general, and more specifically games of simulation, have acquired such a paramount role in our 'electronic age'. Confronted with a strange new technology, which is hard to understand because it works mainly at a microscopic level, and which brings up uneasy concepts such as 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace' (a quasi-mythical ethereal space -- Wertheim 18), we seem to be going through an identity crisis. In the wilderness of this technological 'newfoundland', an uncomfortable paradise of simulation and cloning, the very essence of human identity, our free will, seems to be mercilessly seized in uncontrolled games, since we are unable to differentiate between computers as the Other and computer as a means to the Other. Games as Scenarios for the Interplay of Determinism and Non-Determinism However, the same metaphor of game can shift this scenario and revert itself into a tool to rethink the identity problem within our technological daily life, for what is at stake in a game is always the question of free will. The game is essentially a framework for uncertainty, allowing the co-existence of determinism and non-determinism: games of chance by definition include the idea of indeterminacy; games of vertigo deal with indeterminacy by inducing an uncontrollable confusion of the senses; games of competition include indeterminacy in the form of the unpredictable abilities of the competitors; games of simulation present a particular type of interplay between rule and indeterminacy, where the gap between the scripts/rules and the interpretation/gaming provides the sense of uniqueness each time it is performed/played. Thus, if games and their probabilistic features are put to work in our favour, it would be an answer to a much searched metaphor, a theoretical ground to pervade contemporary culture allowing for creativity in a pre-determined technological environment. Then, the idea of life as gaming, instead of inspiring fear, can serve as a way to escape the false tyranny of a machine based on logic algorithms, without falling into the nihilism of a romantic refusal of a true information age. Precisely because computers are based in coherent and logical algorithms, coupled with game principles they can be a milieu for the delicate and complex interplay of determinism and non-determinism (Bijl). Computers would cease being this monstrous 'big Other', and simply would stand as an ethical tool, a technological mediated way for touching the Other (Cabral Filho and Szalapaj). We then may be compelled not simply to rebuild or re-shape our identity, but to experiment and question the very idea of such a concept. By exploring the ambiguous and intricate gap between life as gaming and gaming as life, identity can be something that deals with the unknown, based on the always challenging idea of Otherness. As we leave the duty of coherence anchored in non-desiring machines (as Baudrillard has called computers), we are liberated to wander in auspicious new territories. Then, personality, gender, race, colour, and other aspects that were formerly associated with an ideal and immutable image, can become rather playful zones of experimentation. As an open field, identity may be just a nuance in a multitude of flipping horizons. Yet, as freedom is never an easy place to dwell, a disturbing question arises: will it after all be less scary? References Abadi, Mauricio. "Psychoanalysis of Playing." Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 15 (1967): 85-93. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso, 1993. Bijl, Aart. Ourselves and Computers. London: Macmillan, 1995. Cabral Filho, J. S., and P. Szalapaj. "Otherness and Computers: Uniform Cyberspaces and Individual Cyberplaces." The Journal of Design Sciences and Technology (Special Issue: Philosophy of Design and Information Technology) 4.1 (1995): 29-43. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. New York: Free Press, 1961. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens. New York: Roy Publishers, 1950. Kristeva, Julia. Language -- The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace -- A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA style: José dos Santos Cabral Filho. "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/flip.php>. Chicago style: José dos Santos Cabral Filho, "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/flip.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: José dos Santos Cabral Filho. (2000) Flip horizontal: gaming as redemption. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/flip.php> ([your date of access]).

Purpose The COVID-19 virus outbreak began in December 2019 and rapidly spread to every continent on Earth. The analysts have predicted that COVID-19 and other similar pandemics will continue in the coming decade and badly affect offline businesses. As a result, the offline platform is also shifting to the online platform and online demands are increasing daily. The traditional two-dimensional E-Commerce websites are designed to provide simple, browser-based interfaces to allow users to access available products and services. Whilst virtual representations are an essential consideration in establishing trust, most virtual representation sites fall short in mimicking real-life human representation. This paper aims to focus on three-dimensional (3D) E-Commerce technology that presents how virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can help deal with limitations and improve E-Commerce operations. It is built as an internet-only tool, a person-centred shopping assistant created following user-centred design principles to be used on various computing platforms, including desktop and mobile devices. The paper shows how VR and AR can offer more precise product information in 3D E-Commerce environments. The virtual store experience is also enhanced by an AR assistant that helps the users by giving them all the required information in audio form or using its avatar. Design/methodology/approach Implementation of VR and AR in E-Commerce will increase customer satisfaction. Sub hypothesis – to study the implementation of VR in E-Commerce. To study the implementation of AR in E-Commerce. To study the inclusion of E-Commerce sites in an open-world game. To study the customer satisfaction of users using VR stores. Findings The scope of work is concentrated on the urban Indian market especially targeting the country’s youth who are already or ready to indulge in VR such as video games, cinema and other activities (Mattsson and Barkman, 2019). This demography is more open to learning and using VR. The primary segment of E-Commerce that we are concentrating upon is fashion. Here, the regular user needs to have more immersed knowledge about the product rather than just the written information like how would they look in a dress or will the size available on the website fit me or not. Originality/value A perfect system does not exist in the world. A terrible disease has landed on the planet. Very soon, it will be impossible to escape from this current situation. The effects of this plague have been felt in every sector of the world. The researchers also claim that physical stores will continue to exist. There will never be anything that replaces the ability to hold and use products or have personal face-to-face interactions with retail professionals. For the time being, brick-and-mortar retail is having a difficult time, but immersive technology is starting to be used to enhance the in-store experience. The good news is that this should help retailers increase their chances of survival. However, the melody of 3D E-Commerce is it would help out the in-store experience.

"So which is the most authentic experience for an end-user steeped in car culture? Real, made-in-Japan Type R? Or virtual, programmed-in-Japan Type-R. Each Type-R is equally enjoyable, equally wieldy, equally consistent -- and precisely fulfils the sporting intent of Honda's Type-R sub-brand. Car culture, then, is so broad, so diverse, that we might now have got to a point where actual driving, all the bum-on-seat, wind-in-hair, aphid-in-teeth, tradly, dadly stuff we were weaned on is peripheral... Who needs reality, anyway?" -- Russell Bulgin, Car Magazine, August 1998 (53) "Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum." (Baudrillard 6) A Personal Prehistory of Racing Sims The very first racing sim I used was an arcade machine on the Gold Coast sometime during the mid-seventies. A coin-operated cabinet where a boy and his dad could stand and move a plastic steering wheel from side to side. This controlled a plastic model racing car attached to a stick. I kid you not. Youth was further misspent on large four-up machines, with a simple overhead view of a square-cornered, maze-like track. Each driver had a certain coloured 'car' to control round the electronic labyrinth in real time. The revolution moved into the living room, and a Hanimex TV game. Something of a poor man's Atari 2600, the driving sim was the overhead view of an endless straight track -- 'driving' was the act of jabbing a joystick left or right to avoid oncoming traffic. Addictive until the repetitive pattern of avoidance was committed to memory. Finally, there was an Apple II --and perhaps my first true racing sim. No overhead imagery, or even representations of cars. Just a first-person view down an imaginary winding road, as the view shuffled left or right using a knob-shaped controller. A Coming of Age Today, reputable motoring journalists dare to compare driving a Honda sports car on a Sony Playstation with driving a Honda Integra in real life, and deriving similar levels of satisfaction from each. This, mind you, on a two-generations-old, soon to be superseded piece of hardware with relatively chunky graphics hooked up to a mildly archaic television screen. Using a couple of buttons as a controller. When the immersion becomes more complete -- when graphics chips render more and more polygons at ever faster speeds, when the visual virtual is displayed on a wrap-around plasma in a real racing helmet, where control is provided by a force-feedback steering wheel in a vibrating bucket seat, what then... The latest racing sim I used was at Sega World in Sydney. Eight IndyCar machines, all giant 50" screens, mechanical vibrating seats and shuddering steering wheels. The physics engines sucked. Purists would call it more of a game, and less of a sim; but I still walked away with sweaty palms, shaky legs and a moment of nausea. But you ain't seen nothing yet... indeed the Nascar Silicon Motor Speedway in the USA has taken the concept to the next appropriate level -- a dozen real Nascar racers mounted on rocking. rolling motion generators in front of enormous projection screens. And So to the Network The crazies buy fibreglass tubs and strap themselves into racing seats. Jacques Villeneuve apparently learnt the layout of F1 tracks from his PC, before he scored a Formula One drive, and promptly went out and won the world championship in his second season. And the real crazies do it to each other. There are dial-in racing boards all over the USA and the racing mob have taken to the Internet in a big way. Nascar runs a league for on-line racers, who participate in a season of speedway much like that of their heroes. Indeed, the official body of V8 metal munchers in the good old USA is talking about running hybrid races -- inserting virtual images onto real races, and allowing online competitors to compete against their heroes in real time. We're a little way from that technologically -- V90 modems and Voodoo II cards may do the job for the moment, but utopian racing simulations will require Moore's Laws for a few more years yet. Nevertheless, it's way less than a single human generation since playing with a car glued to a stick was considered pretty cool. What of It? It may indeed be time to invoke the appropriate french philosopher. Whilst anecdotal evidence exists of world champions learning formula one race tracks using PC simulators, the reality is that racing sims are a simulacrum for most of us. Few of us have the opportunity, let alone the courage, to partake in the act of driving cars fast. Either on the road, on on a race track. Indeed, when it can take 15 minutes to move a mile in peak hour traffic, it is tempting to suggest that the entire notion of car-culture, which this society holds dear to its heart, be moved to simulation, so that the rest of us can just get on with the job of getting from A to B as efficiently as possible. As participants, racing sims -- even driving sims -- don't exist in real life. A daily commute across the harbour bridge is, in reality, nothing like we imagine the real thing should be. Crawling, foot riding on clutch, through slow-moving traffic, is as far from the dream of freedom that the motorcar suggests as, well, as sitting in front of a Playstation or PC. In fact, the computer does more than represent a simulation of driving. It represents the new freedom. The question is though, in Baudrillard's precession of simulacra, where exactly are we at? If one accepts that the reality represented by a racing sim does not exist; then does this new escapism mask the absence of a profound reality? Is the hyperreality that is the sweaty palm on plastic wheel merely a confirmation that we live in a hyperreality? As he describes Disneyland, "it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality ... but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real" (12). There is no escape machine for the overworked stressed young executive; there is no sports car or highway that can give you a day's respite from the pressures of consumption; there is no road to Tijuana, no Corvette summer, no Highway 66. There is no Bathurst 1000, Le Mans or Monte Carlo where men can be men and leave behind the grinding reality. There is, in fact, no escape at all -- there is only cyberspace! References Jean Baudrillard. "The Precession of Simulacra." Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sherman Young. "Racing Simulacra?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/racing.php>. Chicago style: Sherman Young, "Racing Simulacra?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/racing.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sherman Young. (1998) Racing simulacra? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/racing.php> ([your date of access]).

Whenever a people can be mediatized, they are.Paul Virilio In one of its most popular works – Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas, the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) outlines what it views as a major power shift characterizing the present, namely, the traditional public space – the street, has turned into ‘dead capital’. Borrowing from Guy Debord’s ideas on spectacular society, CAE theorizes that the spectacle has appropriated all, while power has mutated into a nomadic form of pure absence – ‘power itself cannot be seen; only its representation appears.’ To counter this, the activist movement must of course appropriate the same tactics of nomadic absence – eluding mediatization by the virtual power, staying below the radar and yet creating and altering the spectacle by poetic/symbolic acts of absence that will (hopefully) open cracks in the edifice of the monolith. Another strategy would be to perpetuate standard tactics of public space occupation where the _public _is dispensed with, in favor of a virtual counterpart – the ‘controlled deployment of information’. In this Marxist scenario, the activist gains power by attaining control of the means of production of an elusive and virtual ‘semiotic power’ (16). Thus, where Umberto Eco’s semiological guerilla warfare aimed to win the battle ‘not where the communication originates, but where it arrives’ (142), CAE argues that ‘no power base benefits from listening to an alternative message’(17), in effect abolishing the basic tool for communicating public dissent – the channeling of an alternative vision through some sort of public media. The reason for this is, according to CAE, twofold. First, when brought to its extreme, its power analysis leads it to believe that the capitalist means of production are nowadays virtual, and moreover, still worth seizing. Second, the spectacle inevitably appropriates all alternative public messages for its own uses, thus rendering oppositional movements powerless – ‘since mass media allegiance is skewed toward the status quo… there is no way that activist groups can outdo them’ (15). As a consequence of this order, CAE argues for the subversive and the covert while preaching ‘abhorrence of public space as a theatre of action’ (25). A quasi-ontological beta-utopian order emerges, marked by the homogenous essence of all actors, including history, and their dissolution into power-bases interested in self perpetuation. The activist avant-garde is the only actor able to ‘maintain at all times a multi-dimensional persona’, thus not losing its own identity to a mediatized image. The avant-garde fights for the rights of the oppressed but is not and cannot be known to them – a force ex nihilo, an alter ego to the elusive power. The avant-garde of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) is moreover predestined to be the eternal significant other of power. CAE’s vision of this struggle insists that ‘authoritarian structure cannot be smashed; it can only be resisted’, therefore creating a dialectical condition of ever-shifting nomadic identities of resistance and oppression. A more or less similar beta-utopian order is framed by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) in A Network of Castles – a quintessential text expanding on his earlier ideas of the Tong and the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) with regard to the virtual condition. Starting with the TAZ, Hakim Bey claimed its existence as utopia somewhere, preferably here and now, appearing and disappearing, a paradoxical identity without image, beyond the spectacle yet spectacular – in effect virtual. Similar to the ECD, the TAZ is built around the concept of staying below the radar of power and countering nomadic capital with nomadic dissent. The activist ”nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted.’ The Tong in turn – a term borrowed from Chinese secret societies – is similar to the ECD’s avant-garde – an invisible-virtual activist force, united by a dissenting identity and ‘devoted not to one project but to an on-going “cause”’. Here beta-utopia is seen as a necessary edifice, what Bey calls ‘the legend of the Tong’, which creates meaning through its paradoxical absence/presence – it is not (as in does not exist as an image) but it could and must be taken as physically present. The purpose of the Tong, like ECD’s avant-garde, is to escape mediatization and thus sublimate a perfect identity free from desire: ‘it will call a world into being – even if only for a few moments – in which our desires are not only articulated but satisfied.’ The virtual Tong can be implemented through a Network of Castles – existing on the border between the real and the virtual, inaccessible to power, ‘rooted partly in the imaginaire…in the image of mysterious inaccessibility and danger.’ In what presents itself as the synthesis of the TAZ and Tong, the Network of Castles is both physical utopia here and now, and a construct of perfectly fluid virtual identity, by nature inaccessible to mediatization. The Net is to elevate the TAZ and the Tong into a potent possibility to escape mediatization and thus be real again. The Network of Castles is the answer to the problem of virtual identity and real action. As Bey puts it – ‘the tactical problem consists of the need (or desire) to stay ahead of representation – not just to escape it, but to attain through mobilization a relative invulnerability to representation.’ In effect, Bey sublimates from the virtual a physical reality without mediated desire. In this beta-utopian order of fluid (dis)appearance, the icon of the image is abolished, public space is exorcised from mediated desire and the void left by the spectacle presents itself as a fulfilled identity. Thus framed, the activist struggle against oppression looms as a utopian quest for the perfect self – a symbolic and aesthetic paradoxical order. I consider the ECD and the Network of Castles to represent a desire for beta-utopian order, where beta stands for the discourse of an unfinished project, the pre-release that will test the waters for the real thing. A resolution to this order is by definition not supposed to come; utopia is now, in an eternal pre-release form, demanding eternal debugging. Utopian order is seen here as a virtual meta-narrative, thriving around an obfuscated central absence. This order can be also reconstructed as, paraphrasing Mark Dery, a modified ‘ejector seat’ condition, where instead of the utopian task of Cartesian mind escaping matter, virtual identity escapes desire. The imagined order of an unmediated space constantly re-created by unmediated acts is an expression of the need for an identity that is real in itself, beyond history. For, is it not that ‘the fantasy of a social world free from mass media of any kind, ancient or modern, is really a fantasy about being free from desire, by being free from the fantasy space mass media create for collective desire’? (Wark 324). Isaiah Berlin outlines three pillars of utopian belief: that the central problems of humans are the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole (Rothstein, Muschamp and Marty: 84). CAE’s and Bey’s beta-utopian order characteristically fulfills the first and the third condition, but drops the second. The clash with the oppressive spectacle is universal – in that sense history is homogenous. This clash however will never be solved and this condition precisely enables the harmonious existence of a fluid identity – the pure and eternal virtual dissent. In their beta-utopian order CAE and Bey create and obfuscate an other, their projects thrive around a central absence – the fleeing virtual capital, the hollow body of the State, the overwhelming spectacle. In this, they are inescapably modernist, struggling to escape the historical and touch the unperturbed real. ‘The Modernist narrative establishes a process of liberation at the heart of history which requires at its base a pre-social, foundational, individual identity. The individual is posted as outside of and prior to history, only later becoming ensnared in externally imposed chains. The insistence on the freedom of the subject, the compulsive, repetitive inscription into discourse of the sign of the resisting agent, functions to restrict the shape of identity to its modern form’ (Poster: 213-14). Indeed, history is viewed as a layer of oppressive power representations, ensnaring a primordial and foundational identity, which the dissenting activist, the TAZ and the ECD aim to rediscover. History is perceived to have turned into ‘nothing more than a homogeneous construct that continuously replays capitalist victories’ (17). The real, in contrast, is perceived to be marked by the titanic struggle of a liberation movement in opposition to power. However, if the modernist project can be considered as an obfuscation of a central absence, the postmodern by comparison, exposes the arbitrary character of the object and its created, rather than found, relation to the subject. Postmodernism ‘consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character.’ (Wright: 41) References Bey, Hakim. A Network of Castles. 1997. Available: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/. 21 June 2004. ———. “Temporary Autonomous Zones.” 1992. Autonomedia. Available: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/. 21 June 2004. ———. Tong Aesthetics. 1997. Available: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/. 21 June 2004. CAE. “Digital Resistance.” 2001. Autonomedia. Available: http://www.critical-art.net/books/. 21 June 2004. ———. “Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas.” 1996. Autonomedia. Available: http://www.critical-art.net/books/. 21 June 2004. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Eco, Umberto. “Towards a Semiological Guerilla Warfare.” Travels in Hyperreality. Ed. Umberto Eco. London: Picador, 1987. 135-44. Poster, Mark. “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 212-25. Rothstein, E., H. Muschamp, and M. Marty. Visions of Utopia. Oxford University Press, 2003. Wark, McKenzie. Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace. Pluto Press, 1999. Wright, Elizabeth. The Zizek Reader. Blackwell, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mitew, Teodor. "Beta-Utopian Order." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/04-mitew.php>. APA Style Mitew, T. (Jan. 2005) "Beta-Utopian Order," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/04-mitew.php>.

Sports have been a vital element to American entertainment for decades, which are only gaining popularity. Various sport events allow Americans to temporarily escape the stress associated with their social lives and the divisiveness of partisan politics; however, a closer look at the numerous features of sport games reveal an intricate connection between American sports and politics. With the mandatory playing of the national anthem and the integration of sports and political terminology, sport games in America have become a platform to impose various political ideals. This paper will first introduce how the usage of sport terminologies in politics can simplify a complex process into a game of “winners and losers,” which can further political polarization and disincentivize bipartisan collaboration. It will then aim to demonstrate how the imposition of novel rituals that stem from nationalistic and militaristic values can silent dissenting opinions and enforce a homogenous yet unjustified “American Identity.” However, the final part of this paper aims to showcase the alternate impacts that sports can have on politics, especially in the realm of sports-driven activism. This paper does not aim to take a stance on the exact impact that sports can have on American politics, as it is mostly likely to be multi-dimensional, but to unveil to the reader how sports, an entity that is seemingly designed as a form of escape from political agendas, can in reality have substantial impacts on America’s political atmosphere.

In a recent gaming anthology, Henry Jenkins cannot help contrasting his son's cramped, urban, media-saturated existence with his own idyllic, semi-rural childhood. After describing his own Huck Finn meanderings over "the spaces of my boyhood" including the imaginary kingdoms of Jungleoca and Freedonia, Jenkins relates his version of his son's experiences: My son, Henry, now 16 has never had a backyard He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street… Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house I would … tell him he should go out and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, where? … Who wouldn't want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by today's video games? … Perhaps my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of suburban backstreets, or settled into my treehouse with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, "complete freedom of movement". (Jenkins 1998, 263-265) Games here are connected with a shrinking availability of domestic and public space, and a highly mediated experience of the world. Despite his best intentions, creeping into Jenkins's piece is a sense that games act as a poor substitute for the natural spaces of a "healthy" childhood. Although "Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear", they "offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement" (Jenkins 1998, 266). They emerge, then, as a palliation for the claustrophobic circumstances of contemporary urban life, though they offer only unreal spaces, replete with "lakes of fire … cities in the clouds … [and] dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces" (Jenkins 1998, 263), where the work of the childish imagination is already done. Despite Jenkins's assertion that games do offer "complete freedom of movement", it is hard to shake the feeling that he considers his own childhood far richer in exploratory and imaginative opportunities: Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son would come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns ... The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the impact of "sunshine and good exercise" upon our physical well-being. (Jenkins 1998, 266) Throughout the piece, games are framed by a romantic, anti-urban discourse: the expanding city is imagined as engulfing space and perhaps destroying childhood itself, such that "'sacred' places are now occupied by concrete, bricks or asphalt" (Jenkins 1998, 263). Games are complicit in this alienation of space and experience. If this is not quite Paul Virilio's recent dour contention that modern mass media forms work mainly to immobilise the body of the consumer--Virilio, luckily, has managed to escape the body-snatchers--games here are produced as a feeble response to an already-effected urban imprisonment of the young. Strikingly, Jenkins seems concerned about his son's "unhealthy" confinement to private, domestic space, and his inability to imaginatively possess a slice of the world outside. Jenkins's description of his son's confinement to the world of "carpet burns" rather than the great outdoors of "scraped knees" and "mud" implicitly leaves the distinction between domestic and public, internal and external, and even the imagined passivity of the domestic sphere as against the activity of the public intact. For those of us who see games as productive activities, which generate particular, unique kinds of pleasure in their own right, rather than as anaemic replacements for lost spaces, this seems to reduce a central cultural form. For those of us who have at least some sympathy with writers on the urban environment like Raban (1974) and Young (1990), who see the city's theatrical and erotic possibilities, Jenkins's fears might seem to erase the pleasures and opportunities that city life provides. Rather than seeing gamers and children (the two groups only partially overlap) as unwitting agents in their own confinement, we can arrive at a slightly more complex view of the relationship between games and urban space. By looking at the video games arcade as it is situated in urban retail space, we can see how gameplay simultaneously acts to regulate urban space, mediates a unique kind of urban performance, and allows sophisticated representations, manipulations and appropriations of differently conceived urban spaces. Despite being a long-standing feature of the urban and retail environment, and despite also being a key site for the "exhibition" of a by-now central media form, the video game arcade has a surprisingly small literature devoted to it. Its prehistory in pinball arcades and pachinko parlours has been noted (by, for example, Steven Poole 2000) but seldom deeply explored, and its relations with a wider urban space have been given no real attention at all. The arcade's complexity, both in terms of its positioning and functions, may contribute to this. The arcade is a space of conflicting, contradictory uses and tendencies, though this is precisely what makes it as important a space as the cinema or penny theatre before it. Let me explain why I think so. The arcade is always simultaneously a part of and apart from the retail centres to which it tends to attach itself.1 If it is part of a suburban shopping mall, it is often located on the ground floor near the entrance, or is semi-detached as cinema complexes often are, so that the player has to leave the mall's main building to get there, or never enter. If it is part of a city or high street shopping area, it is often in a side street or a street parallel to the main retail thoroughfare, or requires the player to mount a set of stairs into an off-street arcade. At other times the arcade is located in a space more strongly marked as liminal in relation to the city -- the seaside resort, sideshow alley or within the fences of a theme park. Despite this, the videogame arcade's interior is usually wholly or mostly visible from the street, arcade or thoroughfare that it faces, whether this visibility is effected by means of glass walls, a front window or a fully retractable sliding door. This slight distance from the mainstream of retail activity and the visibility of the arcade's interior are in part related to the economics of the arcade industry. Arcade machines involve relatively low margins -- witness the industry's recent feting and embrace of redemption (i.e. low-level gambling) games that offer slightly higher turnovers -- and are hungry for space. At the same time, arcades are dependent on street traffic, relentless technological novelty and their de facto use as gathering space to keep the coins rolling in. A balance must be found between affordability, access and visibility, hence their positioning at a slight remove from areas of high retail traffic. The story becomes more complicated, though, when we remember that arcades are heavily marked as deviant, disreputable spaces, whether in the media, government reports or in sociological and psychological literature. As a visible, public, urban space where young people are seen to mix with one another and unfamiliar and novel technologies, the arcade is bound to give rise to adult anxieties. As John Springhall (1998) puts it: More recent youth leisure… occupies visible public space, is seen as hedonistic and presents problems within the dominant discourse of 'enlightenment' … [T]he most popular forms of entertainment among the young at any given historical moment tend also to provide the focus of the most intense social concern. A new medium with mass appeal, and with a technology best understood by the young… almost invariably attracts a desire for adult or government control (160-161, emphasis mine) Where discourses of deviant youth have also been employed in extending the surveillance and policing of retail space, it is unsurprising that spaces seen as points for the concentration of such deviance will be forced away from the main retail thoroughfares, in the process effecting a particular kind of confinement, and opportunity for surveillance. Michel Foucault writes, in Discipline and Punish, about the classical age's refinements of methods for distributing and articulating bodies, and the replacement of spectacular punishment with the crafting of "docile bodies". Though historical circumstances have changed, we can see arcades as disciplinary spaces that reflect aspects of those that Foucault describes. The efficiency of arcade games in distributing bodies in rows, and side by side demonstrates that" even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular" (Foucault 1977, 143). The efficiency of games from Pong (Atari:1972) to Percussion Freaks (Konami: 1999) in articulating bodies in play, in demanding specific and often spectacular bodily movements and competencies means that "over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex" (Foucault 1977,153). What is extraordinary is the extent to which the articulation of bodies proceeds only through a direct engagement with the game. Pong's instructions famously read only "avoid missing ball for high score"--a whole economy of movement, arising from this effort, is condensed into six words. The distribution and articulation of bodies also entails a confinement in the space of the arcade, away from the main areas of retail trade, and renders occupants easily observable from the exterior. We can see that games keep kids off the streets. On the other hand, the same games mediate spectacular forms of urban performance and allow particular kinds of reoccupation of urban space. Games descended or spun off from Dance Dance Revolution (Konami: 1998) require players to dance, in time with thumping (if occasionally cheesy) techno, and in accordance with on-screen instructions, in more and more complex sequences on lit footpads. These games occupy a lot of space, and the newest instalment (DDR has just issued its "7th Mix") is often installed at the front of street level arcades. When played with flair, games such as these are apt to attract a crowd of onlookers to gather, not only inside, but also on the footpath outside. Indeed games such as these have given rise to websites like http://www.dancegames.com/au which tells fans not only when and where new games are arriving, but whether or not the positioning of arcades and games within them will enable a player to attract attention to their performance. This mediation of cyborg performance and display -- where success both achieves and exceeds perfect integration with a machine in urban space -- is particularly important to Asian-Australian youth subcultures, which are often marginalised in other forums for youthful display, like competitive sport. International dance gamer websites like Jason Ho's http://www.ddrstyle.com , which is emblazoned with the slogan "Asian Pride", explicitly make the connection between Asian youth subcultures and these new kinds of public performance. Games like those in the Time Crisis series, which may seem less innocuous, might be seen as effecting important inversions in the representation of urban space. Initially Time Crisis, which puts a gun in the player's hand and requires them to shoot at human figures on screen, might even be seen to live up to the dire claims made by figures like Dave Grossman that such games effectively train perpetrators of public violence (Grossman 1995). What we need to keep in mind, though, is that first, as "cops", players are asked to restore order to a representation of urban space, and second, that that they are reacting to images of criminality. When criminality and youth are so often closely linked in public discourse (not to mention criminality and Asian ethnicity) these games stage a reversal whereby the young player is responsible for performing a reordering of the unruly city. In a context where the ideology of privacy has progressively marked public space as risky and threatening,2 games like Time Crisis allow, within urban space, a performance aimed at the resolution of risk and danger in a representation of the urban which nevertheless involves and incorporates the material spaces that it is embedded in.This is a different kind of performance to DDR, involving different kinds of image and bodily attitude, that nevertheless articulates itself on the space of the arcade, a space which suddenly looks more complex and productive. The manifest complexity of the arcade as a site in relation to the urban environment -- both regulating space and allowing spectacular and sophisticated types of public performance -- means that we need to discard simplistic stories about games providing surrogate spaces. We reify game imagery wherever we see it as a space apart from the material spaces and bodies with which gaming is always involved. We also need to adopt a more complex attitude to urban space and its possibilities than any narrative of loss can encompass. The abandonment of such narratives will contribute to a position where we can recognise the difference between the older and younger Henrys' activities, and still see them as having a similar complexity and richness. With work and luck, we might also arrive at a material organisation of society where such differing spaces of play -- seen now by some as mutually exclusive -- are more easily available as choices for everyone. NOTES 1 Given the almost total absence of any spatial study of arcades, my observations here are based on my own experience of arcades in the urban environment. Many of my comments are derived from Brisbane, regional Queensland and urban-Australian arcades this is where I live but I have observed the same tendencies in many other urban environments. Even where the range of services and technologies in the arcades are different in Madrid and Lisbon they serve espresso and alcohol (!), in Saigon they often consist of a bank of TVs equipped with pirated PlayStation games which are hired by the hour their location (slightly to one side of major retail areas) and their openness to the street are maintained. 2 See Spigel, Lynn (2001) for an account of the effects and transformations of the ideology of privacy in relation to media forms. See Furedi, Frank (1997) and Douglas, Mary (1992) for accounts of the contemporary discourse of risk and its effects. References Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London ; New York : Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,. Furedi, F.(1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London ; Washington : Cassell. Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Jenkins, H. (1998) Complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. In Jenkins, Henry and Justine Cassell (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Poole, S. (2000) Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. Raban, J. (1974) Soft City. London: Hamilton. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics : Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin's Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Websites http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/s... (Time Crisis synopsis and shots) http://www.dancegames.com/au (Site for a network of fans revealing something about the culture around dancing games) http://www.ddrstyle.com (website of Jason Ho, who connects his dance game performances with pride in his Asian identity). http://www.pong-story.com (The story of Pong, the very first arcade game) Games Dance Dance Revolution, Konami: 1998. Percussion Freaks, Konami: 1999. Pong, Atari: 1972. Time Crisis, Namco: 1996. Links http://www.dancegames.com/au http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/arcade/ag1154.php http://www.pong-story.com http://www.ddrstyle.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wilson, Jason A.. "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php>. Chicago Style Wilson, Jason A., "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Wilson, Jason A.. (2002) Performance, anxiety. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]).

This paper takes a critical look at the cases of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two boys responsible for the Columbine High School massacre, and Seung-Hui Cho, responsible for the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. After careful examination of the published literature on relevant topics including junior delinquency, school massacres, and the increasing access to media, I propose that these violent incidents are logical consequences of an escapist approach to reality, undeniably prevalent in the current youth population at large. Fantasies (any product of the imagination), conjured up by books, movies, games, television, internet, and drugs, provide an escape away from the unsatisfactory reality, and serve as one weapon in the war against it. Although fantasizing can be therapeutic and creative in moderation, when one is hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the obstacles of real life, one becomes more and more dependent on fantasies as the solution to all problems. In the case of Harris, Klebold and Cho, this dependence escalated to violent hatred against reality. However, violence in movies and video games are not what leads people to mass murder. Rather, the fault is in the society that breeds a generation of escapists who need such fantasies to survive. The readymade fantasies on television – violent, sexual, and otherwise – that many criticize as the source of evil in these young people are mere symptoms of a greater phenomenon, produced to meet the overwhelming and preexisting demand for an escape.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, or so the story goes anyway. Equally perilous, of course, is the opposite scenario of all play and no work. I'm not quite sure what that might make poor old Jack; unemployed perhaps? For my part, it made me a 'mature student'! Whatever else it may be, though, play is pervasive. It's one of the first things we get to do as human beings (once we've gotten the more immediate concerns of getting fed and changed out of the way), and if we're lucky it will be one of the things we get to do at every other stage of our lives too (again, along with eating and...). It is probably fitting that play should be the organisational concept for this particular issue of M/C, coinciding as it does with one of the more drawn out periods of play in the Western world: Christmas. Coming at this time, it has certainly brought home to me the relationship between work and play, and where to fit the former into the latter. It's probably no surprise, then, that a couple of the articles here should seek to engage with this particular divide. In the feature article for this issue Belinda Barnet explores the idea of hypertext as an avant-garde alternative to the controlled regularity of the linear text, a playful reaction to predetermined possibilities. Reading hypertext is a bit like playing, it's spontaneous, interactive, and a little subversive in that it rejects the notion of following the single linear text all the way to its hidden but preferred meaning. The nodal leaps of reading hypertext leave us always in a state of something like blissful possibility. Thus hypertext should be considered to involve the active translation of being into becoming in an imagined, or virtual space. Though the danger exists that such a reader risks disorientation in the face of the infinite potential offered by hypertextual linking, just as much as he or she risks being subsumed by the passive subject position "demanded by infotainment culture and the encyclopaedic desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'". Sherman Young examines the point at which playing and living meet; in the dual context, here, of driving simulation computer games and Baudrillard's precession of simulacra. As driving simulators become more and more sophisticated and 'realistic', embodying the thrills and spills of pushing the car to its limits on the open road, or on the Formula One race track, driving itself becomes more and more (for the majority of us at least) of a daily rush-hour crawl, one foot on the clutch and one hand on the wheel, unexciting and not very challenging. Has the play version of driving left the real behind, or is it a fact that the real is no longer real, but hyperreal? Axel Bruns engages with the recent proliferation of what he calls "musical exhumations": the re-forming and touring of well known and commercially safe musical acts on a large scale, playing either old songs, or new songs that sound like old songs. At the root of this 'replay', he contends, is the mainstream music industry's desire to both make a dollar, and respond to a changing mediascape which may well leave the giants behind as it continues to evolve and diversify. At the core of the problems which the music industry monoliths face is bandwith -- the huge number of 'channels' which something like the Internet provides --, and as a consequence, the opportunity on the one hand for marginal operators and audiences to proliferate, and the lack of opportunity on the other hand for the industry to achieve complete coverage for its preferred (i.e. most profitable) products. So, while the new players spread out on the cyber-airwaves, the old players come together in the better class venues; but in the longer term, it seems, the days of the almost complete domination of large-scale industrialised music may be numbered. Kirsty Leishman takes the work of Michel de Certeau on the art of making do as practiced by individuals going about their everyday life, her own experiences as a convenience store employee of five years standing, and the idea of play as "taking delight in inventiveness, trickery, guile and ruse", and melds them all into an explication of how opportunities for play may be found in even the most mundane kinds of work-a-day existences. In doing so she outlines the tactical use of the store's facilities, pursued as much in an effort to find relief from boredom, as to procure an abundant supply of toiletries and confectionary. This article will make you rethink your own ideas on how the Seven-Elevens of the world operate. John Banks starts from the observation that, even if only for their huge sales and the associated hype that goes with that, the playing of computer games has become "a crucial component of the popular cultural terrain". It is also a problematic one in the sense that so many of the games seem to inscribe somewhat questionable gender roles and relations. But Banks wants to go further than merely examining the representational, or textual level of computer games, critically engaging instead with the activity of playing: a visceral event, and one which is repeatedly described by those in the know in terms of the ephemeral concept of Gameplay. This term, he argues, "functions as something of a shared horizon or assumed knowledge" amongst gamers, and may consequently describe something about the attraction of games that hitherto escapes the vocabulary of cultural theorising: that they're fun, but it's hard to explain exactly how or why. The upshot is that because it does not easily lend itself to theoretical explication this does not mean that the eventhood of the game, as expressed in the term 'Gameplay', is to be devalued in seeking to understand computer games as cultural activities; just as issues of representation should not either be simply abandoned. Rebecca Farley, like Kirsty Leishman, also engages with the divide between work and play, but deals with the animation studio as a workplace rather than the convenience store. In doing so she addresses the twin questions of what exactly is play, and how is it practiced? Is it, as Johan Huizinga would have it, a separate thing, to be done in a separate time and place? Or is the distinction more fluid, play being something we do alongside work, or sprinkled in between bits of work? The answer might, of course, have a lot to do with who you work for. Nick Caldwell briefly charts the history of the computer strategy game, in particular its sub-genre, the "God game". The point he is seeking to make is that the parameters of these games, and the symbolism which they both draw upon and reinforce, are resolutely Western in their nature and detail. Success for the player-God in a game like Civilisation, for example, is contingent upon him or her skilfully leading the flock through a human-scale history of exploration, conflict and technological development; all of which, Caldwell argues, amounts to an imposition of an "ahistorically Westernised path of conquest and colonialism" upon the broad canvas of human history in general. Thus, computer strategy games such as this, by so attractively packaging and promoting what is, after all, just one politico-historical model among many, may simply become little more than "effective tools of the hegemonic apparatus". Ben King closes this issue with some thoughts on an aspect of play that would not seem obvious to most of us: playful murder. He explores the genre of yuppie horror films in which the villain, far from being portrayed as a hideous outcast creature, is actually just the same as the victims: young, beautiful, rich; the playfulness coming from the kind of "selfish revelry" they display in their macabre acts. All that remains for me to say at this point, I guess, is that all of us at M/C hope that your revelry over this holiday season has not been of the too macabre kind, (though, if that's what turns you on...), and that you find these offerings enjoyable, informative, or maybe even both. Read on then. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Mc Cormack. "Editorial: 'Play'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/edit.php>. Chicago style: Paul Mc Cormack, "Editorial: 'Play'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Mc Cormack. (1998) Editorial: 'play'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1998.–––. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.Freese, Peter. "Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero; Entropy in the 'Mtv Novel'?" Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction. Eds. Reingard Nishik and Barbara Korts. Wurzburg: Konighausen and Naumann, 1990. 68–87. Hand, Elizabeth. "House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the Author of 'American Psycho,' Rips into His Most Frightening Subject Yet—Himself." The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2005.Klein, Joshua. "Interview with Bret Easton Ellis." The Onion AV Club 17 Mar.(1999). 5 Sep. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis,13586/ >.Macdonald, Marianna. “Interview—Bret Easton Ellis—All Cut Up.” The Observer 28 June 1998.Moran, Joe. Star Authors. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.Murray, Noel. "Lunar Park [Review]." The Onion AV Club 2 Aug. 2005. 1 Nov. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/lunar-park,4393/ >.Phillips, Jennifer. "Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content." Current Narratives 1.1 (2009): 60–68.Rose, Charlie. “A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis”. The Charlie Rose Show. Prod. Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega. PBS. 7 Sep. 1994. Rosenblatt, Roger. "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" The New York Times 16 Dec. 1990: Arts.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Tobias, Scott. "Bret Easton Ellis (Interview)". The Onion AV Club 22 Apr. 2009. 31 Aug. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis%2C26988/1/ >.Wyatt, Edward. "Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror." The New York Times 7 Aug. 2005: Arts.

As the science fictional years come upon us -- 1999, 2000, 2001 -- there is a sense that this is the future, and nothing much has changed. Indeed, the future has turned out to be pretty much like the past, but with Tamagotchis and Karaoke. Beyond Darko Suvin's adoption of the term "novum" and the souls sold to the demons of postmodernism, the criticism of science fiction remains more or less the same as it did thirty years ago, except that it is now often written by people who have only read Neuromancer. It is high time that this critical apparatus was shaken up. The various techniques and devices in the arsenal of the contemporary science-fiction writer need to be explored anew. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Clute and Grant introduced a series of terms, such as "polder" and "instauration", which they made use of in their analyses of the fantastic mode1. It is hoped that the terms I introduce gain similar currency. In the limited space I have available, I can only explore the terminology of plot. The key to the popular fictional genres, both visual and literary, is that they are defined by a certain sense of familiarity with the material, a familiar engendered by repetition with difference. Even within this overall scheme of generic recognition, there is a stage further when a plot is borrowed entire from another work. It is clearly easy for a writer to borrow a plot from someone else, as it is known that it already works, has already pleased readers and rations out the degree of originality in a genre which depends upon originality. For example, Dan Simmons's Hyperion has a series of characters telling each other stories to pass the time on a journey: obviously this is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. But in addition to that it is a gathering together of disparate characters, who are going to go and visit this wonderful, strange being, to ask for their deepest desires. As I read this, I began to wonder whether one of them wanted a brain and one of them wanted a heart and one of them wanted courage and one of them wanted to go back to Kansas. This is of course the structure of The Wizard of Oz. Hyperion is thus Canterbury Tales meets Wizard of Oz sung to the tune of Keats, and is therefore hailed as being startlingly original. At the end of Hyperion, as the characters go off to see the Wizard, one character bursts into song: 'What's that song you're singing to Rachel?' The scholar forced a grin and scratched his short beard. 'It's from an ancient flat film...' 'But who is the wizard?' asked Colonel Kassad... 'And what is Oz?' asked Lamia. 'And just who is off to see this wizard?' (Hyperion 500-1) In order to avoid charges of plagiarism, Simmons reveals his sources, or, to be more charitable, acknowledges the intertextual borrowing which he has been engaged in. Another plot which gets used again and again is in cyberpunk, where the non-spatial realm of cyberspace stands in for the realm of the dead, the Underworld, and an analogue for Orpheus is sent to rescue a version of Eurydice: a female is kidnapped by a god of the Underworld, and a male hero has to rescue her, only to be trapped behind himself. This is the plot which underlies Vurt, Snow Crash, and one of the less obvious cyberpunk classics, Mythago Wood. The titular wood is a realm whose interior dimensions do not match the exterior's, rather like cyberspace. The main character's entry into the wood to rescue his brother and mother / sister-in-law / lover strikes a suitable note of incest, and the beings encountered there are mythic archetypes. As Pollen was to make clear, the Underworld is the realm of the collective unconscious, the realm of Story, Myth and Archetype2. The great trilogy of the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, borrows the structure of The Lord of the Rings. In Fellowship of the Ring a group of disparate characters come together and set off on a mission, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In the next volume, The Two Towers, the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Finally in The Return of the King there are last climatic battles, councils of peace, characters die of old age and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. Compare this to the structure of Robinson's epic: in Red Mars a group of disparate characters (the First Hundred) come together and set off on a mission to Mars, there's a great calamity following a betrayal and they are all scattered. In Green Mars the scattered characters wander around aimlessly, not really achieving anything, and there's a couple of battles or revolutions. Blue Mars depicts a final climatic battle, councils of peace, characters die of old age -- as does the reader -- and there's a sense of loss, that the world has been changed, but for the next generation. (Curiously Kim Stanley Robinson next work, Antarctica, was a reworking of Blue Mars, but without the Mars, a feature it also shares with Lord of the Rings.) Repetition in narratives happens with entire works, but also within narratives. These are known as Cookie Dough Plots. Home-made cookies are made by using cutters which produce the same shape again and again from dough. In the same way, narratives can be constructed from a series of broadly similar events which are repeated ad infinitum. A recent example of this is Dan Simmons's Endymion (1996), where the entire plot is organised around the two poles of: 'We're being chased' and 'Phew, we've escaped'. This fills up over four hundred pages. The Ping Pong Plot is one where two plotlines interconnect and are told alternatively: two sets of characters are involved in two separate storylines, where the action is occurring simultaneously and the author cuts between the two. William Gibson does this a lot in his fiction, with increasing numbers of character sets. Strangely enough, great science fiction of twenty or thirty years ago was around two hundred pages in length, and great science fiction of today is around the four hundred page mark. It's twice the size of an old novel. Most of these novels use the Ping Pong Plot, with events alternating between two sets of characters who usually, but not always, meet up by page four hundred. They might as well be in separate novels. In fact what we appear to have in today's great science fiction, is two novels. As no-one would pay $50 for a two hundred page novel, they get two for the price of one, shuffled in accordance to the rules of Ping Pong. In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased. In Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, there are two sets of characters: the first plot is an angel looking for her mortal beloved soul mate or perfect man and the second is a man wandering around. And reading it, the reader thinks, 'Ooh, I wonder who her perfect man is going to be? Ooh, there's another 390 pages to find out.' The novel is an example of the Ping Pong Cookie Dough Plot variant, where the chase-escape-chase format is enlivened by switching -- Ping-Ponging -- between the chaser and the chased. Perhaps the most significant example of this Timeslip Ping Pong in recent years is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996), where the action alternates between the account of the preparation for the voyage and the voyage itself and the account of the aftermath of the voyage. There's the before of events and the after of events, moving towards the discovery of the dark secret at the heart of the tale. It doesn't quite keep up the Ping Pong, as some chapters slip into the past or the future, and the Pings are not sufficiently distinguishable from the Pongs. In the past, series of novellas or novels used a variation on the Timeslip Ping Pong Plot, where the events and resolution of one story sets up the problem for the next. Rather than a series of sequels, what often happened was a number of sequels and prequels, until the final, ultimate and closing Prelude. (In a sense this is what Jack Womack is doing in his Dryco sequence). One variation on this should be known -- after E.E. 'Doc' Smith's novels -- as the My-Ultimate-Weapon-Is-More-Ultimate-Than-Yours-Is Sequence. In every Lensman novel there is an Ultimate Weapon, a weapon too dreadful to use, which they use after all, since they have it around, cluttering up the place. Fortunately for the sequence, the UW can be countered by the Ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative (or USDI) which is much more ultimate, and an even more UW. By the time you get to the eighth novel in the sequence, the UW of the first book ought to be renamed the Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Antipenultimate Penultimate Ultimate Weapon. The preceding terminology covers the major versions of narratives used within contemporary science fiction, narratives which it seems likely will dominate the next century of science fiction. Similarly the same sorts of settings, which I hope to explore elsewhere, will dominate: in particular the rainy city, post-holocaust and the next five minutes (although the pre-millennial tension setting is clearly now obsolete). Footnotes A "polder" is a realm which is deliberately maintained as separate and distinct from the outside world (Clute 772-3). "Instauration fantasies" are those where "the real world is transformed" (Clute 501). For cyberpunk and the underworld narrative see Joan Gordon, "Yin and Yang Duke It Out", in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Postmodern Science Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1991). For a longer exploration of Mythago Wood see my article in Vector 192 (March/April 1997): 4, and my "Journeys beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavoured Novels of Jeff Noon", Novel Turns: The Novel in Europe Now, ed. by John Gatt-Rutter (forthcoming). The term "cyberpunk-flavoured" is one I coined for a discussion of the works of Jeff Noon: the novels share a number of characteristics of cyberpunk, whilst not necessarily being unproblematically cyberpunk. A tradition of works which have a realm analogous to cyberspace, or a realm which serves a comparative narrative need, could be identified; Borges's use of the term "precursor" might be useful here to characterise such a tradition, although as Mythago Wood is more or less contemporary with Neuromancer it cannot properly be a precursor. The cyberspatial realm of the Vurt feather is something between an interior mental landscape and a computer game; the wood realm of Mythago Wood is somewhere between an interior mental landscape which can be simulated / created / entered with the use of electrical stimulation on the brain and a secondary world. References Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit: 1997 Citation reference for this article MLA style: Andrew M. Butler. "Towards a Language for Science Fiction Studies: Narratives." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php>. Chicago style: Andrew M. Butler, "Towards a Language for Science Fiction Studies: Narratives," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Andrew M. Butler. (2000) Towards a language for science fiction studies: narratives. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/sf.php> ([your date of access]).

Objectives: Studies have suggested that the prevalence of Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) is higher among Asian populations. This study compared the prevalence and severity of IGD between English-speaking gamers and Chinese-speaking gamers. Correlates of IGD were investigated in the global sample. Methods: A total of 101 English-speaking gamers and 130 Chinese-speaking gamers were recruited via a social marketing campaign and participated in an online questionnaire. Results: The prevalence of IGD was 0.0% and 0.8%, respectively, among English-speaking gamers and Chinese-speaking gamers. Chinese-speaking gamers were more likely to deceive family members, therapists, or others because of the amount of gaming activity, and were more likely to have jeopardized or lost an important relationship, job, or an educational or career opportunity because of gaming activity. English-speaking gamers were more likely to own a dedicated gaming device, started video gameplay at a younger age, spent more hours weekly on gameplay, and were more likely to play games to escape or relieve a negative mood. Among the global sample, correlates of a higher level of IGD were: being males, being current students, spending more hours weekly on gameplay, having experienced anxiety in the past year, having a higher level of violence, and having less real-life social support. Conclusions: These results suggested that the prevalence of IGD is low and comparable between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking gamers. The two populations differed in certain diagnosis criteria of IGD and behavioral factors relating to gameplay. Psychosocial factors of IGD were observed among the global sample adjusting for the cultural background.