Journal articles on the topic 'Fantasy games – Design'

"In recent years, computer role-playing games have changed the way we spend our free time. Traditional games have been increasingly replaced by digitized productions, and technology has made it easier to access videogames on multiples devices. Online games bring users together in a fantasy world in which they design avatars, manifesting their creativity and employing gaming strategies. This study analyzed Romanian gamers’ behaviors and perceptions of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (henceforth MMORPGs); by employing focus groups and a survey, the authors aimed to map preferences and habits of users in terms of gender. We found that users are not likely to engage in stereotypical activities in creating and using their avatars within the games, nor do they design female avatars solely for visual pleasure, but rather for opportunistic reasons. Moreover, the research subjects did not think of choosing female avatars as a safeguard for advancing through in-game levels, but rather consider other variables, such as hard work, skills, or strategy, as important to succeed. Keywords: role-playing games, gaming behavior, gamer preferences, gender-swapping, avatar gender."

Modern narratological researches are quite well developed and has long gone beyond the purely philological field. One of the applications of narratology is the study of computer games, the most relevant new medium. This paper is devoted to the issue of unusual narrative strategies used in games on the example of Final Fantasy XIII-2. The analysis is conducted via the possible-worlds method, which is currently in demand in modern humanities, but it is less known in Russia. The aim of the research is to determine the function of possible worlds existing in Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a better understanding of the game design. In the course of the work, the author examines the internal structure of the game world with the help of the theory of possible worlds, analyzes the narrative strategy, and makes a game scheme of possible worlds with accessibility links which let to see the deep internal structure of the narrative game world. In conclusion, it is clear that Final Fantasy XIII-2 contains a non-trivial narrative structure with multiple branches that is smoothed out by the gameplay and cinematic experience of the player, although such a composition of possible worlds represents a complex scheme of the game's macrocosm which demands a close attention to the narrative. The article is intended for various humanitarian specialists interested in the study of computer games.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide information about the design principles of educational games in the context of an educational math game example to educational game developers and instructors. Especially, it tries to demonstrate the importance of the academic content-fantasy integration and entertainment factors of educational games from the viewpoint of the experts. For this purpose, as a sample, an educational math game was examined to see how successful is the academic aspect, fantasy aspect, academic-fantasy aspects integration and enjoyment aspect of the game. Good aspects of the game and aspects need improvement were summarized for guidance to game developers while producing educational games. Design/methodology/approach In this study, heuristic evaluation method was used for evaluating the educational math game. In the scope of this study, an example of modern educational computer game was examined by experts in this study. The integration of academic-fantasy context and enjoyment aspects of the game were analyzed deeply by using qualitative and quantitative data collection methods together. Findings According to Relevance Embedding Translation Adaptation Immersion and Naturalization rubric results, embedding element received the highest mean score. It showed that the academic content is well coupled with the fantasy/story content. According to GameFlow criteria, clear goals and feedback sections got the highest scores; on the contrary immersion section got the lowest score. Immersion element of the game should be improved. According to the interview findings, more than half of the participants stated that, in terms of academic content of game, players can actively be involved in learning process during the game. The story of the game and elements used in the game have counterpart in daily life. Didactic elements do not affect learners’ flow in the game. It is easy to learn and feedbacks are enough and useful. Originality/value This study offered suggestions to designers for developing good educational games which are well balanced with academic and fantasy context.

(1) Background: Augmented reality (AR) game-based learning, has received increased attention in recent years. Fantasy is a vital gaming feature that promotes engagement and immersion experience for children. However, situating learning with AR fantasy to engage learners and fit pedagogical contexts needs structured analysis of educational scenarios for different subjects. (2) Methods: We present a combined study using our own built AR games, MathMythosAR2 for mathematics learning, and FancyBookAR for English as second-language learning. For each game, we created a fantasy and a real-life narrative. We investigated player engagement and teachers’ scaffolding through qualitative and quantitative research with 62 participants aged from 7 to 11 years old. (3) Results: We discovered that fantasy narratives engage students in mathematics learning while disengaging them in second-language learning. Participants report a higher imagination with fantasy narratives and a higher analogy with real-life narratives. We found that teachers’ scaffolding for MathMythosAR2 focused on complex interactions, for FancyBookAR, focused on story interpretation and knowledge explanation. (4) Conclusions: It is recommended to mix fantasy and real-life settings, and use simple AR interaction and pedagogical agents that enable teachers’ scaffolding seamlessly. The design of AR fantasy should evaluate whether the story is intrinsically related to the learning subjects, as well as the requirements of explicit explanation.

The article Open World and Dispersed Narrative in FromSoftware’s “Elden Ring” tackles a number of design issues associated with open world design in video games. Building upon Tim Ingold’s dis- crepancy of two distinct modes of exploring the reality (wayfaring and trail-following), the author proceeds with analysing how the categories in question might have influenced the design of Elden Ring’s ‘The Lands Between’, which is torn between two different ambitions. One is to create a high fantasy narrative in allotopia, whilst the other is to sustain the principles of procedural rhetoric typical for soulsborne games, well-known for leaning towards a dark fantasy design style both in terms of their aesthetics and narrative content. Consequently, the main goal of this analysis is to propose a potential way of avoiding such inconsequence in open world game design, which is termed here a “ludotopian dissonance”.

The majority of videogames as they are currently constituted seem to display a mechanistic repetitiveness in conception, development and production. A creative shallowness in games, a lack of innovation, and a tendency to clone successful titles, are in part attributable to the hegemonic control exerted by game producers. This situation persists despite the intense frustration from the creative talent within the industry: “design documents are worked out by the marketing department; effectively as an artist or programmer you do what you’re told” (Wade 2007, p.687). This article approaches Fantasy as an underlying structuring element capable of energising the creative evolution of video games. Fantasy is interpreted as persisting throughout all game forms, and not confined to its own recognisable genre.

Cyberspace is a virtual world in a computer network. With the continuous development of information technology and the continuous expansion of the boundary of art, more and more artists and designers focus their exploration on the visual presentation of cyberspace. Video games and sci-fi movies have become the testing ground for the visual image of cyberspace. The film Free Guy is a science fiction film based on video games. The film production designers designed a fantasy and colourful cyberspace for Free Guy, which has been widely praised for its visual presentation. Therefore, this study mainly analyzes the visual representation of cyberspace from the production design of the film Free Guy.

Through a series of case studies, this article presents a framework of common musical tropes originally only found in heavy metal music. The use of aggressive “double-kick” drum grooves, galloping bass lines, harmonized melodies, and overall fast tempi are all common elements of many styles of metal that first emerged in the 1980s. Video games developed alongside this musical genre; action, platforming, and role-playing games not only embraced these distinguishing characteristics of metal music, but these tropes are now expected in games of various genres. In addition, other extra-musical topics associated with heavy metal’s lyrical themes—such as references to the occult and fantasy—are common archetypes used to build the worlds of these video games. Studies have been conducted that examine the cultural similarities between these two cultures, the relationship of music genre with game genre and function, and the use of rock paired with sacred music specifically in battle themes. By analyzing the arrangements, treatment of melodic contours, rhythmic gestures, and harmonic progressions of these games, this article discusses and demonstrates how metal has disseminated into video game culture. There are strong connections between the fast-paced obstacles in Mega Man with the speed of Iron Maiden, the gothic horror stages of Castlevania and Baroque elegance of Yngwie Malmsteen, and how the themes from fantasy literature made their way into video game design and power metal. The worlds of these games are built on their music, but their music is built on a fusion of tropes used in heavy metal culture.

The video game industry, by its wider reputation, is not commonly regarded for its deep and thoughtful experiences. In its common media presence it is represented as frequently dealing with content that is excessively violent and usually expressing themes and genres that are otherworldly: science-fiction, horror, or fantasy. However, the broad reputation of video games’ reputation is not wholly deserved, partly due to an arthouse-esque movement growing rapidly alongside the larger, traditional releases. In the last decade, and five years especially, there have been an increasing number of games which tell personal stories that are either inspired by life or that are autobiographical and that defy that broader reputation. These games are often highly concerned with creating vivid and believable characters, telling personal stories, or conveying emotional experiences using interaction to enhance the narrative. This article discusses some of the key titles in this area, the debates in video game culture surrounding them, and some of the choices made in the development of the author's own narrative game experience 'Fragments of Him'.

Designers of human-agent interaction techniques may benefit from an analysis of existing video games that include aspects of human-agent teaming. Many popular multi-player video games have been designed to integrate multiple human and computer agents in pursuit of a common objective and can serve as a testbed to explore novel interaction methods in human-agent teams. A guiding framework of human-agent interaction was created to bridge best practices between video game and real-world domains. The framework was used to analyze games on five main dimensions: 1) Levels of Automation, 2) Levels of Interaction, 3) Control Mode, 4) Teaming, and 5) Interaction Timing. Two video games, Final Fantasy XIV and Mass Effect, were assessed to identify human-agent interaction paradigms, and ramifications for real-world applications for human-agent teaming. This research draws on interaction design principles, human-agent interaction theory, and existing video games to offer human-agent team designers potential examples of successful interaction paradigms.

Knights Fantasy Online is a massively multiplayer online game with role-playing game genre. This game was developed using ActionScript 3.0 of Adobe Flash for client and Java for its server, while the design of the game was designed using Adobe Illustrator. This research is intended to make multiplayer online games using Adobe Flash. In this game, Players start their adventure in a world called Edenia as a knight from a kingdom called Aurum, the player is in charge of controlling the population of monsters. Players can take on quests, collect equipment and improve their character's ability. The game was tested by using Blackbox, alpha, beta and stress test. Through the results of a questionnaire distributed to 40 people. The test results shows that Knights Fantasy Online has an interesting gameplay, easy to understand and also has enough features as a massively multiplayer online game.

How to design useful digital game-based learning is a topic worthy of discussion. Past research focused on specific game genres design, but it is difficult to use when the target game genre differs from the default genres used in the research. This study presents macrodesign concepts that elucidates 11 crucial game-design factors, including game goals, game mechanism, game fantasy, game value, interaction, freedom, narrative, sensation, challenges, sociality, and mystery. We clearly define each factor and analyze the relationships among the 11 factors to construct a game-based learning design model. Two application examples are analyzed to verify the usability of the model and the performance of these factors. It can assist educational game designers in developing interesting games.

Background. Educational computer games can enhance learner engagement and content knowledge gain. Video games based on Malone’s theory of game design that involve challenge, fantasy, and curiosity can help improve learning. Aim. The purpose of the study is to compare differences between two drill-and-skill games to learn French phrases. Variables examined were student engagement, content knowledge gain, and demographical implications (e.g., gender, minority status, and socio-economic status). One of the games in the study meets Malone’s theory of game design. Method. This quasi-experimental study divides participants into two groups, each playing a different type of drill-and-skill game. Instruments to collect data include a pre- and post-test on French phrases and a digital game engagement questionnaire. Participants receive a short instructional session, game play time, and instruments to complete. Results. No significant results have been found in content knowledge gain and engagement between participants in the pre- and post-tests. A slight difference in relation to minority status has been discovered. Feedback from the participants show a positive response toward the games, except that some distraction and technicality have interfered with their learning. Conclusion. Although results are inconclusive, drill-and-skill computer games can be a tool to enhance learning and provide student engagement.

To date, reviews of the games literature have noted a lack of empirical studies examining the relationships between games and their purported benefits (Huizenga, Admiraal, & Dam, 2011; Vandercruysse, Vanderwaetere, & Clarebout, 2012; Young et al., 2012). Furthermore, researchers have called for a better understanding of the specific game features that may lead to beneficial outcomes (Hartmann & Klimmt, 2006; Klimmt, Schmid, & Orthmann, 2009; McNamara, Jackson, & Graesser, 2010; Vorderer, Bryant, Pieper, & Weber, 2006; Wilson et al., 2009). In this survey study, a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was employed to better understand the specific features that influence player enjoyment of video games. The resulting Gameplay Enjoyment Model (GEM) explains players’ overall Enjoyment of games, as well as their preferences for six specific types of enjoyment, including Challenge, Companionship, Competition, Exploration, Fantasy, and Fidelity. The implications of these model components are discussed in the context of educational game design and future directions for research are offered. GEM provides an empirical framework within which vital progress can be made in understanding the enjoyment of games and the role that games play in education.

Engaged citizenship requires understanding why different ideologies lead to different policy positions. However, we know little about political perspective taking. How might we use games to teach citizens political perspective taking? This paper describes a design research project to develop a cognitive game for political perspective taking. Study 1 describes a political perspective taking measure created through expert and novice task analysis. Study 2 surveyed 187 undergraduate students and found relatively poor political perspective taking ability. Study 3 tests an educational game for political perspective taking and found that the game was engaging but did not promote learning. Study 4 describes a technical exploration testing the feasibility of a cognitive game with intelligent tutoring for scaffolding complex reasoning on political perspectives. This work argues games can teach political perspective taking using: (a) moral foundations theory, (b) fantasy environments that ask players to predict policy positions, and (c) embedded intelligent tutors.

Narrators in Tights. The Thematic Turn in Swedish Tabletop Role-Playing Games The concept of theme in tabletop role-playing games is examined from the joint perspectives of comparative literature and game studies, focusing mainly on the independent tabletop role-playing game Supercrew by Tobias Radesäter, published in 2006. The article starts with a theoretical separation of motif and theme, where the latter represents a question, problem or issue that generates narrative by use of elements from common motifs. Against the background of Swedish and international games published 1974–2006, it is argued that Supercrew represents a turning point in Swedish role-playing game history. Earlier mainstream role-playing games generate theme mainly through settings and scenarios, whereas later games to a larger extent also gene rate theme through the game rules. Supercrew is described as a unique example of a meta- and paragame in the superhero genre, presented entirely in the form of a comic book. It is shown how the game is influenced by American indie role-playing game design from The Forge, notably byrefe rencing the term ”narrativism”, by the introduction of conflict resolution, and by the distribution of traditional game master power. However, Supercrew does not adopt the crucial concepts of premise and theme, adapted by Ron Edwards from the theory of Lajos Egri. Instead, it regulates the relationship between real world, game world, and traditional (fantasy) game world so that it becomes the theme of the game. Referencing Gary Alan Fine’s use of frame analysis and awareness context, it is demonstrated how this is achieved by a subversion of pretense–open awareness, and by collapsing the primary, game and fantasy frames in Supercrew while keeping the traditional way of gaming as a metadiegetic reference. The article ends by remarking that a thematic turn only implies that theme is commonly generated in a different way after the turn than it commonly was before. This does not necessarily entail that role-playing game narratives are now stronger than they once were. It is suggested that further studies could benefit from analyzing editions of the same game from before and after the turn.

Due to the advent of the Internet, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have been enjoyed worldwide by many players simultaneously, and game publishers’ revenues have reached billions of dollars from subscriptions alone. Frequent updates (e.g., versioning) and new contents (e.g., quest system) are the typical strategies adopted by developers to keep MMORPG experiences fresh and attractive. What makes such strategies attractive and retains the interest of players in MMORPGs? This study focuses on one aspect of a popular MMORPG: the player’s experience of the quest systems of Final Fantasy XIV (FF14). The different quest systems were analyzed considering Bartle’s players’ classification, specifically for the explorers and achievers. From an information science perspective, such an analysis can be achieved via game refinement (GR) theory, which formulates the information of the game’s progression into a measurable model of game sophistication. On top of that, we used the concept of motion in mind, which was derived from concepts in physics. It maps game progression information to enable the possible quantification and approximation of players’ mental movements and affective experiences in the game. Based on the analysis of the collected data using the proposed measures of GR and motion in mind, the impact of regular updates on players in long-term games is discussed. Insights from the study provide guidance and suggestions for potential improvements in long-term game design.

To realise the of promotion and sustainable development for the digital archives programme, the National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS) developed a game-based learning website for children with knowledgeable, storytelling, explorative learning, joyful and personalised characteristics. This website applied design principles including interdisciplinary island maps for exploration, theme-based design with learning content and games, multi-user interactive learning environments, good use of digital archives knowledge repositories, supporting school teaching and learning and personalised membership service. Some game factors were also infused into the website including curiosity, fantasy, self value, challenge, sense of control, exploring experience, sense of achievement, competitiveness, interpersonal interaction and virtual socialisation. An evaluation result indicates that the game-based learning website can inspire learning motivation and enhance learning effectiveness for children. In the near future a virtual-and-physical blended learning service model will be delivered to children by creating personalised and collaborative learning services across onsite and online spaces.

Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and reconfigured by digital mediation. The case study of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) illustrates a contemporary challenge to rigid dichotomies between game/not game, skilled/unskilled play, and game/gambling game, demonstrating how regulation becomes deterritorialized as gambling moves out of state-regulated physical casinos and takes the form of networked, digital games. Our second case study of Pokémon Go approaches regulation from a different direction, complicating the rigid dichotomy between production/consumption in online networked play. We show how play is increasingly realized as productive in economic, social, physical, subjective and analytic registers, while at the same time, it is driven by gambling design imperatives, such as extending time-on-device. Pokémon Go exemplifies analytic productivity, a term we use to refer to the production of data flows that can be leveraged for a wide variety of purposes, including to predict, shape, and channel the behaviour of player populations, thereby generating multiple streams of revenue. Ultimately, both cases illustrate how digital games and gambling increasingly blur into each other, complicating the regulatory landscape.

In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006; Grant 2011; Johnson 2011). If that’s all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried protectionist concludes, shouldn’t we dismiss this intrinsically flat medium as inferior to more established media forms such as film or literature? (Ebert 2010). Contrary to this view, this paper discusses gameplay examples that shed light on how this medium might leverage its expressive resources to arrive at rich representations of loss. First, the notion of loss implied in Sigmund Freud’s work “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) will be discussed in relation to losing in games. Looking at procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor as three expressive gameplay devices identified by Doris Rusch (2009) will help explain the expressive shortcoming of losing and lay out what is at stake with profound gameplay expression. Moreover, it will serve as the keywords structuring the following analysis of three videogames, Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001) and Passage (2007), and their design decisions fostering deep representations of loss. Keeping the Freudian notion of loss in mind, we can trace its repercussions on the three expressive dimensions respectively. Following a separate analysis of each gameplay example, the last section will discuss some commonalities and differences and arrive at the identification of desired object, permanent disruption and linearity as design aspects modeling loss in more compelling ways than losing.

IJRP 11: Full Issue Table of Contents Evan Torner, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and William J. White, “Editorial Introduction to Issue 11” Some context for the current issue, especially with regard to current critiques of themes of violence and oppression in games, as well as this year’s Call for Papers on Applied Role-playing Games and the excellent articles submitted in response. Sarah Albom, “The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons” A textual analysis evaluating the language used in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player’s Handbook. This article discusses the ways that the text incentivizes characters to take violent actions more often than offering peaceful solutions. Diana J. Leonard, Jovo Janjetovic, Maximilian Usman, “Playing to Experience Marginalization: Benefits and Drawbacks of ‘Dark Tourism’ in Larp” An examination of how playing characters with marginalizations the player does not share can lead to perspective taking and empathy, but can also cause harm if not done with care. Joe Lasley, “Fantasy In Real Life: Making Meaning from Vicarious Experiences with a Tabletop RPG Internet Stream” A qualitative study examining seven fans of the livestream show Critical Role, in which actors play Dungeons & Dragons. The fans described an increase in their well-being due to parasocial relationships with the fiction and players in the show. Kerttu Lehto, “Role-Playing Games and Well-Being” A secondary literature review discussing the main themes in role-playing game studies, as well as arts and well-being as fields of study. This author advocates for more dialogue between these fields as a fruitful line of inquiry, especially with regard to the design of games for personal development and well-being. Josephine Baird, “Role-playing the Self – Trans Self-Expression, Exploration, and Embodiment in Live Action Role-Playing Games” An autoethnography blending gender theory with personal experience exploring gender in role-playing games and other performance spaces. The author considers how best to design larps explicitly to help trans people embody their identities. Katrin Geneuss, “The Use of the Role-playing Technique STARS in Formal Didactic Contexts” A summary of Design-based Research on 16 educational live action role-playing games (edu-larps) created for German schools. This article offers several best practices for educators who seek to implement edu-larp in the classroom.

AbstractThe current paper analyses the video game Raji: An Ancient Epic (Nodding Head Games 2020) to determine the accuracy of its representation of historical Indian experiences, in the domains of architecture, aesthetics, spatiality, technology, and so on. The ludic elements of the game, including weapon or enemy design and their compatibility with reflecting an Indian ethos in video game mechanisms have also been discussed. The treatment of Indian mythology is extensively explored, with an eye to locating its space in Indian mythic tradition. Through an analysis of narrative storytelling in the game, aspects such as the foregrounding of a female protagonist and the apparent progressive feminist attitude of the game have been scrutinised. The sociocultural depiction of India and its implications and contexts relating to contemporary understanding of the space of the subcontinent has also been taken into consideration. A careful study of the game within the contemporary post‐colonial discourse constitutes a part of the article. We also undertake a comparative study with another Indian mythic video game, Unrest (Pyrodactyl 2014), to better understand the issues surrounding the treatment of mythic and historical elements. The article both contemplates the missed opportunities and future potentials, for example, in terms of more nuanced and accurate representation and the balance between ludic execution and representational possibilities, as experienced in the ludo‐narrative experience offered by the game.

IJRP 12: Full Issue Table of Contents William J. White, Evan Torner, and Sarah Lynne Bowman,“Editorial: The Social Epistemology of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies” Reflections on the interdisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of role-playing games studies, as evident in the five uniquely distinct articles in Issue 12. Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama and Luiz Falcão, “Analog Role-Playing Game Studies: A Brazilian Overview” An overview of the history of role-playing games and their respective game communities in Brazil, as well as the development of role-playing game study scholarship, including research on RPGs in education. Marissa Baker, “An Analysis of the Literature Surrounding the Intersection of Role-Playing Games, Race, and Identity” A review and examination of a body of multidisciplinary scholarship on representation and race in fantasy RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. Pascal Martinolli, “A Scholarly Character Sheet to Frame Learning Activities and Improve Engagement” An evaluation of the use of role-playing game inspired character sheets in a graduate seminar on library instruction to assess the participants’ knowledge, present the curriculum, and measure the their progress. Hanne Grasmo and Jaakko Stenros, “Nordic Erotic Larp: Designing for Sexual Playfulness” Mapping, organizing, and understanding the phenomena of erotic larp design through a systemic examination of 25 design abstracts of Nordic art larps from the last decade. Christian Mehrstam, “Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation asAutopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu” An examination of how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981), analyzing the game’s potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era.

Digital games development process is often done using traditional methods. Many digital game developers believe that the game development process cannot be equated and use other software development methods because game development is not only focused on technical processes such as programming and coding but also creative processes such as asset and display design. In this study, the process of developing a fantasy adventure puzzle game was carried out using the Game-Scrum approach, a method modified from the Agile Scrum method. As well as the software development process using the agile method, game development using this method is carried out with an iterative process where each process allows an update of the feedback given to each sprint backlog. At the end of the study it was concluded that although there were still some things that had to be adjusted, basically the Game Scrum method could be adapted for the development of a digital game.

Purpose – Achievement is considered to be an important value for students. The purpose of this paper is to explore what achievement values were derived from playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), especially for high-engaged MMORPGs players. Design/methodology/approach – The research employed two approaches to collect data: focus group and a web survey of online game players were conducted. Moreover, an addiction-engagement scale was used to ensure all participants were genuinely highly engaged MMORPGs players in data collection process. There are 12 highly engaged players were recruited as focus group members in Phase 1. The online survey yielded 315 responses, of which 267 were considered valid, and 177 of those were considered to be genuine highly engaged players in Phase 2. In the study, exploratory factor analysis was performed to reveal underlying structure of achievement values. Findings – The result focussing on popular MMORPGs reveal that highly engaged players derived six achievement values from playing MMORPGs, including fantasy satisfaction, adventure, victory, socialization ability, self-actualization, and advancement of wealth and status. Originality/value – In view of the prevalence of MMORPGs, it is imperative to draw attention to understand students’ achievement values derived from playing MMORPGs. By doing that, educators know how to bridge students’ achievement values to their academic performance.

This study has the aim of providing a theoretical–methodological strategy for the design and implementation of educational programs that favor the development of children’s creative potential in the context of museums as cultural institutions. It was carried out in two schools with the collaboration of the National Museum of Natural Sciences and the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, Spain, during an entire academic year. The emphasis of the procedure is based on multi-stakeholder participation and a multidisciplinary approach through workshops based on a collaborative methodology that promotes communication between the school as an institution, the teachers, and the museum facilitators, during the various phases of the intervention. The work with the children is supported by the creative problem-solving (CPS) methodology through the development of workshops in the museums, where the children were able to be the protagonists and manage their own learning process. The obtained results show the relevance of assuming a set of methodological principles and resources that can be replicated in future intervention programs, among which the school–museum collaborative communication, creative problem solving, the use of activity records, and the role of games and fantasy as mediators in the stimulation of creativity stand out.

Role playing game is defined as one of the popular genres of video games being released for computer and video game console system. In some of role playing game, the students can give the main character is name of story. Especially in teaching narrative using RPG, narrative is basically story within this story telling, there are many kinds of narrative comedy, mystery, romance, etc. The topic of RPG related with education has become interesting topic recently. In SMPN2 Purwoasri, the teacher has been done the implementation of teaching writing using RPG since a year ago. The game was conducted to make students more interesting in in teaching writing. In this research, the design used is descriptive qualitative design. The subject of the research is students VIII-F class which consists of 30 students. Concerning the preparation that the teachers have in teaching writing English at SMPN 2 Purwoasri. The teacher should have the syllabus or lesson plan before they teach writing English at SMPN 2 Purwoasri. Concerning about the material that the teachers used syllabus and lesson plan based on the curriculum 2013. The method used was think pair solo. While the media used as brainstorming the idea in writing is RPG Final fantasy. The teachers automatically evaluated the students’ writing English in every meeting the teacher gives evaluation using four aspect those are: grammatical, generic structure, words and spelling and content Key words: narrative text, teaching process, RPG (Role playing game)

Background: Jones fractures result in subsequent dysfunction and remain an issue for athletes. Purpose: To (1) describe the epidemiology, treatment, and impact of Jones fractures identified at the National Football League (NFL) Scouting Combine on players’ early careers and (2) establish the value of computed tomography (CT) to determine bony healing after a fracture in prospective players. Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: All players who attended the combine between 2009 and 2015 were retrospectively reviewed to identify their history of Jones fractures. The playing position, treatment method, and number of missed collegiate games were recorded. The mean overall draft pick number, number of games started and played, snap percentage, and position-specific performance scores (fantasy score) over the first 2 years in the NFL were compared between players with fractures and controls. An imaging classification system was applied based on grading of each quadrant of the fifth metatarsal (plantar, dorsal, medial, lateral), with a score of 0 for not healed or 1 for healed. Results: Overall, the number of Jones fractures identified was 72 in 2285 athletes (3.2%), with all treated via intramedullary screw fixation. The mean overall draft pick number for players with fractures was 111.2 ± 67.9 compared with 99.0 ± 65.9 for controls ( P = .12). Performance scores for players with fractures were lower than those for controls across all positions, with a significant difference in running backs (2.6 vs 4.0, respectively; P < .001) and defensive linemen (1.4 vs 2.3, respectively; P = .02). The mean CT score was 2.5 ± 1.3. Of the 32 athletes who underwent imaging, 16 Jones fractures (50.0%) were healed or nearly healed, 12 (37.5%) were partially healed, and 4 (12.5%) showed little or no healing. The plantar cortex demonstrated the least healing (18/32; 56.3%), followed by the lateral cortex (15/32; 46.9%). Players with a mean score <1 were found to have fewer games started (2.7 ± 2.5) than those with 1 to 3 cortices healed (17.4 ± 10.4) or all cortices healed (8.7 ± 11.2). Conclusion: Based on CT, 50% of all players with a previous Jones fracture demonstrated incomplete healing. Moreover, position-specific performance scores over the first 2 years of a player’s career were lower across all positions for those with fractures compared with controls. Players with CT scores <1 were found to start fewer games and were drafted later than controls.

Introduction: One way to minimize the impact of hospitalization is storytelling with dolls or puppet shows , which is a type of game using puppet media through fantasy games for preschoolers (3-6 years old). The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of play therapy "puppet show" on the impact of hospitalization on preschool children (3-6 years) in the Orchid room of Ibnu Sina Hospital, Gresik Regency. Methods: This study uses a quasi experiment with one group pre test and post test design. The population of this research is parents who have preschool age children (3-6 years) who are hospitalized in the Orchid Room of Ibnu Sina Hospital, Gresik Regency. While the sampling using consecutive sampling technique obtained 22 parents. The independent variable studied was play therapy "puppet show". The dependent variable in this study was the impact of hospitalization on preschool children aged (3-6 years) who experienced hospitalization. Data collection is done by using a questionnaire then analyzed through the T-test statistical test. Results: The results of this study indicate that there is a significant difference between positive and negative impacts on pre-school age children during nursing actions before and after play therapy "puppet show" (p value = 0.005 smaller than = 0.05). Conclusions: Based on the results of the research obtained, the need for play should still be given to children undergoing hospital treatment to continue the child's growth and development, reduce stress and tension.

Abstract Electronic Arts’ The Godfather: The Game uses Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's films as the raw material for new representations of Italian American ethnicity. In the game, viewers design their avatar. Unusual in the world of game design, this interface, dubbed “Mob Face,” limits players’ choices to narrow, stereotypically Italian American male physiognomy. After choosing everything from physical features to clothing, the player enters the game space as an in-group member of the Corleone Italian American crime family. The game's rules further complicate this construction of ethnicity by requiring players to engage in acts of violence and extortion in order for the narrative to progress. Despite reminders that players are not really Italian American gangsters, the game's design romanticizes regressive masculine norms and offers a fantasy of an all-powerful, exclusively White ethnic, male group creating troubling notions of ethnic, racial, and gender identities. Ultimately, The Godfather: The Game reframes not only the original text(s) on which it is based but also the meaning of Italian American ethnicity (and, by extension, other identity categories) in a digital space.

Animated music video is an audio-visual media design that is presented in an illustrative narrative with song accompaniment. This spectacle has become a model for campaign media design that has appeal, like the animated music video “Sabda Alam” by students of SMK Raden Umar Said Kudus, which won appreciation at the 2021 Balinale International Film Festival. “Sabda Alam” tells the story of the lives of birds endemic typical of Indonesia which is increasingly rare. This media campaign indirectly supports the Ministry of Environment's program to socialize the importance of protecting the rich diversity of wild birds in Indonesia. This spectacle is interesting to study because it conveys a message by relying on the power of images in visual space. This research aims to show the relationship of visual elements in visual space as meaningful entities. The research method is descriptive qualitative with data collection techniques in the form of literature studies, observations, and interviews. While the data analysis technique uses image composition analysis into the rule of three imaginary grids, both vertically and horizontally. The results show that "Sabda Alam" prioritizes visual spatial framing, middle framing and full framing to convey messages about threats to protected wild birds. This research is expected to be a reference for knowledge about the function of images in the framing of visual space that is able to provide information and education, as an art of conveying campaign messages in entertaining and attention-grabbing ways. Keywords: visual space, music video, animation. AbstrakVideo musik animasi merupakan bentuk desain media audio visual yang mempresentasikan materi informasi melalui narasi ilustratif dengan iringan lagu. Tontonan ini dapat menjadi model desain media kampanye yang memiliki daya tarik, sebagaimana video musik animasi berjudul “Sabda Alam” karya para siswa SMK Raden Umar Said Kudus, yang telah berhasil memperoleh apresiasi di Balinale International Film Festival 2021. Sabda Alam berkisah tentang kehidupan burung-burung endemik khas Indonesia yang semakin langka. Video musik animasi ini secara tidak langsung ikut mendukung program Kementrian Lingkungan Hidup untuk mensosialisasikan pentingnya perlindungan terhadap keragaman burung liar sebagai kekayaan fauna di Indonesia. Tontonan ini menarik untuk dikaji karena menyampaikan pesan dengan mengandalkan kekuatan gambar pada ruang visual. Penelitian ini bertujuan menunjukkan relasi unsur-unsur visual di dalam ruang visual sebagai entitas bermakna. Metode penelitian secara kualitatif deskriptif dengan teknik pengumpulan data berupa studi literatur, observasi, dan wawancara. Sedangkan teknik analisis data menggunakan analisis komposisi gambar ke dalam aturan per tiga grid imajiner, baik secara vertikal maupun horizontal. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan, video musik animasi “Sabda Alam” mengutamakan pembingkaian ruang visual pada framing tengah dan framing penuh untuk menyampaikan pesan tentang ancaman terhadap burung-burung liar yang dilindungi. Penelitian ini diharapkan menjadi referensi pengetahuan tentang fungsi gambar di dalam pembingkaian ruang visual yang mampu memberikan informasi dan edukasi, sebagai seni menyampaikan pesan kampanye dengan cara-cara menghibur dan menarik perhatian.Kata Kunci: ruang visual, video musik, animasi. Authors:Winny Gunarti Widya Wardani : Universitas Indraprasta PGRISyahid : Universitas Indraprasta PGRITaufiq Akbar : Universitas Indraprasta PGRI References:Ali, M. M., & Ali, M. A. (2018). Karakterisasi Tokoh Dalam Film Salah Bodi. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 7(1), 15-30.Aminah, S. (2019). Pengembangan Video Animasi Sebagai Media Pembelajaran Untuk Meningkatkan Kosa Kata Pada Anak Usia 4-5 Tahun. Skripsi. Universitas Negeri Islam Raden Intan, Lampung.Block, B. (2013). The Visual Story, Creating The Visual Structure of Film, TV, and Digital Media. Massachusetts: Focal Press.Deva, S. (2022). Analisis Konflik Tokoh Dalam Film Kukira Kau Rumah Karya Sutradara Umay Shahab. Diploma Thesis. IKIP PGRI: Pontianak.Fitria, R., Nazar, E., Nelmira, W., & Sahara, N. (2019). Pengembangan Video Pembelajaran Teknik Menjahit Busana pada Mata Kuliah Busana Dasar di IKK FPP UNP. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 8(1), 19-29.WW, W. G., Piliang, Y. A., & Syarief, A. (2013). Wacana Visual Talk Show ‘ Mata Najwa’: Melihat Bahasa Tubuh Partisipan sebagai Kekuatan Visual. Panggung, 23(4).Halawa, W. E., Triyanto, R., Budiwiwaramulja, D., & Azis, A. C. K. (2020). Analisis Gambar Ilustrasi Hombo Batu Nias Gunungsitoli. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 9(1), 193-203.Hermawan, S. (2022). “Gaya Ilustrasi Dalam Karakter Visual Video Musik Animasi Sabda Alam”. Hasil Wawancara Pribadi: 5 Agustus 2022, SMK RUS, Kudus.Homan, D. K. (2014). Eksplorasi Visual Diri Dalam Desain Karakter. Humaniora, 5(2), 729-736. https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/167255-ID-eksplorasi-visual-diri-dalam-desain-kara.pdf.Natadjaja, L. (2006). ANALISIS SUDUT PANDANG KAMERA (Studi kasus: Film Jelangkung dan Film The Ring 1). Nirmana, 7(2).Pradesta, E., & Aryanto, H. (2020). Gaya Semirealis Sebagai Inspirasi Perancangan Character Concept Art Game Fantasi Berbasis Legenda Nusantara. BARIK, 1(3), 167-177.Pratama, D., Wardani, W. G. W., Sidhartani, S. (2018). Building Natural and Cultural Tourism Entities Through Visual Space of Television Shows: Analysis of “My Trip My Adventure”, WESTECH 2018. https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.8-12-2018.2283861.Rizali, M., Warhat, Z., & Zebua, E. (2019). Pengaruh Elemen-Elemen Desain Komunikasi VISUAL (DKV) Box Art Game terhadap Story Line Berdasarkan Persepsi Gamers pada Video Game Populer di Indonesia. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 8(2), 295-302. https://doi.org/10.24114/gr.v8i2.14700.Saputro, M. R. D. (2019). Perancangan Video Musik Animasi 2D Pada Lagu Negeri Syam yang Berjudul 5 Dalam 1. Skripsi. Institut Seni Indonesia, Yogyakarta.Schirato, T. dan Webb, J. (2004). Reading the Visual. Crows-Nest: Alen & Unwin.Venus, A. (2019). Manajemen kampanye, panduan teoretis dan praktis dalam mengefektifkan kampanye komunikasi publik. Edisi Revisi, Bandung: Simbiosa Rekatama Media.Wirandi, R., & BP, M. M. (2019). Fungsi MusikDalam Upacara Perayaan Ritual Thaipusam Etnis Hindu Tamil di Banda Aceh. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(2), 415-422. https://doi.org/10.24114/gr.v10i2.28379.Witabora, J. (2012). Peran dan Perkembangan Ilustrasi. Humaniora, 3(2), 659-667. https://doi.org/10.21512/humaniora.v3i2.3410.Yasa, G. P. P. A. (2022). Estetika Animasi: Konsep dan Gaya Animasi Bul. Viswa Design, 2(1), 60-67. https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/546982-none-695d1ef3.pdf.

In this essay I discuss how realism operates to constrain games, especially role-playing games, that take place in a fantasy milieu. The design of these games involves tradeoffs between two values, which are sometimes labeled “realism” and “playability”. These values are ordinarily understood to be wholly independent and competing. Using resources drawn from John Rawls's conception of political theory as a search for a “realistic utopia”, I show how these values can instead be understood as aspects of the more general value of creating and conceiving a realistic fantasy through the medium of game play. I also explain how realism operates differently as a constraint on tabletop role-playing games from how it operates in realistic video games and live-action role-playing.

Introduction: Game Culture and GenderAs texts with the potential to help mediate specific forms of identity, video games are rich and complex sites for analysis. A tendency, however, still exists in scholarship to treat video games as just another kind of text, and work that explores the expression of masculine identity persists in drawing from cinematic analysis without proper consideration of game design and how these games are played (Triana). For example, insights from studies into horror cinema may illuminate the relationship between players and game systems in survival horror video games (Habel & Kooyman), but further study is needed to explore how people interact with the game.This article aims to build towards a scholarly definition of the term “Power Fantasy”, a concept that seems well established in wider discourse but is not yet well theorised in the scholarly literature. It does so through a case of the most recent reboot of Doom (2016), a game that in its original incarnation established an enduring tradition for high-action Power Fantasy. In the first-person shooter game Doom, the player fills the role of the “Doom Guy”, a faceless hero who shuttles between Earth and Hell with the sole aim of eviscerating demonic hordes as graphically as possible.How, then, do we begin to theorise the kind of automediation that an iconic game text like Doom facilitates? Substantial work has been done to explore player identification in online games (see Taylor; Yee). Shaw (“Rethinking”) suggests that single-player games are unexplored territory compared to the more social spaces of Massively Multiplayer Online games and other multiplayer experiences, but it is important to distinguish between direct identification with the avatar per se and the ways in which the game text mediates broader gender constructions.Abstract theorisation is not enough, though. To effectively understand this kind of automediation we also need a methodology to gain insights into its processes. The final part of this article, therefore, proposes the analysis of “Let’s Play” videos as a kind of gender identity performance which gives insight into the automediation of dominant masculine gender identities through Power Fantasy video games like Doom. This reflexive performance works to denaturalise gender construction rather than reinforce stable hegemonic identities.Power Fantasy and Gender IdentityPower Fantasy has become an established trope in online critiques and discussions of popular culture. It can be simply defined as “character imagines himself taking revenge on his bullies” (TVTropes). This trope takes on special resonance in video games, where the players themselves live out the violent revenge fantasy in the world of the game.The “power fantasy” of games implies escapism and meaninglessness, evoking outsize explosions and equally outsized displays of dominance. A “power gamer” is one who plays with a single-minded determination to win, at the expense of nuance, social relationships between players, or even their own pleasure in play. (Baker)Many examples apply this concept of Power Fantasy in video games: from God of War to Metroid: Prime and Grand Theft Auto, this prevalent trope of game design uses a kind of “agency mechanics” (Habel & Kooyman) to convince the player that they are becoming increasingly skilful in the game, when in reality the game is simply decreasing in difficulty (PBS Digital Studios). The operation of the Power Fantasy trope is also gendered; in a related trope known as “I Just Want To Be a Badass”, “males are somewhat more prone to harbour [the] wish” to feel powerful (TVTropes). More broadly, even though the game world is obviously not real, playing it requires “an investment in and commitment to a type of masculine performance that is based on the Real (particularly if one is interested in ‘winning’, pummelling your opponent, kicking ass, etc.)” (Burrill 2).Indeed, there is a perceived correlation (if not causation) between the widespread presence of Power Fantasy video games and how “game culture as it stands is shot through with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other biases” (Baker). Golding and van Deventer undertake an extended exploration of this disconcerting side of game culture, concluding that games have “become a venue for some of the more unsophisticated forms of patriarchy” (213) evidenced in the highly-publicised GamerGate movement. This saw an alignment between the label of “gamer” and extreme misogyny, abuse and harassment of women and other minorities in the industry.We have, then, a tentative connection between dominant gameplay forms based on high skill that may be loosely characterised as “Power Fantasy” and some of the most virulent toxic gender expressions seen in recent times. More research is needed to gain a clearer understanding of precisely what Power Fantasy is. Baker’s primary argument is that “power” in games can also be characterised as “power to” or “power with”, as well as the more traditional “power over”. Kurt Squire uses the phrase “Power Fantasy” as a castaway framing for a player who seeks an alternative reward to the usual game progression in Sid Meier’s Civilisation. More broadly, much scholarly work concerning gameplay design and gender identity has been focussed on the hot-button question of videogame violence and its connection to real-world violence, a question that this article avoids since it is well covered elsewhere. Here, a better understanding of the mediation of gender identity through Power Fantasy in Doom can help to illuminate how games function as automedia.Auto-Mediating Gender through Performance in Doom (2016) As a franchise, Doom commands near-incomparable respect as a seminal text of the first-person shooter genre. First released in 1993, it set the benchmark for 3D rendered graphics, energetic sound design, and high-paced action gameplay that was visceral and deeply immersive. It is impossible to mention more recent reboots without recourse to its first seminal instalment and related game texts: Kim Justice suggests a personal identification with it in a 29-minute video analysis entitled “A Personal History of Demon Slaughter”. Doom is a cherished game for many players, possibly because it evokes memories of “boyhood” gaming and all its attendant gender identity formation (Burrill).This identification also arises in livestreams and playthroughs of the game. YouTuber and game reviewer Markiplier describes nostalgically and at lengths his formative experiences playing it (and recounts a telling connection with his father who, he explains, introduced him to gaming), saying “Doom is very important to me […] this was the first game that I sat down and played over and over and over again.” In contrast, Wanderbots confesses that he has never really played Doom, but acknowledges its prominent position in the gaming community by designating himself outside the identifying category of “Doom fan”. He states that he has started playing due to “gushing” recommendations from other gamers. The nostalgic personal connection is important, even in absentia.For the most part, the critical and community response to the 2016 version of Doom was approving: Gilroy admits that it “hit all the right power chords”, raising the signature trope in reference to both gameplay and music (a power chord is a particular technique of playing heavy metal guitar often used in heavy metal music). Doom’s Metacritic score is currently a respectable 85, and, the reception is remarkably consistent between critics and players, especially for such a potentially divisive game (Metacritic). Commentators tend to cite its focus on its high action, mobility, immersion, sound design, and general faithfulness to the spirit of the original Doom as reasons for assessments such as “favourite game ever” (Habel). Game critic Yahtzee’s uncharacteristically approving video review in the iconic Zero Punctuation series is very telling in its assessment of the game’s light narrative framing:Doom seems to have a firm understanding of its audience because, while there is a plot going on, the player-character couldn’t give a half an ounce of deep fried shit; if you want to know the plot then pause the game and read all the fluff text in the character and location database, sipping daintily from your pink teacup full of pussy juice, while the game waits patiently for you to strap your bollocks back on and get back in the fray. (Yahtzee)This is a strident expression of the gendered expectations and response to Doom’s narratological refusal, which is here cast as approvingly masculine and opposed to a “feminine” desire for plot or narrative. It also feeds into a discourse which sees the game as one which demands skill, commitment, and an achievement orientation cast within an exclusivist ideology of “toxic meritocracy” (Paul).In addition to examining reception, approaches to understanding how Doom functions as a “Power Fantasy” or “badass” trope could take a variety of forms. It is tempting to undertake a detailed analysis of its design and gameplay, especially since these feed directly into considerations of player interaction. This could direct a critical focus towards gameplay design elements such as traversal and mobility, difficulty settings, “glory kills”, and cinematic techniques in the same vein as Habel and Kooyman’s analysis of survival horror video games in relation to horror cinema. However, Golding and van Deventer warn against a simplistic analysis of decontextualized gameplay (29-30), and there is a much more intriguing possibility hinted at by Harper’s notion of “Play Practice”.It is useful to analyse a theoretical engagement with a video game as a thought-experiment. But with the rise of gaming as spectacle, and particularly gaming as performance through “Let’s Play” livestreams (or video on demand) on platforms such as TwitchTV and YouTube, it becomes possible to analyse embodied performances of the gameplay of such video games. This kind of analysis allows the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of how such games mediate gender identities. For Judith Butler, gender is not only performed, it is also performative:Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. (214)Let’s Play videos—that show a player playing a game in real time with their commentary overlaying the on screen action—allow us to see the performative aspects of gameplay. Let’s Plays are a highly popular and developing form: they are not simple artefacts by any means, and can be understood as expressive works in their own right (Lee). They are complex and multifaceted, and while they do not necessarily provide direct insights into the player’s perception of their own identification, with sufficient analysis and unpacking they help us to explore both the construction and denaturalisation of gender identity. In this case, we follow Josef Nguyen’s analysis of Let’s Plays as essential for expression of player identity through performance, but instead focus on how some identity construction may narrow rather than expand the diversity range. T.L. Taylor also has a monograph forthcoming in 2018 titled Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, suggesting the time is ripe for such analysis.These performances are clear in ways we have already discussed: for example, both SplatterCat and Markiplier devote significant time to describing their formative experiences playing Doom as a background to their gameplay performance, while Wanderbots is more distanced. There is no doubt that these videos are popular: Markiplier, for example, has attracted nearly 5 million views of his Doom playthrough. If we see gameplay as automediation, though, these videos become useful artefacts for analysis of gendered performance through gameplay.When SplatterCat discovers the suit of armor for the game’s protagonist, Doom Guy, he half-jokingly remarks “let us be all of the Doom Guy that we can possibly be” (3:20). This is an aspirational mantra, a desire for enacting the game’s Power Fantasy. Markiplier speaks at length about his nostalgia for the game, specifically about how his father introduced him to Doom when he was a child, and he expresses hopes that he will again experience “Doom’s original super-fast pace and just pure unadulterated action; Doom Guy is a badass” (4:59). As the action picks up early into the game, Markiplier expresses the exhilaration and adrenaline that accompany performances of this fastpaced, highly mobile kind of gameplay, implying that he is becoming immersed in the character and, by performing Doom Guy, inhabiting the “badass” role and thus enacting a performance of Power Fantasy:Doom guy—and I hope I’m playing Doom guy himself—is just the embodiment of kickass. He destroys everything and he doesn’t give a fuck about what he breaks in the process. (8:45)This performance of gender through the skilled control of Doom Guy is, initially, unambiguously mediated as Power Fantasy: in control, highly skilled, suffused with Paul’s ‘toxic meritocracy. A similar sentiment is expressed in Wanderbots’ playthrough when the player-character dispenses with narrative/conversation by smashing a computer terminal: “Oh I like this guy already! Alright. Doom Guy does not give a shit. It’s like Wolf Blascowicz [sic], but like, plus plus” (Wanderbots). This is a reference to another iconic first-person shooter franchise, Wolfenstein, which also originated in the 1980s and has experienced a recent successful reboot, and which operates in a similar Power Fantasy mode. This close alignment between these two streamers’ performances suggests significant coherence in both genre and gameplay design and the ways in which players engage with the game as a gendered performative space.Nonetheless, there is no simple one-to-one relationship here—there is not enough evidence to argue that this kind of gameplay experience leads directly to the kind of untrammelled misogyny we see in game culture more broadly. While Gabbiadini et al. found evidence in an experimental study that a masculinist ideology combined with violent video game mechanics could lead to a lack of empathy for women and girls who are victims of violence, Ferguson and Donnellan dispute this finding based on poor methodology, arguing that there is no evidence for a causal relationship between gender, game type and lack of empathy for women and girls. This inconclusiveness in the research is mirrored by an ambiguity in the gendered performance of males playing through Doom, where the Power Fantasy is profoundly undercut in multiple ways.Wanderbots’ Doom playthrough is literally titled ‘I have no idea what I’m Dooming’ and he struggles with particular mechanics and relatively simple progression tools early in the game: this reads against masculinist stereotypes of superior and naturalised gameplay skill. Markiplier’s performance of the “badass” Doom Guy is undercut at various stages: in encountering the iconic challenge of the game, he mentions that “I am halfway decent… not that good at video games” (9:58), and on the verge of the protagonist’s death he admits “If I die this early into my first video I’m going to be very disappointed, so I’m going to have to kick it up a notch” (15:30). This suggests that rather than being an unproblematic and simple expression of male power in a fantasy video game world, the gameplay performances of Power Fantasy games are ambiguous and contested, and not always successfully performed via the avatar. They therefore demonstrate a “kind of gender performance [which] will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire” (Butler 211). This cuts across the empowered performance of videogame mastery and physical dominance over the game world, and suggests that the automediation of gender identity through playing video games is a complex phenomenon urgently in need of further theorisation.ConclusionUltimately, this kind of analysis of the mediation of hegemonic gender identities is urgent for a cultural product as ubiquitous as video games. The hyper-empowered “badass” digital avatars of Power Fantasy video games can be expected to have some shaping effect on the identities of those who play them, evidenced by the gendered gameplay performance of Doom briefly explored here. This is by no means a simple or unproblematic process, though. Much further research is needed to test the methodological insights possible by using video performances of gameplay as explorations of the auto-mediation of gender identities through video games.ReferencesBaker, Meguey. “Problematizing Power Fantasy.” The Enemy 1.2 (2015). 18 Feb. 2018 <http://theenemyreader.org/problematizing-power-fantasy/>.Burrill, Derrick. Die Tryin’: Video Games, Masculinity, Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 10th ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Ferguson, Christopher, and Brent Donellan. “Are Associations between “Sexist” Video Games and Decreased Empathy toward Women Robust? A Reanalysis of Gabbiadini et al. 2016.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 46.12 (2017): 2446–2459.Gabbiadini, Alessandro, Paolo Riva, Luca Andrighetto, Chiara Volpato, and Brad J. 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Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.Triana, Benjamin. “Red Dead Maculinity: Constructing a Conceptual Framework for Analysing the Narrative and Message Found in Video Games.” Journal of Games Criticism 2.2 (2015). 12 Apr. 2018 <http://gamescriticism.org/articles/triana-2-2/>.TVTropes. Playing With / Power Fantasy. 18 Feb. 2018 <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/PowerFantasy>.———. I Just Want to Be a Badass. 18 Feb. 2018 <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IJustWantToBeBadass>.Wanderbots. “Let’s Play Doom (2016) – PC Gameplay Part I – I Have No Idea What I’m Dooming!” YouTube, 18 June 2016. 14 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQSMNhWAf0o>.Yee, Nick. “Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games.” Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. Eds. Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Sun. 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Background. Building on previous studies on racism and whiteness in video games, this article investigates how deck building games provide platforms for identity tourism, the symbolic appropriation of marginalised experiences, through their coupling of mechanics and racial stereotypes. Aims. The aim is to contribute to our understanding how dominant ideologies are expressed through simulation and gaming in a deck building context and how games similar to ASCENSION: DAWN OF CHAMPIONS (henceforth A: DOC) perpetuate racism and coloniality through gameplay design. This is part of an ongoing game studies effort to critique white supremacist and imperial structures in games. Method. In this article, I conduct a first-person close reading of A: DOC as an emblematic case study for contemporary deck building design. Using critical whiteness theory, I pay special attention to the gameplay design of the four Champion characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis, and Dhartha in order to demonstrate the interplay of ludic, racial, and social performative elements in the construction of playful identities. Analysis. The deck building principles of A: DOC provides a racial pedagogical arena which creates affective links between gameplay and white supremacist values. In coupling digital deck building mechanics with stereotypical fantasy characters, the game invites players to take the roles of fantasy tourists and thereby become implicit in white supremacist play. Even though the characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis and Dhartha are leaders of different genders and races, their “diversity” is established via popular racial cybertypes like the white female diversity advocate, the technologically advanced white male emperor, the aggressive Black male, and the Asian male exotic Oriental.

Ruins are increasingly sites of interest in popular culture and scholarly settings, with recent academic thought surrounding ruination frequently crossing disciplinary lines. This includes work by human geographers reflecting on their experiences of walking through ruinous landscapes. By turning attention to the work of Tim Edensor and Jonathan Brettell, this article considers their ideas in the context of contemporary video games, using textual analysis to unpack the fantastical futures of Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) and its recent sequel Horizon Forbidden West (2022). Horizon Zero Dawn has been described as a ‘techno-fantasy’ (Maher n.p.), blending elements from classic fantasy novels and post-apocalypse film (Hudgins n.p.). These open-world role playing games are set in a post-apocalyptic United States, amidst landscapes strewn with debris left behind by the Old Ones. The player takes control of an outcast named Aloy, who sets out to solve the mysteries of the Old Ones and their technology, all while directing her on quests through a world overrun by strange animal-like machines. In considering the ruins of the Horizon games, this article develops the ideas of others: “that ruins might be one avenue through which to detect critical potential in games” (Fraser 178). On the whole, this article examines how Edensor’s and Brettell’s experiences of ruins compare to those in computer-generated settings, while thinking more broadly about the differences and similarities between physical and virtual ruins. In doing so, specific attention is given to how players traverse Horizon’s ruins, how game design curates the players’ experiences of ruination, and how encountering entropy provides an opportunity to reflect upon the future. Beyond these discussions, this article works to demonstrate the utility of fantasy media in interdisciplinary work, arguing that Horizon offers players an opportunity to engage with distinct entropic landscapes and to reflect on Earth’s ecological well-being.

This article examines the symbolic and discursive effects of the “final boss” trope in speculative and fantasy games. In contrast to our own world, the rulers, kings, and presidents of speculative games are often the most powerful individuals personally or physically, not just systemically. I employ political theorists Claude Lefort and Eric Santner to argue that the utilization of this trope allows audiences to safely engage with tensions and uncomfortable affects which are inherent to life in a democracy. Fighting bosses which are both monarch and the most powerful of their faction allows audiences to smooth frustrations with the symbolic and discursive chaos which often pervades democratic life. I examine one boss, Godrick the Grafted of Elden Ring, as a particularly fascinating example of this dynamic. I employ close readings of character dialogue and design to argue that such games serve a more concretized political function than scholars have identified.

Gender representation in video games has long been a fraught topic of discussion within online gaming communities. In game scholarship, analysis of the usually harmful tropes and trends of female representation has resulted in countless studies demonstrating that video games are often a regressive medium in terms of representation, privileging heterosexual white male subjectivities and erasing, marginalizing, or even vilifying anyone outside of that specific demographic. These conversations and scholarly studies tend to focus on the representation of human women, especially as victimized damsels-in-distress. Considerably less work has been done to analyse the portrayal of villainous and monstrous nonhuman women in games, even though countless science fiction, fantasy, and horror games feature these kinds of characters. Many of these games utilize harmful tropes and design practices related to female villainy and monstrosity, thereby reinforcing misogynistic ideologies. With the understanding that gender representations in games can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect with representations of race, sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, and age, this paper examines online player and developer discourse regarding female-coded monsters from a selection of commercially successful “AAA” video games. The intent of this project is to contribute to ongoing scholarship on monstrosity in games by looking at how developers explain and justify their design processes in online interviews and forum posts and how players/fans articulate their attitudes towards and reception of these monstrous creatures.

PurposePlaying video gaming is one of the most popular forms of leisure activities. This study looks into a specific video game genre, under the category of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors that lead to the consumption of MOBA games. Three factors, imaginal, emotional and sensory experiences, are investigated through an integration of the hedonic consumption model, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT).Design/methodology/approachThe study analyses a sample of 292 MOBA game players using the PLS-SEM model. The study comprises two stages; in the first stage, an estimation model was used to test the constructs' quality and legitimacy. In the second stage, we assessed the theoretical model to test the relationship between the principle constructs.FindingsThe study found that factors related to emotional experiences, namely enjoyment, emotional involvement, and arousal, led to greater intention to play MOBA games. Similarly, two factors related to imaginal experiences, escapism and role projection, also positively impacted while fantasy carried a negative impact. The study also found that sensory experiences had a significant positive impact on the intention to play MOBA games. Lastly, a positive correlation was also found between the intention to use and usage behavior in MOBA games.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the playful-consumption experiences of pleasure-oriented information systems (I.S.) that is MOBA games that derive behavioral intention to play MOBA games, which in turn determines the usage behavior of MOBA players. The study also incorporates the uses and gratification theory to uncover the needs and experiences that trigger MOBA games' behavioral intention and its further impact on gamers' usage behavior. The study also presents useful insights for game developers and other relevant stakeholders in game development.

The dungeon and megadungeon are imagined spaces of a complex and interconnected network that emerged in fantasy tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) from the 1970s. As a space distinctive to early TTRPGs it is characterised by asymmetry between the dungeon as an object of design, and the dungeon as a practice of play. The discourse of games manuals, independent publications and blogs emerging from the TTRPG scene tracks the origins and evolution of these procedural and labyrinthine spaces, and the distinct spatiality of the megadungeon as a geographical object. The space of the megadungeon can be mapped onto a Lefebvrian triad of spatial production: it exists as a representation of space produced by a dungeon master or algorithmic generation that forms an infrastructure of play; it exists as a spatial practice emerging out of the unique experience of players traversing the megadungeon; and it forms a space of representation by seeking to imagine the megadungeon as a living fictional world, intersecting with the assumptions about spatial norms and relations originating in tropes of fantasy fiction. Surveying these trends in conversation with recent insights from human geography illustrates the distinct spatiality of the megadungeon that is derived from its origins in TTRPG play. This brings forward important questions for the utility of the megadungeon as a metaphor for digital media ecologies, and asks whether the metaphor could be extended to enrich conceptual debates in human geography.

Final Fantasy XIV dirilis pada tahun 2010 dan menerima banyak kritik dan dianggap sebagai sebuah video gim online yang gagal pada waktu itu. Dirilis kembali pada tahun 2013 dengan nama Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn dan telah sukses hingga merilis expansion terakhirnya yang berjudul Endwalker yang membuat jumlah pemain Final Fantasy XIV melonjak drastis setelah dikeluarkannya video game trailer pada bulan Februari dan Mei tahun 2021. Video game trailer menampilkan gambaran dari video gim dan memberikan penonton ekspektasi apa yang akan mereka dapatkan pada saat bermain salah satu caranya yaitu dengan menampilkan karakter yang berkaitan dengan narasi dari video gim menggunakan elemen visual yang bertujuan untuk menarik calon pemain. Artikel ini akan menganalisis faktor apa saja yang mempengaruhi ketertarikan khalayak sasaran terhadap suatu video gim melalui visualisasi desain karakter yang ditampilkan. Metode analisis konten digunakan untuk membedah video game trailer menggunakan pendekatan mise-en-scene, The Mixed Emotions and Character Appeal (MECA) Model dan kemudian dianalisa menggunakan pendekatan mean value. Penggunaan MECA model sendiri sudah memberikan hasil bahwa desain karakter sangat mempengaruhi pemain dalam menikmati sebuah narasi dan ketertarikan mereka terhadap karakter fiksi. Penelitian ini juga membuktikan bahwa penerapan mise-en-scene yang tepat juga mempengaruhi persepsi ketertarikan terhadap karakter fiksi. Final Fantasy XIV was released in 2010 and received a lot of criticism and was considered a failed online video game at that time. It was released back in 2013 under the name Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and was successful until the release of its last expansion entitled Endwalker which made the number of Final Fantasy XIV players soar after the release of the video game trailer in February and May 2021. The video game trailer shows an overview of video games and giving viewers expectations of what they will get when playing, one way is to display characters related to the narrative of the video game using visual elements that aim to attract potential players. This article will analyze what factors affect the target audience's interest in a video game through the visualization of the character designs displayed throughout the video game trailer. Content analysis method is used to dissect video game trailers using the mise-en-scene approach, The Mixed Emotions and Character Appeal (MECA) Model and then analyzed using the mean value approach. The use of the MECA model itself has resulted in the character design greatly influencing the players' enjoyment of a narrative and their interest in fictional characters. This research also proves that the application of the right mise-en-scene also influences the perception of attraction towards fictional characters.

The computer game is perhaps the fastest growing and most quickly evolving cultural leisure technology in the western world. Invented as a form just under 40 years ago with the creation of Space War at MIT, computer and video games collectively account for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales across the world. And yet critical analysis of this cultural form is still in its infancy. Perhaps the sheer speed of the development of games may account for this. Thirty years ago, strategy games were screens of text instructions and a prompt where you could type a weather forecast. Today pretty much all games are flawlessly shaded and rendered polygons. The technology of film has barely changed at all in the same period. In any case, the critical study of games began in the eighties. The focus initially was on the psychology of the gamer. Most game players were children and teenagers during this period, and the focussing of their leisure time on this new and strange computer technology became a source of extreme moral panic for educators, parents and researchers alike. Later, research into the cultures of gaming would become more nuanced, and begin to detail the semiotics and narrative structures of games. It is in that kind of frame that this article is positioned. I want to look closely at a particular strategy game series, The Settlers. Firstly, however, a description of the strategy game genre. Strategy games put the player into a simulated inhabited environment and give the player almost total control over that environment and its simulated inhabitants. The strategy game has many genres, including the simulation game and the god game, but the sub-genre I will focus on in this paper is the real-time strategy game. The game requires the player to develop a functioning economy, geared around the production of weapons and armies, which are sent out to combat neighbouring tribes or armies. Real-time games typically give greater tactical control of the armies to the player, and slightly less detailed economic control. The aim is basically to amass as much gold or whatever as possible to buy as many troops as possible. However, the game I am about to discuss is, in addition to being a simple game of war, a very interesting simulation of economic and logistical constraints. The Settlers is series of fantasy computer strategy games developed by the German game design firm Blue Byte. The three extant Settlers games can be considered an evolution of game design rather than a continuing narrative, so, given the time constraints, for the purposes of this paper I will address only one game in the series, the most recently released title, The Settlers 3. The Settlers 3 tells the story of three expansionist empires, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Asians, who have been thrust onto an uninhabited continent by the gods of their peoples to determine who is the fittest to survive. In other words, the game is founded from the beginning on a socio-Darwinian premise. In each level of the game, the settlers of each tribe must, under their player's direction, build an efficient and well maintained colony with a fully operating economy in order to achieve a set objective, which is usually to wipe out the opposing tribes by building up a large army, though it may be also to amass a predetermined level of a particular resource. Each level begins with about twenty settlers, a small guard hut to define the limits of the borders and a barely adequate supply of wooden planks, stone slabs and tools with which to begin to construct the economy. The player chooses building types from a menu and places them on the screen. Immediately the appropriate number of settlers walk across the landscape, leaving visible tracks in their wake, to pick up tools and supplies in order to construct the building. Typically, the player will order the construction of a woodcutter's hut, a sawmill, a stone cutter and a forester to ensure the steady flow of the basic construction materials to the rest of the colony. From this point more guard huts and towers are constructed to expand into new territory, and farms are built to feed the miners. Once constructed, the mine produce coal, gold and ore, which is sent down to the smelters to make iron bars (to make swords and tools) and gold bars (to pay the troops). Luxuries such as beer and wine are produced as a sacrifice to the gods. This results in rewards such as magical spells and promotion of the soldiers. Occasionally, incursions of enemy troops must be dealt with -- if they take a guard tower in battle, the borders, represented by lines of coloured flags, shrink, leading to the collapse and destruction of any building outside the boundaries. Finally, sufficient swords, bows and spears are produced, the soldiers are promoted, and they set off to pillage and destroy their neighbours' territory. If the previously mentioned enemy incursions were frequent enough, the final conflict where the player's warriors brutally annihilate the enemy is tremendously satisfying. The problematics of that particular game construct are left as an exercise for the audience. When territory is taken, the villages of the enemy go up in smoke and their resources are left lying on the ground, for the settlers to pick up and use for the benefit of the player. One of the things that make the game so fascinating to play is the complexity of the simulation. It must be said right away that the game employs many abstractions to make it playable and not utterly boring. For instance, only the miners out of all the settlers actually need food, and the mechanism by which new settlers are actually created is a bit vague (you construct a building called a "residence", and when it's completed, new setters simply troop out. And there only seem to be male settlers, unless you play the Amazons). Nonetheless, the game still quite explicitly details things most games of its type gloss right over. Unlike most games, pulling out all the stops in production just leads to bottlenecks where the transportation infrastructure can't get the goods to their destinations. Production levels have to be carefully monitored and throttled back where necessary to ensure the smooth flow of resources from A to B, C and D. Resources themselves -- coal lumps, gold bricks, fish, loaves of bread, swords --are modelled individually: you can actually track the process whereby an individual sheaf of wheat is harvested, picked up by a settler, carried off to the mill, turned into flour, sent to the bakery, made into a loaf of bread, and delivered to the coal miner for consumption. With its attention to the gritty detail of getting stuff from one place to the next, The Settlers is one of the very few truly logistically precise strategy games. Before I begin the analysis proper, I want to introduce some key terms that I'll be using a bit idiosyncratically in this paper. I'll be talking about gameplay quite a bit. Gameplay is a bit of a sliding signifier in the discourse of gaming theory -- loosely speaking it's that indefinable something that gets a player heated up about a game and keeps them playing for days on end. But here I want to be more precise. I'll offer a strategic definition. Gameplay is a way of quantifying the operations of a kind of economy of desire that operates between the player and the game itself. This economy has, as its constitutive elements, such factors as attention span, pleasure, ratio of novelty to repetition. These elements are in constant circulation in a game and the resulting economy is responsible for a good deal of the dynamism of the experience: in other words, the gameplay. What I want to focus on in this paper is what comes from the precise moment where two, quite central impulses of gameplay are in perfect balance, just before the first surrenders its grasp and the second takes over. The first impulse of play consists of two elements -- the visual presentation of the game, i.e. the pretty pictures that draw you in, and the narrative pretext of the story, the thing that gives what you are doing some kind of sense. It is on these two elements that classical ideological analysis of gameplay is typically founded. For instance, the archetypal platform game where all the female characters are helpless maidens who only exist as a way of getting the masculine protagonist into the action. The second impulse of gameplay is what might be called the "process", the somewhat under-theorised state where the visual trappings of the game and the motivating story line have slipped into the background, leaving only the sense of seamless integration of the player into the game's cybernetic feedback loop. The visual presentation and narrative pretext of The Settlers draws the player into a familiar fantasy of pre-modern existence. Presented to the player is a beautifully rendered virgin wilderness, filled with rolling hills, magnificent mountain ranges and vast forests, resounding with the sounds of the stream and brook, and the rustling of the wildlife. Into this wilderness the player must project an empire. That empire will consist of an elaborately detailed network (and I use the term deliberately) of cottage industries, labourers, paths, commodities, resources, defensive structures and places of worship. Real-world economic activities are consummately simulated as complex flows of information. The simulation is always fascinating to watch. Each node in this network, be it a fisherman's hut, a bakery, or a smelter, is exquisitely rendered, and full of picturesque, yet highly functional, animation. For instance, the process of a fisherman leaving his hut, going to a stream, setting his line, and catching a fish is visually expressive and lively, but it also is a specific bottleneck in the production process -- it takes a finite time, during which the carrier settlers stand around waiting for produce to deliver. This, then, is the game's crucial dialectic. What is depicted is a visually sumptuous, idyllic existence, but on closer inspection is a model of constant, uninterrupted, backbreaking labour. There are not even demarcations of day and night in the game -- life is perpetually midday and the working day will last forever. To put it less simply, perhaps, the game purposefully reifies the human social condition as being a reflexively structured mechanism of economic production under the guise of an ideologically idyllic pastoral paradise. It positions the player as not merely complicit in this mechanism but the fundamental point of determination within it. The balancing moment then is the point where the player begins to ignore or take for granted the visual lushness of the game's graphics and to focus instead on the underlying system, to internalise the lessons of the game -- the particular ideological and discursive assumptions about how economic and political systems successfully operate -- and to apply these lessons to the correct playing of the game, almost like a transition between REM dream-state sleep and deep sleep. And the analogy to sleep is not entirely specious -- critics and players alike have noted the way time stops when you play a game, with whole nights and days seemingly swallowed up in seconds of game time. The type of focus I am describing is not an interpretative one -- players are not expected to gain new insights of meaning from the act of playing at this new level of intensity, instead they are simply to blend their thoughts, actions and reactions with the dynamic processes of the game system. In a sense, a computer game is less a textual form than it is a kind of tool: in the same way proficient word processor users becomes so fluent in the operations of their software that the trappings -- toolbars, menus, mouse -- become secondary to the smooth continuous process of churning out words. Such a relationship does not exactly inspire thoughtful contemplation about the repressive qualities of Microsoft's hegemonic domination of office software, and the similar relationship with the computer game makes any kind of reflexivity about the gameplay's cultural referents seem simply counterproductive. It's an interesting dilemma for the theorist of gaming -- the point at which the underlying structure comes most clearly into focus during the state of play/analysis is also the moment when one is most resistant to the need to draw the wider connections. In this paper, I've tried to take a suggestive approach, to point out some of the ways that ideological assumptions about culture and production can be actualised in a simulated environment. And hopefully, I've also pointed out some of the pitfalls in a purely ideological analysis of games. Games are never just about the ideology. A nuanced analysis from a cultural studies point of view must also take into account the quite complex ways games not only articulate certain ideologies but they also complicate them. Beyond that, analysis must take into account the ways that games go beyond the paradigm of textuality and begin to take on the aspect of being whole systems of symbolic manipulation and transmission. It is only at this point that any kind of comprehensive and theoretically precise engagement with games as cultural texts and processes can be seriously begun. References Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design. Berkeley, California: Osborne / McGraw-Hill, 1984. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996. Freidman, Ted. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. Steven G. Jones. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. 73-89. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London and New York: Verso, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (2000) Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]).

PurposeThis research investigates how advergame design elements (fantasy vs realistic advergame experiences) may impact players' brand patronage (BP), under the influence of mediators (hot and cold brand relationship quality [BRQ]) and moderators (advergame reward system and brand personality).Design/methodology/approachThis research comprises of a survey (study 1) and a lab experiment (study 2).FindingsStudy 1 shows that fantasy (reality) based advergame experience leads to brand patronage through strong mediation of hot (cold) BRQ and weak mediation of cold (hot) BRQ. Introducing a utilitarian (hedonic) advergame reward system positively moderates the effect of fantasy (reality) based advergame experience on cold (hot) BRQ. Study 2 shows that an advergame that elicits fantasy (realistic) experience and offers hedonic (utilitarian) rewards for a brand having affective (vs cognitive) brand personality strongly impacts hot (cold) BRQ.Originality/valueThis research is an effort to understand how gamification as leisure information systems may be used to create gamers' advergame experiences that elicit BP by strategically designing advergame reward systems specific to brand personality types.

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

Introduction -- Making Sense of the (Virtual) World Computer games are never "just games". Computer games are models of reality and if they were not, we would never be able to understand them. Models serve three functions; they capture important, critical features of that which is to be represented while ignoring the irrelevant, they are appropriate for the person and they are appropriate for the task -- thereby enhancing the ability to make judgements and discover relevant regularities and structures (Norman 1993). Despite the inherently unvisualisable nature of computer code -- the flexible material of which all software constructs are built -- computer code is still the most "salient" ingredient in computer games. Less salient are those assumptions that are "built into" the software. By filtering out those parts of reality that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessary, different sorts of assumptions, different sorts of bias are automatically built into the software, reified in the very computer code (Friedman 1995, Friedman and Nissenbaum 1997). Here I will analyse some of the built-in structures that constitute the fabric of a special sort of game, a MUD. A MUD is an Internet-accessible "multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose user interface is entirely textual" (Curtis, 1992). The specific MUD in question is a nine-year old Swedish-language adventure MUD called SvenskMUD ("SwedishMUD") that is run by Lysator, the academic computer club at Linköping University, Sweden. I have done field studies of SvenskMUD over a period of three and a half years (Pargman, forthcoming 2000). How is the SvenskMUD adventure world structured and what are the rules that are built into the fabric of this computer game? I will describe some of the ways in which danger and death, good and evil, courage, rewards and wealth are handled in the game. I will conclude the paper with a short analysis of the purpose of configuring the player according to those structures. Revocable Deaths Characters (personae/avatars) in SvenskMUD can be divided into two categories, players and magicians. Making a career as a player to a large part involves solving quests and killing "monsters" in the game. The magicians are all ex-players who have "graduated" and gone beyond playing the game of SvenskMUD. They have become the administrators, managers and programmers of SvenskMUD. A watchful eye is kept on the magicians by "God", the creator, owner and ultimate custodian of SvenskMUD. My own first battle in the game, in a sunlit graveyard with a small mouse, is an example of a bit-sized danger suitable for newcomers, or "newbies". I correctly guessed that the mouse was a suitably weak opponent for my newborn character, but still had to "tickle" the mouse on its belly (a euphemism for hitting it without much force) 50 times before I managed to kill it. Other parts of this epic battle included 45 failed attempts of mine to "tickle" the mouse, 39 successful "tickles" of the mouse and finally a wild chase around the graveyard before I caught up with the mouse, cornered it and managed to kill it and end the fight. Although I was successful in my endeavour, I was also more than half dead after my run-in with the mouse and had to spend quite some time engaged in more peaceful occupations before I was completely healed. It was only later that I learned that you can improve your odds considerably by using weapons and armour when you fight... Should a SvenskMUD player fail in his (or less often, her) risky and adventurous career and die, that does not constitute an insurmountable problem. Should such a thing pass, the player's ghost only has to find the way back to a church in one of the villages. In the church, the player is reincarnated, albeit with some loss of game-related abilities and experience. The way the unfortunate event of an occasional death is handled is part of the meta-rules of SvenskMUD. The meta-rules are the implicit, underlying rules that represent the values, practices and concerns that shape the frame from which the "ordinary" specific rules operate. Meta-rules are part of the "world view that directs the game action and represents the implicit philosophy or ideals by which the world operates" (Fine 1983, 76). Despite the adventure setting with all its hints of medieval lawlessness and unknown dangers lurking, SvenskMUD is in fact a very caring and forgiving environment. The ultimate proof of SvenskMUD's forgiveness is the revocable character of death itself. Fair Dangers Another SvenskMUD meta-rule is that dangers (and death) should be "fair". This fairness is extended so as to warn players explicitly of dangers. Before a dangerous monster is encountered, the player receives plenty of warnings: You are standing in the dark woods. You feel a little afraid. East of you is a small dark lake in the woods. There are three visible ways from here: east, north and south. It would be foolish to direct my character to go east in this situation without being adequately prepared for encountering and taking on something dangerous in battle. Those preparations should include a readiness to flee if the expected danger proves to be superior. If, in the example above, a player willingly and knowingly directs a character to walk east, that player has to face the consequences of this action. But if another player is very cautious and has no reason to suspect a deadly danger lurking behind the corner, it is not considered "fair" if that player's character dies or is hurt in such a way that it results in damage that has far-reaching consequences within the game. The dangerous monsters that roam the SvenskMUD world are restricted to roam only "dangerous" areas and it is considered good manners to warn players in some way when they enter such an area. Part of learning how to play SvenskMUD successfully becomes a matter of understanding different cues, such as the transition from a safe area to a dangerous one, or the different levels of danger signalled by different situations. Should they not know it in advance, players quickly learn that it is not advisable to enter the "Valley of Ultimate Evil" unless they have reached a very high level in the game and are prepared to take on any dangers that come their way. As with all other meta-rules, both players and magicians internalise this rule to such an extent that it becomes unquestionable and any transgression (such as a dangerous monster roaming around in a village, killing newbie characters who happen to stray its way) would immediately render complaints from players and corresponding actions on behalf of the magicians to rectify the situation. Meta-Rules as "Folk Ideas" Fine (1983, 76-8) enumerates four meta-rules that Dundes (1971) has described and applies them to the fantasy role-playing games he has studied. Dundes's term for these meta-rules is "folk ideas" and they reflect existing North American (and Western European) cultural beliefs. Fine shows that these folk ideas capture core beliefs or central values of the fantasy role-playing games he studied. Three of Dundes's four folk ideas are also directly applicable to SvenskMUD. Unlimited Wealth The first folk idea is the principle of unlimited good. There is no end to growth or wealth. For that reason, treasure found in a dungeon doesn't need a rationale for being there. This folk idea is related to the modernist concept of constant, unlimited progress. "Some referees even 'restock' their dungeons when players have found a particular treasure so that the next time someone enters that room (and kills the dragon or other beasties guarding it) they, too, will be rewarded" (Fine 1983, 76). To restock all treasures and reawaken all killed monsters at regular intervals is standard procedure in SvenskMUD and all other adventure MUDs. The technical term is that the game "resets". The reason why a MUD resets at regular intervals is that, while the MUD itself is finite, there is no end to the number of players who want their share of treasures and other goodies. The handbook for SvenskMUD magicians contains "design guidelines" for creating quests: You have to invent a small story about your quest. The typical scenario is that someone needs help with something. It is good if you can get the story together in such a way that it is possible to explain why it can be solved several times, since the quest will be solved, once for each prospective magician. Perhaps a small spectacle a short while after (while the player is pondering the reward) that in some way restore things in such a way that it can be solved again. (Tolke 1993, my translation) Good and Evil The second folk idea is that the world is a battleground between good and evil. In fantasy literature or a role-playing game there is often no in-between and very seldom any doubt whether someone encountered is good or evil, as "referees often express the alignment [moral character] of nonplayer characters through stereotyped facial features or symbolic colours" (Fine 1983, 77). "Good and evil" certainly exists as a structuring resource for the SvenskMUD world, but interestingly the players are not able to be described discretely in these terms. As distinct from role-playing games, a SvenskMUD player is not created with different alignments (good, evil or neutral). All players are instead neutral and they acquire an alignment as they go along, playing SvenskMUD -- the game. If a player kills a lot of mice and cute rabbits, that player will turn first wicked and then evil. If a player instead kills trolls and orcs, that player first turns good and then saint-like. Despite the potential fluidity of alignment in SvenskMUD, some players cultivate an aura of being good or evil and position themselves in opposition to each other. This is most apparent with two of the guilds (associations) in SvenskMUD, the Necromancer's guild and the Light order's guild. Courage Begets Rewards The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: More experienced characters gain experience points (xps) and rise in levels only by seeking out and overcoming danger and "there is a positive correlation between the danger in a setting and its payoff in treasure" (Fine 1983, 78). Just as it would be "unfair" to die without adequate warning, so would it be (perceived to be) grossly unfair to seek out and overcome dangerous monsters or situations without being adequately rewarded. And conversely, it would be perceived to be unfair if someone "stumbled over the treasure" without having deserved it, i.e. if someone was rewarded without having performed an appropriately difficult task. Taken from the information on etiquette in an adventure MUD, Reid's quote is a good example of this: It's really bad form to steal someone else's kill. Someone has been working on the Cosmicly Invulnerable Utterly Unstoppable Massively Powerful Space Demon for ages, leaves to get healed, and in the interim, some dweeb comes along and whacks the Demon and gets all it's [sic] stuff and tons of xps [experience points]. This really sucks as the other person has spent lots of time and money in expectation of the benefits from killing the monster. The graceful thing to do is to give em [sic] all the stuff from the corpse and compensation for the money spent on healing. This is still a profit to you as you got all the xps and spent practically no time killing it. (Reid 1999, 122, my emphasis) The User Illusion An important objective of the magicians in SvenskMUD is to describe everything that a player experiences in the SvenskMUD world in game-related terms. The game is regarded as a stage where the players are supposed to see only what is in front of, but not behind the scenes. A consistent use of game-related terms and game-related explanations support the suspension of disbelief and engrossment in the SvenskMUD fantasy world. The main activity of the MUD users should be to enter into the game and guide their characters through a fascinating (and, as much as possible and on its own terms, believable) fantasy world. The guiding principle is therefore that the player should never be reminded of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real, that SvenskMUD is only a game or a computer program. From this perspective, the worst thing players can encounter in SvenskMUD is a breakdown of the user illusion, a situation that instantly transports a person from the SvenskMUD world and leaves that person sitting in front of a computer screen. Error messages, e.g. the feared "you have encountered a bug [in the program]", are an example of this. If a magician decides to change the SvenskMUD world, that magician is supposed to do the very best to explain the change by using game-related jargon. This is reminiscent of the advice to "work within the system": "wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community" (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 294). If for some reason a shop has to be moved from one village to another, a satisfactory explanation must be given, e.g. a fire occurring in the old shop or the old shop being closed due to competition (perhaps from the "new", relocated shop). Explanations that involve supernatural forces or magic are also fine in a fantasy world. Explanations that remind the player of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real ("I moved the shop to Eriksros, because all magicians decided that it would be so much better to have it there"), or even worse, that SvenskMUD is a computer program ("I moved the program shop.c to another catalogue in the file structure") are to be avoided at all costs. Part of socialising magicians becomes teaching them to express themselves in this way even when they know better about the machinations of SvenskMud. There are several examples of ingenious and imaginative ways to render difficult-to-explain phenomena understandable in game-related terms: There was a simple problem that appeared at times that made the computer [that SvenskMUD runs on] run a little slower, and as time went by the problem got worse. I could fix the problem easily when I saw it and I did that at times. After I had fixed the problem the game went noticeably faster for the players that were logged in. For those occasions, I made up a message and displayed it to everyone who was in the system: "Linus reaches into the nether regions and cranks a little faster". (Interview with Linus Tolke, "God" in SvenskMUD) When a monster is killed in the game, it rots away (disappears) after a while. However, originally, weapons and armour that the monster wielded did not disappear; a lucky player could find valuable objects and take them without having "deserved" them. This specific characteristic of the game was deemed to be a problem, not least because it furthered a virtual inflation in the game that tended to decrease the value of "honestly" collected weapons and loot. The problem was discussed at a meeting of the SvenskMUD magicians that I attended. It was decided that when a monster is killed and the character that killed it does not take the loot, the loot should disappear ("rot") together with the monster. But how should this be explained to the players in a suitable way if they approach a magician to complain about the change, a change that in their opinion was for the worse? At the meeting it was suggested that from now on, all weapons and shields were forged with a cheaper, weaker metal. Not only would objects of this metal "rot" away together with the monster that wielded them, but it was also suggested that all weapons in the whole game should in fact be worn down as time goes by. (Not to worry, new ones appear in all the pre-designated places every time the game resets.) Conclusion -- Configuring the Player SvenskMUD can easily be perceived as a "blooming buzzing confusion" for a new player and my own first explorations in SvenskMUD often left me confused even as I was led from one enlightenment to the next. Not everyone feels inclined to take up the challenge to make sense of a world where you have to learn everything anew, including how to walk and how to talk. On the other hand, in the game world, much is settled for the best, and a crack in a subterranean cave is always exactly big enough to squeeze through... The process of becoming part of the community of SvenskMUD players is inexorably connected to learning to become an expert in the activities of that community, i.e. of playing SvenskMUD (Wenger 1998). A player who wants to program in SvenskMUD (thereby altering the fabric of the virtual world) will acquire many of the relevant concepts before actually becoming a magician, just by playing and exploring the game of SvenskMUD. Even if the user illusion succeeds in always hiding the computer code from the player, the whole SvenskMUD world constitutes a reflection of that underlying computer code. An implicit understanding of the computer code is developed through extended use of SvenskMUD. The relationship between the SvenskMUD world and the underlying computer code is in this sense analogous to the relationship between the lived-in world and the rules of physics that govern the world. All around us children "prepare themselves" to learn the subject of physics in school by throwing balls up in the air (gravity) and by pulling carts or sledges (friction). By playing SvenskMUD, a player will become accustomed to many of the concepts that govern the SvenskMUD world and will come to understand the goals, symbols, procedures and values of SvenskMUD. This process bears many similarities to the "primary socialisation" of a child into a member of society, a socialisation that serves "to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies" (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 155). This is the purpose of configuring the player and it is intimately connected to the re-growth of SvenskMUD magicians and the survival of SvenskMUD itself over time. However, it is not the only possible outcome of the SvenskMUD socialisation process. The traditional function of trials and quests in fantasy literature is to teach the hero, usually through a number of external or internal encounters with evil or doubt, to make the right, moral choices. By excelling at these tests, the protagonist shows his or her worthiness and by extension also stresses and perhaps imputes these values in the reader (Dalquist et al. 1991). Adventure MUDs could thus socialise adolescents and reinforce common moral values in society; "the fantasy hero is the perfectly socialised and exemplary subject of a society" (53, my translation). My point here is not that SvenskMUD differs from other adventure MUDs. I would imagine that most of my observations are general to adventure MUDs and that many are applicable also to other computer games. My purpose here has rather been to present a perspective on how an adventure MUD is structured, to trace the meaning of that structure beyond the game itself and to suggest a purpose behind that organisation. I encourage others to question built-in bias and underlying assumptions of computer games (and other systems) in future studies. References Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1966. Curtis, P. "MUDding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities." High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Ed. P. Ludlow. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/virtual-reality/communications/papers/muds/muds/Mudding-Social-Phenomena.txt>. Dalquist, U., T. Lööv, and F. Miegel. "Trollkarlens lärlingar: Fantasykulturen och manlig identitetsutveckling [The Wizard's Apprentices: Fantasy Culture and Male Identity Development]." Att förstå ungdom [Understanding Youth]. Ed. A. Löfgren and M. Norell. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 1991. Dundes, A. "Folk Ideas as Units of World View." Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Ed. A. Paredes and R. Bauman. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Fine, G.A. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Friedman, B. and H. Nissenbaum. "Bias in Computer Systems." Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Ed. B. Friedman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997. Friedman, T. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer. "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat." Cyberspace: The First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge: MA, MIT P, 1991. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.communities.com/company/papers/lessons.php>. Norman, D. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Pargman, D. "Code Begets Community: On Social and Technical Aspects of Managing a Virtual Community." Ph.D. dissertation. Dept. of Communication Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, forthcoming, December 2000. Reid, E. "Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace." Communities in Cyberspace. Ed. M. Smith and P. Kollock. London, England: Routledge, 1999. Tolke, L. Handbok för SvenskMudmagiker: ett hjälpmedel för byggarna i SvenskMUD [Handbook for SvenskMudmagicians: An Aid for the Builders in SvenskMUD]. Printed and distributed by the author in a limited edition, 1993. Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Pargman. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Pargman, "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Pargman. (2000) The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]).

Art Imitating ArtThis article discusses the global, historical and literary references that are present in the video game franchise Bayonetta. In particular, references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of Dr John Dee, and European traditions of witchcraft are examined. Bayonetta is modern in the sense that she is a woman of the world. Her character shows how history and literature may be used, re-used, and evolve into new formats, and how modern games travel abroad through time and space.Drawing creative inspiration from other works is nothing new. Ideas and themes, art and literature are frequently borrowed and recast. Carmel Cedro cites Northrop Frye in the example of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. These writers created stories and characters that have developed a level of acclaim and resonated with many individuals, resulting in countless homages over the years. The forms that these appropriations take vary widely. Media formats, such as film adaptations and even books, take the core characters or narrative from the original and re-work them into a different context. For example, the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1883 was adapted into the 2002 Walt Disney animated film Treasure Planet. The film maintained the concepts of the original narrative and retained key characters but re-imaged them to fit the science fiction genre (Clements and Musker).The video-game franchise Bayonetta draws inspiration from distinct sources creating the foundation for the universe and some plot points to enhance the narrative. The main sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy, the projections of John Dee and his mystical practices as well as the medieval history of witches.The Vestibule: The Concept of BayonettaFigure 1: Bayonetta Concept ArtBayonetta ConceptsThe concept of Bayonetta was originally developed by video game designer Hideki Kamiya, known previously for his work including The Devil May Cry and the Resident Evil game series. The development of Bayonetta began with Kamiya requesting a character design that included three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and four guns. This description laid the foundations for what was to become the hack and slash fantasy heroine that would come to be known as Bayonetta. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri during the 1300s, was a revolutionary piece of literature for its time, in that it was one of the first texts that formalised the vernacular Italian language by omitting the use of Latin, the academic language of the time. Dante’s work was also revolutionary in its innovative contemplations on religion, art and sciences, creating a literary collage of such depth that it would continue to inspire hundreds of years after its first publication.Figure 2: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and his Divine Comedy, surrounded by depictions of scenes in the textBayonetta explores the themes of The Divine Comedy in a variety of ways, using them as an obvious backdrop, along with subtle homages and references scattered throughout the game. The world of Bayonetta is set in the Trinity of Realities, three realms that co-exist forming the universe: Inferno, Paradiso and the Chaos realm—realm of humans—and connected by Purgitorio—the intersection of the trinity. In the game, Bayonetta travels throughout these realms, primarily in the realm of Purgitorio, the area in which magical and divine entities may conduct their business. However, there are stages within the game where Bayonetta finds herself in Paradiso and the human realm. This is a significant factor relating to The Divine Comedy as these realms also form the areas explored by Dante in his epic poem. The depth of these parallels is not exclusive to factors in Dante’s masterpiece, as there are also references to other art and literature inspired by Dante’s legacy. For example, the character Rodin in Bayonetta runs a bar named “The Gates of Hell.” In 1917 French artist Auguste Rodin completed a sculpture, The Gates of Hell depicting scenes and characters from The Divine Comedy. Rodin’s bar in Bayonetta is manifested as a dark impressionist style of architecture, with an ominous atmosphere. In early concept art, the proprietor of the bar was to be named Mephisto (Kamiya) derived from “Mephistopheles”, another name for the devil in some mythologies. Figure 3: Auguste Rodin's Gate of Hell, 1917Aspects of Dante’s surroundings and the theological beliefs of his time can be found in Bayonetta, as well as in the 2013 anime film adaptation Bayonetta, Bloody Fate. The Christian virtues, revered during the European Middle Ages, manifest themselves as enemies and adversaries that Bayonetta must combat throughout the game. Notably, the names of the cardinal virtues serve as “boss ranked” foes. Enemies within a game, usually present at the end of a level and more difficult to defeat than regular enemies within “Audito Sphere” of the “Laguna Hierarchy” (high levels of the hierarchy within the game), are named in Italian; Fortitudo, Temperantia, Lustitia, and Sapientia. These are the virtues of Classical Greek Philosophy, and reflect Dante’s native language as well as the impact the philosophies of Ancient Greece had on his writings. The film adaption of Bayonetta incorporated many elements from the game. To adjust the game effectively, it was necessary to augment the plot in order to fit the format of this alternate media. As it was no longer carried by gameplay, the narrative became paramount. The diverse plot points of the new narrative allowed for novel possibilities for further developing the role of The Divine Comedy in Bayonetta. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Bayonetta enters as a nun, just as she does in the game, only here she is in church praying rather than in a graveyard conducting a funeral. During her prayer she recites “I am the way into the city of woe, abandon all hope, oh, ye who enter here,” which is a Canto of The Divine Comedy. John Dee and the AngelsDr John Dee (1527—1608), a learned man of Elizabethan England, was a celebrated philosopher, mathematician, scientist, historian, and teacher. In addition, he was a researcher of magic and occult arts, as were many of his contemporaries. These philosopher magicians were described as Magi and John Dee was the first English Magus (French). He was part of a school of study within the Renaissance intelligensia that was influenced by the then recently discovered works of the gnostic Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be of great antiquity. This was in an age when religion, philosophy and science were intertwined. Alchemy and chemistry were still one, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler and Tyco Brahe cast horoscopes. John Dee engaged in spiritual experiments that were based in his Christian faith but caused him to be viewed in some circles as dangerously heretical (French).Based on the texts of Hermes Trismegistas and other later Christian philosophical and theological writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Dee and his contemporaries believed in celestial hierarchies and levels of existence. These celestial hierarchies could be accessed by “real artificial magic,” or applied science, that included mathematics, and the cabala, or the mystical use of permutations of Hebrew texts, to access supercelestial powers (French). In his experiments in religious magic, Dee was influenced by the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535). In Agrippa’s book, De Occulta Philosophia, there are descriptions for seals, symbols and tables for summoning angels, to which Dee referred in his accounts of his own magic experiments (French). Following his studies, Dee constructed a table with a crystal placed on it. By use of suitable rituals prescribed by Agrippa and others, Dee believed he summoned angels within the crystal, who could be seen and conversed with. Dee did not see these visions himself, but conversed with the angels through a skryer, or medium, who saw and heard the celestial beings. Dee recorded his interviews in his “Spiritual Diaries” (French). Throughout Bayonetta there are numerous seals and devices that would appear to be inspired by the work of Dee or other Renaissance Magi.In these sessions, John Dee, through his skryer Edward Kelley, received instruction from several angels. The angels led him to believe he was to be a prophet in the style of the biblical Elijah or, more specifically like Enoch, whose prophesies were detailed in an ancient book that was not part of the Bible, but was considered by many scholars as divinely inspired. As a result, these experiments have been termed “Enochian conversations.” The prophesies received by Dee foretold apocalyptic events that were to occur soon and God’s plan for the world. The angels also instructed Dee in a system of magic to allow him to interpret the prophesies and participate in them as a form of judge. Importantly, Dee was also taught elements of the supposed angelic language, which came to be known as “Enochian” (Ouellette). Dee wrote extensively about his interviews with the angels and includes statements of their hierarchy (French, Ouellette). This is reflected in the “Laguna Hierarchy” of Bayonetta, sharing similarities in name and appearance of the angels Dee had described. Platinum Games creative director Jean-Pierre Kellams acted as writer and liaison, assisting the English adaptation of Bayonetta and was tasked by Hideki Kamiya to develop Bayonetta’s incantations and subsequently the language of the angels within the game (Kellams).The Hammer of WitchesOne of the earliest and most integral components of the Bayonetta franchise is the fact that the title character is a witch. Witches, sorcerers and other practitioners of magic have been part of folklore for centuries. Hideki Kamiya stated that the concept of” classical witches” was primarily a European legend. In order to emulate this European dimension, he had envisioned Bayonetta as having a British accent which resulted in the game being released in English first, even though Platinum Games is a Japanese company (Kamiya). The Umbra Witch Clan hails from Europe within the Bayonetta Universe and relates more closely to the traditional European medieval witch tradition (Various), although some of the charms Bayonetta possesses acknowledge the witches of different parts of the world and their cultural context. The Evil Harvest Rosary is said to have been created by a Japanese witch in the game. Bayonetta herself and other witches of the game use their hair as a conduit to summon demons and is known as “wicked weaves” within the game. She also creates her tight body suit out of her hair, which recedes when she decides to use a wicked weave. Using hair in magic harks back to a legend that witches often utilised hair in their rituals and spell casting (Guiley). It is also said that women with long and beautiful hair were particularly susceptible to being seduced by Incubi, a form of demon that targets sleeping women for sexual intercourse. According to some texts (Kramer), witches formed into the beings that they are through consensual sex with a devil, as stated in Malleus Maleficarum of the 1400s, when he wrote that “Modern Witches … willingly embrace this most foul and miserable form of servitude” (Kramer). Bayonetta wields her sexuality as proficiently as she does any weapon. This lends itself to the belief that women of such a seductive demeanour were consorts to demons.Purgitorio is not used in the traditional sense of being a location of the afterlife, as seen in The Divine Comedy, rather it is depicted as a dimension that exists concurrently within the human realm. Those who exist within this Purgitorio cannot be seen with human eyes. Bayonetta’s ability to enter and exit this space with the use of magic is likened to the myth that witches were known to disappear for periods of time and were purported to be “spirited away” from the human world (Kamiya).Recipes for gun powder emerge from as early as the 1200s but, to avoid charges of witchcraft due to superstitions of the time, they were hidden by inventors such as Roger Bacon (McNab). The use of “Bullet Arts” in Bayonetta as the main form of combat for Umbra Witches, and the fact that these firearm techniques had been honed by witches for centuries before the witch hunts, implies that firearms were indeed used by dark magic practitioners until their “discovery” by ordinary humans in the Bayonetta universe. In addition to this, that “Lumen Sages” are not seen to practice bullet arts, builds on the idea of guns being a practice of black magic. “Lumen Sages” are the Light counterpart and adversaries of the Umbra Witches in Bayonetta. The art of Alchemy is incorporated into Bayonetta as a form of witchcraft. Players may create their own health, vitality, protective and mana potions through a menu screen. This plays on the taboo of chemistry and alchemy of the 1500s. As mentioned, John Dee's tendency to dabble in such practices was considered by some to be heretical (French, Ouellette).Light and dark forces are juxtaposed in Bayonetta through the classic adversaries, Angels and Demons. The moral flexibility of both the light and dark entities in the game leaves the principles of good an evil in a state of ambiguity, which allows for uninhibited flow in the story and creates a non-linear and compelling narrative. Through this non-compliance with the pop culture counterparts of light and dark, gamers are left to question the foundations of old cultural norms. This historical context lends itself to the Bayonetta story not only by providing additional plot points, but also by justifying the development decisions that occur in order to truly flesh out Bayonetta’s character.ConclusionCompelling story line, characters with layered personality, and the ability to transgress boundaries of time and travel are all factors that provide a level of depth that has become an increasingly important aspect in modern video gameplay. Gamers love “Easter eggs,” the subtle references and embellishments scattered throughout a game that make playing games like Bayonetta so enjoyable. Bayonetta herself is a global traveller whose journeying is not limited to “abroad.” She transgresses cultural, time, and spatial boundaries. The game is a mosaic of references to spatial time dimensions, literary, and historical sources. This mix of borrowings has produced an original gameplay and a unique storyline. Such use of literature, mythology, and history to enhance the narrative creates a quest game that provides “meaningful play” (Howard). This process of creation of new material from older sources is a form of renewal. As long as contemporary culture presents literature and history to new audiences, the older texts will not be forgotten, but these elements will undergo a form of renewal and restoration and the present-day culture will be enhanced as a result. In the words of Bayonetta herself: “As long as there’s music, I’ll keep on dancing.”ReferencesCedro, Carmel. "Dolly Varden: Sweet Inspiration." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 37-46. French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1972. Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 2008. Kamiya, Hideki.Bayonetta. Bayonetta. Videogame. Sega, Japan, 2009.Kellams, Jean-Pierre. "Butmoni Coronzon (from the Mouth of the Witch)." Platinum Games 2009.Kramer, Heinrich. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Eds. Sprenger, Jakob, or joint author, and Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.McNab, C. Firearms: The Illustrated Guide to Small Arms of the World. Parragon, 2008.Ouellette, Francois. "Prophet to the Elohim: John Dee's Enochian Conversations as Christian Apocalyptic Discourse." Master of Arts thesis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2004.Treasure Planet. The Walt Disney Company, 2003.Various. "Bayonetta Wikia." 2016.

Introduction This article reports on the emerging findings from a study undertaken as part of an international research collaboration (Australia, Belgium, Italy, UK; DP180103922) exploring the benefits and risks of the Internet of Toys (IoToys). IoToys builds upon technological innovations such as smartphone apps that remotely control home-based objects, and wearable technologies that measure sleep patterns and exercise regimes (Holloway and Green). Mascheroni and Holloway summarise the features of IoToys as entities that users can program, with human-toy interactivity, and which have network connectivity. In this discussion we focus on children’s play with a small programmable robot named Cozmo (fig. 1). The robot also has an ‘explorer mode’ in which children can view the world through the eyes of Cozmo, and a camera which can film the robot’s view, accessed through the mobile app. Children are encouraged to personify Cozmo, including feeding the robot and keeping it tuned up. Cozmo also has numerous functions including tricks, a coding lab, and games that utilise three provided ‘Power Cubes’ that encourage child-robot interaction: Keep Away – the player slides the cube closer to Cozmo then pulls away quickly when Cozmo ‘pounces’ – the aim of the game is to ensure Cozmo misses the cube. Quick Tap – a colour matching game which involves hitting the cubes (before Cozmo) when the colours match. Memory Match – Cozmo shows a pattern of colours, and the player then taps the cubes in the right colour order – each round the pattern gets longer. Fig. 1: Cozmo Whilst the toy uses Wi-Fi rather than connecting directly to the Internet, Cozmo was chosen as a focus for the study because many of its characteristics are typical of IoToys, including connectivity, programmability, and the human-toy connection (Mascheroni and Holloway). Children’s play lives have been changed through the development of digital technologies including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and games consoles (Marsh et al.) and inevitably, children’s play experiences now cross a range of boundaries including the “virtual/physical world, online/offline and digital/nondigital” (Marsh 5). As IoToys become more prevalent in the toy market, there is an increasing need to understand how these connected toys transcend digital-material boundaries between toy and media technology. Whilst toys such as Cozmo share similar traits with traditional toys, they also increasingly share characteristics with computing devices (i.e., video games, mobile apps) and domestic media (i.e., Amazon Alexa; Berriman and Mascheroni). The combination of the traditional and digital adds a layer of complexity to children’s play experiences as the interaction between the child and the robot is ‘reconfigured as a bidirectional, multidimensional, multisensory experience’ (Mascheroni and Holloway 5). By asking ‘what types of play does an Internet-enabled toy engender?’, this article examines the capabilities and limitations of Cozmo for children’s play experiences. Currently, there is little reliable information about children’s IoToy use despite the media attention the subject attracts. Many assumptions are made regarding how technological devices offer restricted opportunities for play (see Healey et al.), and therefore it is vital to investigate the benefits and limitations of these new-generation technologies for parents and children. This article contributes to ongoing debates focussing on children’s playful engagement with digital technology and the importance of engaging parents in discussions on different types of play and children’s development. Methodology This international study involved thirteen families across four countries (Australia, Belgium, Italy, UK; Appendix 1). Ethical clearance was obtained prior to the commencement of the study. Consent was gained from both the children and the parents, and the children were specifically asked if they could be audio-recorded and photographed by the researchers. Pseudonyms have been used in this article. Families were visited twice by a researcher, with each visit lasting around an hour. Firstly, the children were interviewed about their favourite toys, and the parent was interviewed about their thoughts on their children’s (digital) play practices. This provided background information about the child’s play ecologies, such as the extent to which they were familiar with IoToys. Cozmo was also introduced to the children during the first visit and researchers ensured they were confident using the toy before leaving. Cozmo was left with the children to use for a period of between one and three months before the researcher returned for the second visit. Families were reinterviewed, with a focus on what they thought about Cozmo, and how the children had engaged with the toy in their play. Data were deductively analysed using a revised version of Hughes’s taxonomy of play that takes account of the digital aspect of children’s play contexts. Hughes’s original framework, identifying the types of play children engage in, was developed before the rise of digital media. The revised taxonomy was developed by Marsh et al. (see Appendix 2) in a study that examined how apps can promote children’s play and creativity. Data emerging from this study illuminated how Hughes’s taxonomy can be applied in digital contexts, demonstrating that “what changes in digital contexts is not so much the types of play possible, but the nature of that play” (Marsh et al. 250). The adapted framework was applied to the data as a way of analysing play with Cozmo across digital and non-digital spaces, and selections from the transcripts were chosen to illustrate the categories, discussed in the next section. Framing Children’s Digital and Non-Digital Play Practices The findings from the data highlight numerous digital play types (Marsh et al.) that occurred during the children’s interactions with the robot, primarily: Imaginative play in a digital context in which children pretend that things are otherwise. Exploratory play in a digital context in which children explore objects and spaces through the senses to find out information or explore possibilities. Mastery play in digital contexts in which children attempt to gain control of environments. Communication play using words, songs, rhymes, poetry in a digital context. Other types of play that were observed include: Virtual Locomotor play involving movement in a digital context e.g., child may play hide and seek with others in a virtual world. Object play in which children explore virtual objects through vision and touch. Social play in a digital context during which rules for social interaction are constructed and employed. Imaginative Play “Imaginative play” was prevalent in all the case study families, in particular anthropomorphic/zoomorphic play. Anthropomorphic/zoomorphic play can be categorised as imaginative play when children are aware that the object is not real; they display a willing suspension of disbelief. The morphology of social robots is often classified into anthropomorphic (i.e., human-like) and zoomorphic (i.e., animal-like) and different morphologies can elicit differences in how users perceive and interact with robots (Barco et al.). This was the case for the children in this research, who all referred to the fact that the toy was a robot but often described Cozmo as having human/animal attributes. Across the sample, the children talked about Cozmo as if it was a fellow human being or pet. Eleanor (aged 8) stated that “I feel like he’s one of my family”, while Emma (aged 8) said “we sometimes call him ‘brother’ because he is a little bit like family”. Martina (aged 8) observed that Cozmo sometimes has “hiccups'' that prevent him from responding to her queries, reasoning that “it happens by itself because it eats too much”. Louis (aged 9) did not refer to Cozmo as being human, although he did attribute emotions to the toy, mentioning that Cozmo runs in circles whenever he is happy. Sofia’s mother stated that “one thing that made me laugh is that for Sofia it is a puppy. So, she would pet it, give it kisses”. The mother of Aryana (aged 9) commented that “they tried to like treat it like a living thing, not like toy, like a pet . ... They treat it not like something dead or something frozen, something live”. Epley et al. suggest that anthropomorphisation occurs because knowledge that individuals have about humans is developed earlier than knowledge about non-human entities. Therefore, the knowledge children have of being human is drawn upon when encountering objects such as robots. It may be of little surprise that children react like this because, as Marsh (Uncanny Valley 58) argues, “younger children are likely to possess less knowledge about both human and non-human entities than older children and adults, and, therefore, are more likely to anthropomorphise”. Severson and Woodard (2) argue that even in cases where children know the object is not real, the children ascribe feelings, thoughts, and desires to objects in such a serious manner that anthropomorphism is a “pervasive phenomenon that goes beyond mere pretense”. Robot toys such as Cozmo are specifically designed to stimulate anthropomorphism/zoomorphism. Beck et al. have shown that head movements help children identify emotions in robots. Cozmo is programmed to recognise faces and learn names, which inevitably contributes to children feeling an emotional connection. For example, Eleanor (aged 8) remarked that “he was always looking at me and it looked like he was listening to me when I was talking”. The desire for a connection with the robot was so strong for Oscar (aged 7) that he deliberately programmed the robot to respond to him, saying “I can make him do happy stuff which makes me feel like he likes me”. Emma’s mother stated that whenever Emma (aged 8) did something that seemed to make Cozmo happy, she would do those things repeatedly. Emma also referred to Cozmo as having agency, for example, when Cozmo built towers or turned himself into a bulldozer. Even though she made those commands herself via the app, Emma attributed the idea and action to Cozmo. Overall, the children implemented imaginative play practices through the pretence of Cozmo’s ‘human-like’ attributes such as knowing their name, “looking at” and “listening to” them, and displaying different emotions such as love, anger, and happiness. Exploratory Play “Exploratory play” usually occurred when the children first received the toy and most of the children immediately wanted to get to know Cozmo’s features and possibilities. Arthur’s father stated that the first thing Arthur (aged 8) did was grab the remote and start clicking buttons to find out what would happen. Oscar’s mother was amazed that her child had played initially for five hours using Cozmo when he did not spend this long with other toys. She explained that he had been exploring what the toy could do: “he was getting it to choose blocks, pick up blocks, do tricks, make faces, and do dances … . He really enjoyed that”. Controlling Cozmo to travel between rooms was an example of “Virtual Locomotor play”, although the robot could also lead to locomotor play in the physical world as children chased after Cozmo or danced with it. Further examples of virtual locomotor play occurred when the robot followed and chased children if they moved from the play area. Oscar (aged 7) enjoyed using this mode to set the robot on a course which led to it ‘spying’ on his younger sister. His mother noted that: because their bedrooms are opposite sides of the hallway, he kept sending Cozmo to go and watch what she was doing and waiting and seeing how long it took her to realise he was there. Jacob (aged 10) also swiftly realised Cozmo’s surveillance potential as he referred to the robot as a “spying machine”. Louis (aged 9) stated that after he had explored all the options Cozmo offers, playing with it became dull. To him, all the fun was in the exploratory play. Other children across the sample also reported that they stopped playing with Cozmo after a while when they felt like there was nothing new to explore. Mastery Play “Exploratory play” was also connected to “Mastery play” through programmatic sequencing which enabled the robot to move and follow different directions as requested by the children. For example, Eleanor (aged 8) commented, “I liked to play games with him ... . I liked doing the acting thing”. This involved programming the toy to undertake a series of actions that were sequenced in a performance. For Ebrahim (aged 7), the explorer mode also led to mastery play, as he set up an obstacle course for Cozmo using his toy soldiers, explaining that “I took a couple of my soldiers in here and made them out in a specific order and then I tried to get past them in explorer mode”. Arthur (aged 8) would continuously try to find ways to make Cozmo go through obstacle courses faster. He especially liked the coding and programming aspect of the toy, and his father would challenge him to think his decisions through to get better results. Children also utilised other objects in their exploratory and mastery play. Louis (aged 9) would put up barricades so that Cozmo could not escape, and Matteo (aged 9) constructed “high towers” and operated “stability tests” by using Cozmo’s explorer mode and constructing pathways through furniture and other objects. The blurring of physical/virtual and material/digital play, which is prevalent in contemporary play landscapes (Marsh et al., Children, Technology and Play), is highlighted during these episodes in which the children incorporated their own interests linked to their personal environments into their play with Cozmo. Mastery play inevitably involved “Object play”, as children played around with icons on the app to investigate their properties. Cozmo offers a variety of games which stimulate various abilities and can be played via the app or remote. Available games allow both child-robot interaction by means of the ‘Power Cubes’ provided with the robot, and programming games with different difficulty levels. Physical contact between the child and Cozmo, and the robot’s responses, encouraged anthropomorphism, as Jacob (aged 10) switched from referencing Cozmo as ‘it’ to ‘him’ as the discussion progressed: Interviewer: (to Jacob) We got a robot interfacing this time. (To Cozmo) Hello, are you still looking at me? That’s great. (To Jacob) So, do you want to show us your fist bumps that you coded? Jacob: Oh, I didn’t code it. Well, I did code it. Go to tricks. Do you want to fist bump him? Interviewer: Yeah, can I fist bump him? Jacob: Just put your fist near him like close, close, like that. In addition to the fist bump game, Dylan (aged 9) unlocked the Fist Bump app icon on his tablet enabling him to receive rewards by alternating physical fist bumps with himself and virtual fist bumps between Cozmo and the iPad. These object and exploratory play types were positioned as stimulating the robot’s feelings and emotions through musical sounds (like a robot “purring”) that seem to be designed to foster a stronger connection between the child and Cozmo. All the children in the research played Cozmo’s games; the tapping game and the building games with blocks were popular. A clear connection between mastery and object play is shown in those situations where children explore objects to gain control of their environment. While children pointed out that winning the games against Cozmo was almost impossible, some tried to change the game in their favour. Arthur (aged 8), for example, would move the blocks during games to slow down Cozmo. Whenever Emma (aged 8) became impatient with the games, she would move the blocks closer to Cozmo to finish certain games faster. Mastery play was valued by parents because of its interactivity and educational potential. Arthur’s father praised Cozmo’s programming and coding possibilities and valued the technical insight and problem-solving skills it teaches children. Oscar’s mother also valued the educational potential of the toy, but did not appear to recognise that the exploratory play he engaged in involved learning: I liked the fact that it had all these sorts of educational aspects to it. It would have been nice if we’d have got to use them. I like the idea that it could code, and it would teach coding ... but it wasn’t to be. There was some disappointment with the lack of engagement with the coding capabilities of Cozmo. Parents lamented that their children did not engage with coding activities but accepted that this was due to the level of difficulty or technical issues (i.e., Cozmo shutting down frequently), as well as their children’s inability to navigate coding activities (i.e., due to their age). Communication Play “Communication play” was observed as the English-speaking children learnt how to write things into Cozmo that the robot would then say. Ebrahim (aged 7) explained “you can type whatever you want him to say, like, I typed this, ‘I play with Monica’”. Emma (aged 8) made up entire stories for Cozmo to tell, and Arthur (aged 8) made up plays for Cozmo to perform. Oscar (aged 7) felt that the app had helped him learn to read: when asked how it helped him to read, he said “by me typing it in and him saying the words back to me so then I can hear what it says”. This highlights how IoToys can facilitate a playful approach to literacy and supports the work of Heljakka and Ihamäki (96), who assert a need to “widen understandings of toy literacy into multiple directions”. As such, the potential to support aspects of children’s literacy and digital learning in a way that is engaging and playful illuminates the benefits that these types of toys can provide. In contrast, Italian and Belgian children faced more difficulties in communicating with Cozmo as they did not speak English. However, this did not limit the possibility to interact and communicate with Cozmo, for example, through parental mediation or by referring to recognisable symbols (sounds, icons, and images in the app). Other Types of Play The data indicated that four play types (imaginative, exploratory, mastery, and communication play) were the most prevalent among the participating families, although there was also evidence of “Locomotor play” (during exploratory play), and “Object play” (during mastery play). “Social play” was also reported, for instance, when children played with the robot with siblings or friends. All the children wanted to show Cozmo to friends and family. Arthur (aged 8) even arranged with his teacher that he could bring Cozmo to school and show his classmates what Cozmo could do during a class presentation. “Creative play” (play that enables children to explore, develop ideas, and make things in a digital context) was limited in the data. Whilst there was some evidence of this type of play – for example, Oscar (aged 7) and Matteo (aged 9) built ramps and obstacle courses for Cozmo –, in general, there was limited evidence of children playing in creative ways to produce new artefacts with the robot. This is despite the toy having a creative mode, in which children can use the app to code games and actions for Cozmo. For Eleanor, it seemed that the toy did not foster open-ended play. Her mother noted that Eleanor normally enjoyed creative play, but she appeared to lose interest in the toy after displaying initial enthusiasm: “I don’t think it was creative enough, I think it’s not open-ended enough and that’s why she didn’t play with it, would be my guess”. Oscar (aged 7) also lost interest in the toy after the first few weeks of use, which his mother put down to technical issues: I think if it worked flawlessly every time he’d gone to pick it up then he would have been quite happy ... but after a couple of negative experiences where it wouldn’t load up and it’s very frustrating, maybe it just put him off. Other families also talked about how the battery was quick to drain and slow to charge, which impacted on the nature of the play. Emma’s mother stated that the WiFi settings needed to be changed to play with Cozmo which Emma (aged 8) could not do by herself. Therefore, she was only able to play with Cozmo when her mother was around to help her. According to the parents of Arthur and Emma (both aged 8), Cozmo often showed technical errors and did not perform certain games, which caused some frustration with the children. The mother of Aryana (aged 9) also reported a loss of interest in Cozmo, but not particularly related to technical reasons: “she lost interest all the time, so she didn’t follow the steps to the end, she just play a little bit and she'd say, ‘Oh I'm bored, I want to do something’ … mostly YouTube”. Such hesitant engagement may be due to technical issues but might also be due to the limitations regarding creative play identified in this study. Conclusion This study indicates that the Cozmo robot led to a variety of types of play, and that the adaptation of Hughes’s framework by Marsh et al. offered a useful index for identifying changing practices in children's play. As highlighted, children’s play with Cozmo often transcended the virtual and physical, online and offline, and digital and material, as well as providing a vehicle for learning. This analysis thus challenges the proposition that electronic objects limit children’s imagination and play. Prevalent in the findings was the willingness of children to suspend disbelief and engage in anthropomorphic/zoomorphic play with Cozmo by applying human-like attributes to the toy. Children related to the emotional connection with the robot much more than the technical aspects (i.e., coding), and whilst the children understood the limitations of the robot’s agency, there are studies to suggest that caution should be applied by robot developers to ensure that, as technology advances, children are able to maintain the understanding that robots are different from human beings (van den Berghe et al.). This is of particular importance when existing literature highlights that younger children have a less nuanced understanding of the ‘alive’ status of a robot than older children (Nijssen et al.). Children often incorporated more traditional toys and resources into their play with Cozmo: for instance, the use of toy soldiers and building blocks to create obstacle courses demonstrates the digital-material affordances of children’s play. All the children enjoyed the pre-programmed games that utilised the ‘Power Cubes’, and there was an element of competitiveness for the children who demonstrated an eagerness to ‘beat’ the toy. Importantly, parents reported that the app supported children’s literacy development in a playful way, although this was more beneficial for the children whose first language was English. The potential for children’s literacy development through playful child-robot interaction presents opportunities for further study. One significant limitation of the toy that emerged from the findings was the capacity to encourage children’s creative play. Kahn Jr. et al.'s earlier research showed that children endowed less animation to robot toys than to stuffed animals, as if children believe that toy robots have some agency and do not need assistance. Therefore, it is possible that children are less inclined to play in creative ways because they expect Cozmo to control his own behaviour. The research has implications for work with parents. The parents in this study emphasised the value of mastery play for education, but at times overlooked the worth of other types of play for learning. Engaging parents in discussion of the significance that different types of play have for children’s development could be beneficial not just for their own understanding, but also for the types of play they may then encourage and support. The study also has implications for the future development of IoToys. The producers of Cozmo promote types of play through the activities they support in the app, but a broader range of activities could lead to a wider variety of types of play to include, for example, fantasy or dramatic play. There are also opportunities to promote more creative play by, for example, enabling children to construct new artefacts for the robot toy itself, or providing drawing/painting tools that Cozmo could be programmed to use via the app. Broadening play types by design could be encouraged across the toy industry as a whole but, in relation to the IoToys, the opportunities for these kinds of approaches are exciting, reflecting rapid advances in technology that open up possible new worlds of play. This is the challenge for the next few years of toy development, when the first possibilities of the IoToys have been explored. Acknowledgement This research was funded by ARC Discovery Project award DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. The article originated as an initiative of the International Partners: Dr Louise Kay and Professor Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, UK), Associate Professor Giovanna Mascheroni (Università Cattolica, Italy), and Professor Bieke Zaman (KU Leuven, Belgium). The Australian Chief Investigators on this grant were Dr Donell Holloway and Professor Lelia Green, Edith Cowan University. Much of this article was written by Research Officers who supported the grant’s Investigators, and all parties gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by the Australian Research Council for this project. References Barco, Alex, et al. “Robot Morphology and Children's Perception of Social Robots: An Exploratory Study.” International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 23-26 Mar. 2020, Cambridge. Beck, Aryel, et al. “Interpretation of Emotional Body Language Displayed by a Humanoid Robot: A Case Study with Children.” International Journal of Social Robotics 5.3 (2013). 27 Jan. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0193-z>. Berriman, Liam, and Giovanna Mascheroni. “Exploring the Affordances of Smart Toys and Connected Play in Practice.” New Media & Society 21.4 (2019). 27 Jan. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818807119>. Brito, Rita, et al. “Young Children, Digital Media and Smart Toys: How Perceptions Shape Adoption and Domestication.” British Journal of Educational Technology 49.5 (2018). 27 Jan. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12655>. Epley, Nicholas, et al. "On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism". Psychological Review 114.4 (2007): 864-886. Healey, Aleeya, et al. “Selecting Appropriate Toys for Young Children in the Digital Era.” Pediatrics 143.1 (2019). 27 Jan. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-3348>. Holloway, Donell, and Lelia Green. "The Internet of Toys." Communication Research and Practice 2.4 (2016): 506-519. Hughes, Bob. A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types. 2nd ed. Playlink, 2002. Heljakka, Katriina, and Pirita Ihamäki. “Preschoolers Learning with the Internet of Toys: From Toy-Based Edutainment to Transmedia Literacy.” Seminar.Net 14.1 (2018): 85–102. Kahn Jr., Peter, et al. "Robotic Pets in the Lives of Preschool Children." Interaction Studies 7.3 (2007): 405-436. Marsh, Jackie. “The Internet of Toys: A Posthuman and Multimodal Analysis of Connected Play.” Teachers College Record (2017): 30. ———. "The Uncanny Valley Revisited: Play with the Internet of Toys." Internet of Toys : Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children's Smart Play. Eds. Giovanni Mascheroni and Donell Holloway. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 47-66. Marsh, Jackie, et al. “Digital Play: A New Classification.” Early Years 36.3 (2016): 242. Marsh, Jackie, et al. Children, Technology and Play: Key Findings of a Large-Scale Research Report. The LEGO Foundation, 2020. Mascheroni, Giovanni, and Donell Holloway, eds. Internet of Toys : Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children’s Smart Play. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Nijssen, Sari, et al. "You, Robot? The Role of Anthropomorphic Emotion Attributions in Children’s Sharing with a Robot." International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 30 (2021). 15 Apr. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100319>. Severson, Rachel L., and Shailee R. Woodard. “Imagining Others? Minds: The Positive Relation between Children's Role Play and Anthropomorphism.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018). 27 Jan. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02140>. Van den Berghe, Rianne, et al. "A Toy or a friend? Children's Anthropomorphic Beliefs about Robots and How These Relate to Second-Language Word Learning." Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 37.2 (2021): 396– 410. 15 Apr. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12497>. Appendix 1: Participants Country Name (Pseudonym) Sex Age Siblings 1 UK Eleanor F 8 2 younger brothers 2 UK Ebrahim M 7 2 older sisters 3 UK Oscar M 7 1 younger sister 4 UK Aryana F 9 2 younger brothers 5 AU Jacob M 10 1 younger brother 6 AU Dylan M 9 2 older brothers 7 Italy Martina F 8 2 younger sisters 8 Italy Anna F 8 1 younger sister 9 Italy Luca M 8 1 older brother 10 Italy Matteo M 9 1 younger sister 11 Belgium Louis M 9 2 younger sisters 12 Belgium Emma F 8 1 younger sister 13 Belgium Arthur M 8 1 younger sister Appendix 2: Play Types Play Type Play Types (Hughes) Digital Play Types (adapted by Marsh et al., "Digital Play") Symbolic play Occurs when an object stands for another object, e.g. a stick becomes a horse Occurs when a virtual object stands for another object, e.g. an avatar’s shoe becomes a wand Rough and tumble play Children are in physical contact during play, but there is no violence Occurs when avatars that represent users in a digital environment touch each other playfully, e.g. bumping each other Socio-dramatic play Enactment of real-life scenarios that are based on personal experiences, e.g. playing house Enactment of real-life scenarios in a digital environment that are based on personal experiences Social play Play during which rules for social interaction are constructed and employed Play in a digital context during which rules for social interaction are constructed and employed Creative play Play that enables children to explore, develop ideas, and make things Play that enables children to explore, develop ideas, and make things in a digital context Communication play Play using words, songs, rhymes, poetry, etc. Play using words, songs, rhymes, poetry, etc., in a digital context, e.g. text messages, multimodal communication Dramatic play Play that dramatises events in which children have not directly participated, e.g. TV shows Play in a digital context that dramatises events in which children have not directly participated, e.g. TV shows. Locomotor play Play which involves movement, e.g. chase, hide and seek Virtual locomotor play involves movement in a digital context, e.g. child may play hide and seek with others in a virtual world Deep play Play in which children encounter risky experiences, or feel as though they have to fight for survival Play in digital contexts in which children encounter risky experiences, or feel as though they have to fight for survival Exploratory play Play in which children explore objects, spaces, etc. through the senses in order to find out information, or explore possibilities Play in a digital context in which children explore objects, spaces, etc., through the senses in order to find out information, or explore possibilities Fantasy play Play in which children can take on roles that would not occur in real life, e.g. be a superhero Play in a digital context in which children can take on roles that would not occur in real life, e.g. be a superhero Imaginative play Play in which children pretend that things are otherwise Play in a digital context in which children pretend that things are otherwise Mastery play Play in which children attempt to gain control of environments, e.g. building dens Play in digital contexts in which children attempt to gain control of environments, e.g. creating a virtual world Object play Play in which children explore objects through touch and vision Play in which children explore virtual objects through vision and touch through the screen or mouse Role play Play in which children might take on a role beyond the personal or domestic roles associated with socio-dramatic play Play in a digital context in which children might take on a role beyond the personal or domestic roles associated with socio-dramatic play Recapitulative play Play in which children might explore history, rituals, and myths, and play in ways that resonate with the activities of our human ancestors (lighting fires, building shelters, and so on) Play in a digital context in which children might explore history, rituals, and myths, and play in ways that resonate with the activities of our human ancestors (lighting fires, building shelters, and so on) Transgressive play Play in which children contest, resist, and/or transgress expected norms, rules, and perceived restrictions in both digital and non-digital contexts.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

As the single most successful social-networking Website to date, Facebook has caused a shift in both practice and perception of online socialisation, and its relationship to the offline world. While not the first online social networking service, Facebook’s user base dwarfs its nearest competitors. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation boasts more than 750 million users (Facebook). The currently ailing MySpace claimed a ceiling of 100 million users in 2006 (Cashmore). Further, the accuracy of this number has been contested due to a high proportion of fake or inactive accounts. Facebook by contrast, claims 50% of its user base logs in at least once a day (Facebook). The popular and mainstream uptake of Facebook has shifted social use of the Internet from various and fragmented niche groups towards a common hub or portal around which much everyday Internet use is centred. The implications are many, but this paper will focus on the progress what Mimi Marinucci terms the “Facebook effect” (70) and the evolution of lists as a filtering mechanism representing one’s social zones within Facebook. This is in part inspired by the launch of Google’s new social networking service Google+ which includes “circles” as a fundamental design feature for sorting contacts. Circles are an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of a single, unified friends list that defines the Facebook experience. These lists and circles are both manifestations of the same essential concept: our social lives are, in fact, divided into various zones not defined by an online/offline dichotomy, by fantasy role-play, deviant sexual practices, or other marginal or minority interests. What the lists and circles demonstrate is that even very common, mainstream people occupy different roles in everyday life, and that to be effective social tools, social networking sites must grant users control over their various identities and over who knows what about them. Even so, the very nature of computer-based social tools lead to problematic definitions of identities and relationships using discreet terms, in contrast to more fluid, performative constructions of an individual and their relations to others. Building the Monolith In 1995, Sherry Turkle wrote that “the Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180). Turkle describes the various deliberate acts of personnae creation possible online in contrast to earlier constraints placed upon the “cycling through different identities” (179). In the past, Turkle argues, “lifelong involvement with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly stringent control” (180). In effect, Turkle was documenting the proliferation of identity games early adopters of Internet technologies played through various means. Much of what Turkle focused on were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented), explicit play-spaces that encouraged identity-play of various kinds. Her contemporary Howard Rheingold focused on what may be described as the more “true to life” communities of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) (1–38). In particular, Rheingold explored a community established around the shared experience of parenting, especially of young children. While that community was not explicitly built on the notion of role-play, the parental identity was an important quality of community members. Unlike contemporary social media networks, these early communities were built on discreet platforms. MUDs, MOOs, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet Groups and other early Internet communication platforms were generally hosted independently of one another, and even had to be dialled into via modem separately in some cases (such as the WELL). The Internet was a truly disparate entity in 1995. The discreetness of each community supported the cordoning off of individual roles or identities between them. Thus, an individual could quite easily be “Pete” a member of the parental WELL group and “Gorak the Destroyer,” a role-player on a fantasy MUD without the two roles ever being associated with each other. As Turkle points out, even within each MUD ample opportunity existed to play multiple characters (183–192). With only a screen name and associated description to identify an individual within the MUD environment, nothing technical existed to connect one player’s multiple identities, even within the same community. As the Internet has matured, however, the tendency has been shifting towards monolithic hubs, a notion of collecting all of “the Internet” together. From a purely technical and operational perspective, this has led to the emergence of the ISP (Internet service provider). Users can make a connection to one point, and then be connected to everything “on the Net” instead of individually dialling into servers and services one at a time as was the case in the early 1980s with companies such as Prodigy, the Source, CompuServe, and America On-Line (AOL). The early information service providers were largely walled gardens. A CompuServe user could only access information on the CompuServe network. Eventually the Internet became the network of choice and services migrated to it. Standards such as HTTP for Web page delivery and SMTP for email became established and dominate the Internet today. Technically, this has made the Internet much easier to use. The services that have developed on this more rationalised and unified platform have also tended toward monolithic, centralised architectures, despite the Internet’s apparent fundamental lack of a hierarchy. As the Internet replaced the closed networks, the wider Web of HTTP pages, forums, mailing lists and other forms of Internet communication and community thrived. Perhaps they required slightly more technological savvy than the carefully designed experience of walled-garden ISPs such as AOL, but these fora and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) rooms still provided the discreet environments within which to role-play. An individual could hold dozens of login names to as many different communities. These various niches could be simply hobby sites and forums where a user would deploy their identity as model train enthusiast, musician, or pet owner. They could also be explicitly about role-play, continuing the tradition of MUDs and MOOs into the new millennium. Pseudo- and polynymity were still very much part of the Internet experience. Even into the early parts of the so-called Web 2.0 explosion of more interactive Websites which allowed for easier dialog between site owner and viewer, a given identity would be very much tied to a single site, blog or even individual comments. There was no “single sign on” to link my thread from a music forum to the comments I made on a videogame blog to my aquarium photos at an image gallery site. Today, Facebook and Google, among others, seek to change all that. The Facebook Effect Working from a psychological background Turkle explored the multiplicity of online identities as a valuable learning, even therapeutic, experience. She assessed the experiences of individuals who were coming to terms with aspects of their own personalities, from simple shyness to exploring their sexuality. In “You Can’t Front on Facebook,” Mimi Marinucci summarizes an analysis of online behaviour by another psychologist, John Suler (67–70). Suler observed an “online disinhibition effect” characterised by users’ tendency to express themselves more openly online than offline (321). Awareness of this effect was drawn (no pun intended) into popular culture by cartoonist Mike Krahulik’s protagonist John Gabriel. Although Krahulik’s summation is straight to the point, Suler offers a more considered explanation. There are six general reasons for the online disinhibition effect: being anonymous, being invisible, the communications being out of sync, the strange sensation that a virtual interlocutor is all in the mind of the user, the general sense that the online world simply is not real and the minimisation of status and authority (321–325). Of the six, the notion of anonymity is most problematic, as briefly explored above in the case of AOL. The role of pseudonymity has been explored in more detail in Ruch, and will be considered with regard to Facebook and Google+ below. The Facebook effect, Marinucci argues, mitigates all six of these issues. Though Marinucci explains the mitigation of each factor individually, her final conclusion is the most compelling reason: “Facebook often facilitates what is best described as an integration of identities, and this integration of identities in turn functions as something of an inhibiting factor” (73). Ruch identifies this phenomenon as the “aggregation of identities” (219). Similarly, Brady Robards observes that “social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook collapse the entire array of social relationships into just one category, that of ‘Friend’” (20). Unlike earlier community sites, Ruch notes “Facebook rejects both the mythical anonymity of the Internet, but also the actual pseudo- or polynonymous potential of the technologies” (219). Essentially, Facebook works to bring the offline social world online, along with all the conventional baggage that accompanies the individual’s real-world social life. Facebook, and now Google+, present a hard, dichotomous approach to online identity: anonymous and authentic. Their socially networked individual is the “real” one, using a person’s given name, and bringing all (or as many as the sites can capture) their contacts from the offline world into the online one, regardless of context. The Facebook experience is one of “friending” everyone one has any social contact with into one homogeneous group. Not only is Facebook avoiding the multiple online identities that interested Turkle, but it is disregarding any multiplicity of identity anywhere, including any online/offline split. David Kirkpatrick reports Mark Zuckerberg’s rejection of this construction of identity is explained by his belief that “You have one identity … having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (199). Arguably, Zuckerberg’s calls for accountability through identity continue a perennial concern for anonymity online fuelled by “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” style moral panics. Over two decades ago Lindsy Van Gelder recounted the now infamous case of “Joan and Alex” (533) and Julian Dibbell recounted “a rape in cyberspace” (11). More recent anxieties concern the hacking escapades of Anonymous and LulzSec. Zuckerberg’s approach has been criticised by Christopher Poole, the founder of 4Chan—a bastion of Internet anonymity. During his keynote presentation at South by SouthWest 2011 Poole argued that Zuckerberg “equates anonymity with a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice.” Yet in spite of these objections, Facebook has mainstream appeal. From a social constructivist perspective, this approach to identity would be satisfying the (perceived?) need for a mainstream, context-free, general social space online to cater for the hundreds of millions of people who now use the Internet. There is no specific, pre-defined reason to join Facebook in the way there is a particular reason to join a heavy metal music message board. Facebook is catering to the need to bring “real” social life online generally, with “real” in this case meaning “offline and pre-existing.” Very real risks of missing “real life” social events (engagements, new babies, party invitations etc) that were shared primarily via Facebook became salient to large groups of individuals not consciously concerned with some particular facet of identity performance. The commercial imperatives towards monolithic Internet and identity are obvious. Given that both Facebook and Google+ are in the business of facilitating the sale of advertising, their core business value is the demographic information they can sell to various companies for target advertising. Knowing a user’s individual identity and tastes is extremely important to those in the business of selling consumers what they currently want as well as predicting their future desires. The problem with this is the dawning realisation that even for the average person, role-playing is part of everyday life. We simply aren’t the same person in all contexts. None of the roles we play need to be particularly scandalous for this to be true, but we have different comfort zones with people that are fuelled by context. Suler proposes and Marinucci confirms that inhibition may be just as much part of our authentic self as the uninhibited expression experienced in more anonymous circumstances. Further, different contexts will inform what we inhibit and what we express. It is not as though there is a simple binary between two different groups and two different personal characteristics to oscillate between. The inhibited personnae one occupies at one’s grandmother’s home is a different inhibited self one plays at a job interview or in a heated discussion with faculty members at a university. One is politeness, the second professionalism, the third scholarly—yet they all restrain the individual in different ways. The Importance of Control over Circles Google+ is Google’s latest foray into the social networking arena. Its previous ventures Orkut and Google Buzz did not fare well, both were variously marred by legal issues concerning privacy, security, SPAM and hate groups. Buzz in particular fell afoul of associating Google accounts with users” real life identities, and (as noted earlier), all the baggage that comes with it. “One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents” (Novak). Google+ takes a different approach to its predecessors and its main rival, Facebook. Facebook allows for the organisation of “friends” into lists. Individuals can span more than one list. This is an exercise analogous to what Erving Goffman refers to as “audience segregation” (139). According to the site’s own statistics the average Facebook user has 130 friends, we anticipate it would be time-consuming to organise one’s friends according to real life social contexts. Yet without such organisation, Facebook overlooks the social structures and concomitant behaviours inherent in everyday life. Even broad groups offer little assistance. For example, an academic’s “Work People” list may include the Head of Department as well as numerous other lecturers with whom a workspace is shared. There are things one might share with immediate colleagues that should not be shared with the Head of Department. As Goffman states, “when audience segregation fails and an outsider happens upon a performance that was not meant for him, difficult problems in impression management arise” (139). By homogenising “friends” and social contexts users are either inhibited or run the risk of some future awkward encounters. Google+ utilises “circles” as its method for organising contacts. The graphical user interface is intuitive, facilitated by an easy drag and drop function. Use of “circles” already exists in the vocabulary used to describe our social structures. “List” by contrast reduces the subject matter to simple data. The utility of Facebook’s friends lists is hindered by usability issues—an unintuitive and convoluted process that was added to Facebook well after its launch, perhaps a reaction to privacy concerns rather than a genuine attempt to emulate social organisation. For a cogent breakdown of these technical and design problems see Augusto Sellhorn. Organising friends into lists is a function offered by Facebook, but Google+ takes a different approach: organising friends in circles is a central feature; the whole experience is centred around attempting to mirror the social relations of real life. Google’s promotional video explains the centrality of emulating “real life relationships” (Google). Effectively, Facebook and Google+ have adopted two different systemic approaches to dealing with the same issue. Facebook places the burden of organising a homogeneous mass of “friends” into lists on the user as an afterthought of connecting with another user. In contrast, Google+ builds organisation into the act of connecting. Whilst Google+’s approach is more intuitive and designed to facilitate social networking that more accurately reflects how real life social relationships are structured, it suffers from forcing direct correlation between an account and the account holder. That is, use of Google+ mandates bringing online the offline. Google+ operates a real names policy and on the weekend of 23 July 2011 suspended a number of accounts for violation of Google’s Community Standards. A suspension notice posted by Violet Blue reads: “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.” Open Source technologist Kirrily Robert polled 119 Google+ users about their experiences with the real names policy. The results posted to her on blog reveal that users desire pseudonymity, many for reasons of privacy and/or safety rather than the lack of integrity thought by Zuckerberg. boyd argues that Google’s real names policy is an abuse of power and poses danger to those users employing “nicks” for reasons including being a government employment or the victim of stalking, rape or domestic abuse. A comprehensive list of those at risk has been posted to the Geek Feminism Wiki (ironically, the Wiki utilises “Connect”, Facebook’s attempt at a single sign on solution for the Web that connects users’ movements with their Facebook profile). Facebook has a culture of real names stemming from its early adopters drawn from trusted communities, and this culture became a norm for that service (boyd). But as boyd also points out, “[r]eal names are by no means universal on Facebook.” Google+ demands real names, a demand justified by rhetoric of designing a social networking system that is more like real life. “Real”, in this case, is represented by one’s given name—irrespective of the authenticity of one’s pseudonym or the complications and dangers of using one’s given name. Conclusion There is a multiplicity of issues concerning social networks and identities, privacy and safety. This paper has outlined the challenges involved in moving real life to the online environment and the contests in trying to designate zones of social context. Where some earlier research into the social Internet has had a positive (even utopian) feel, the contemporary Internet is increasingly influenced by powerful and competing corporations. As a result, the experience of the Internet is not necessarily as flexible as Turkle or Rheingold might have envisioned. Rather than conducting identity experimentation or exercising multiple personnae, we are increasingly obligated to perform identity as it is defined by the monolithic service providers such as Facebook and Google+. This is not purely an indictment of Facebook or Google’s corporate drive, though they are obviously implicated, but has as much to do with the new social practice of “being online.” So, while there are myriad benefits to participating in this new social context, as Poole noted, the “cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.” Areas for further exploration include the implications of Facebook positioning itself as a general-purpose user authentication tool whereby users can log into a wide array of Websites using their Facebook credentials. If Google were to take a similar action the implications would be even more convoluted, given the range of other services Google offers, from GMail to the Google Checkout payment service. While the monolithic centralisation of these services will have obvious benefits, there will be many more subtle problems which must be addressed. References Blue, Violet. “Google Plus Deleting Accounts en Masse: No Clear Answers.” zdnet.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/56›. boyd, danah. “Real Names Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” zephoria.org (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html›. Cashmore, Pete. “MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts.” mashable.com (2006). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts›. Dibble, Julian. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998. Facebook. “Fact Sheet.” Facebook (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistic›. Geek Feminism Wiki. “Who Is Harmed by a Real Names Policy?” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy› Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Google. “The Google+ Project: Explore Circles.” Youtube.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8›. Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Marinucci, Mimi. “You Can’t Front on Facebook.” Facebook and Philosophy. Ed. Dylan Wittkower. Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2010. 65–74. Novak, Peter. “Privacy Commissioner Reviewing Google Buzz.” CBC News: Technology and Science (2010). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/02/16/google-buzz-privacy.html›. Poole, Christopher. Keynote presentation. South by SouthWest. Texas, Austin, 2011. Robards, Brady. “Negotiating Identity and Integrity on Social Network Sites for Educators.” International Journal for Educational Integrity 6.2 (2010): 19–23. Robert, Kirrily. “Preliminary Results of My Survey of Suspended Google Accounts.” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://infotrope.net/2011/07/25/preliminary-results-of-my-survey-of-suspended-google-accounts/›. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Ruch, Adam. “The Decline of Pseudonymity.” Posthumanity. Eds. Adam Ruch and Ewan Kirkland. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.net Press, 2010: 211–220. Sellhorn, Augusto. “Facebook Friend Lists Suck When Compared to Google+ Circles.” sellmic.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://sellmic.com/blog/2011/07/01/facebook-friend-lists-suck-when-compared-to-googleplus-circles›. Suler, John. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology and Behavior 7 (2004): 321–326. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Gelder, Lindsy. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover.” Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices Ed. Rob Kling. New York: Academic Press, 1996: 533–46.

IntroductionIn Nancy Meyers’s 2015 film The Intern a particular kind of masculinity is celebrated through the material accoutrements of Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro). A retired 70-year-old manager, Ben takes up a position as a “senior” Intern in an online clothing distribution company run by Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway). Jules’s company, All About Fit, is the embodiment of the Gen Y creative workplace operating in an old Brooklyn warehouse. Ben’s presence in this environment is anachronistic and yet also stylishly retro in an industry where “vintage” is a mode of dress but also offers alternative ethical values (Veenstra and Kuipers). The alternative that Ben offers is figured through his sartorial style, which mobilises a specific kind of retro masculinity made available through his senior white male body. This paper investigates how and why retro masculinity is materialised and embodied as both a set of values and a set of objects in The Intern.Three particular objects are emblematic of this retro masculinity and come to stand in for a body of desirable masculine values: the business suit, the briefcase, and the handkerchief. In the midst of an indie e-commerce garment business, Ben’s old-fashioned wardrobe registers a regular middle class managerial masculinity from the past that is codified as solidly reliable and dependable. Sherry Turkle reminds us that “material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity” (6), and these impact our thinking, our emotional life, and our memories. The suit, briefcase, and handkerchief are material reminders of this reliable masculine past. The values they evoke, as presented in this film, seem to offer sensible solutions to the fast pace of twenty-first century life and its reconfigurations of family and work prompted by feminism and technology.The film’s fetishisation of these objects of retro masculinity could be mistaken for nostalgia, in the way that vintage collections elide their political context, and yet it also registers social anxiety around gender and generation amid twenty-first century social change. Turner reminds us of the importance of film as a social practice through which “our culture makes sense of itself” (3), and which participates in the ongoing negotiation of the meanings of gender. While masculinity is often understood to have been in crisis since the advent of second-wave feminism and women’s mass entry into the labour force, theoretical scrutiny now understands masculinity to be socially constructed and changing, rather than elemental and stable; performative rather than innate; fundamentally political, and multiple through the intersection of class, race, sexuality, and age amongst other factors (Connell; Butler). While Connell coined the term “hegemonic masculinity,” to indicate “masculinity which occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations” (76), it is always intersectional and contestable. Ben’s hegemonic position in The Intern might be understood in relation to what Buchbinder identifies as “inadequate” or “incompetent” masculinities, which offer a “foil for another principal character” (232), but this movement between margin and hegemony is always in process and accords with the needs that structure the story, and its attendant social anxieties. This film’s fetishising of Ben’s sartorial style suggests a yearning for a stable and recognisable masculine identity, but in order to reinstall these meanings the film must ignore the political times from which they emerge.The construction of retro masculinity in this case is mapped onto Ben’s body as a “senior.” As Gilleard notes, ageing bodies are usually marked by a narrative of corporeal decline, and yet for men of hegemonic privilege, non-material values like seniority, integrity, wisdom, and longevity coalesce to embody “the accumulation of cultural or symbolic capital in the form of wisdom, maturity or experience” (1). Like masculinity, then, corporeality is understood to be a set of unstable signifiers produced through particular cultural discourses.The Business SuitThe business suit is Ben Whittaker’s habitual work attire, so when he comes out of retirement to be an intern at the e-commerce company he re-adopts this professional garb. The solid outline of a tailored and dark-coloured suit signals a professional body that is separate, autonomous and impervious to the outside world, according to Longhurst (99). It is a body that is “proper,” ready for business, and suit-ed to the professional corporate world, whose values it also embodies (Edwards 42). In contrast, the costuming code of the Google generation of online marketers in the film is defined as “super cas[ual].” This is a workplace where the boss rides her bicycle through the open-space office and in which the other 219 workers define their individuality through informal dress and decoration. In this environment Ben stands out, as Jules comments on his first day:Jules: Don’t feel like you have to dress up.Ben: I’m comfortable in a suit if it’s okay.Jules: No, it’s fine. [grins] Old school.Ben: At least I’ll stand out.Jules: I don’t think you’ll need a suit to do that.The anachronism of a 70-year-old being an intern is materialised through Ben’s dress code. The business suit comes to represent Ben not only as old school, however, but as a “proper” manager.As the embodiment of a successful working woman, entrepreneur Jules Ostin appears to be the antithesis of the business-suit model of a manager. Consciously not playing by the book, her company is both highly successful, meeting its five-year objectives in only nine months, and highly vulnerable to disasters like bedbugs, delivery crises, and even badly wrapped tissue. Shaped in her image, the company is often directly associated with Jules herself, as Ben continually notes, and this comes to include the mix of success, vulnerability, and disaster. In fact, the success of her company is the reason that she is urged to find a “seasoned” CEO to run the company, indicating the ambiguous, simultaneous guise of success and disaster.This relationship between individual corporeality and the corporate workforce is reinforced when it is revealed that Ben worked as a manager for 40 years in the very same warehouse, reinforcing his qualities of longevity, reliability, and dependability. He oversaw the printing of the physical telephone book, another quaint material artefact of the past akin to Ben, which is shown to have literally shaped the building where the floor dips over in the corner due to the heavy printers. The differences between Ben and Jules as successive generations of managers in this building operate as registers of social change inflected with just a little nostalgia. Indeed, the name of Jules’s company, All About Fit, seems to refer more to the beautifully tailored “fit” of Ben’s business suit than to any of the other clothed bodies in the company.Not only is the business suit fitted to business, but it comes to represent a properly managed body as well. This is particularly evident when contrasted with Jules’s management style. Over the course of the film, as she endures a humiliating series of meetings, sends a disastrous email to the wrong recipient, and juggles her strained marriage and her daughter’s school schedule, Jules is continuously shown to teeter on the brink of losing control. Her bodily needs are exaggerated in the movie: she does not sleep and apparently risks “getting fat” according to her mother’s research; then when she does sleep it is in inappropriate places and she snores loudly; she forgets to eat, she cries, gets drunk and vomits, gets nervous, and gets emotional. All of these outpourings are in situations that Ben remedies, in his solid reliable suited self. As Longhurst reminds us,The suit helps to create an illusion of a hard, or at least a firm and “proper,” body that is autonomous, in control, rational and masculine. It gives the impression that bodily boundaries continually remain intact and reduce potential embarrassment caused by any kind of leakage. (99)Ben is thus suited to manage situations in ways that contrast to Jules, whose bodily emissions and emotional dramas reinforce her as feminine, chaotic, and emotionally vulnerable. As Gatens notes of our epistemological inheritance, “women are most often understood to be less able to control the passions of the body and this failure is often located in the a priori disorder or anarchy of the female body itself” (50). Transitioning these philosophical principles to the 21st-century workplace, however, manifests some angst around gender and generation in this film.Despite the film’s apparent advocacy of successful working women, Jules too comes to prefer Ben’s model of corporeal control and masculinity. Ben is someone who makes Jules “feel calm, more centred or something. I could use that, obviously,” she quips. After he leads the almost undifferentiated younger employees Jason, Davis, and Lewis on a physical email rescue, Jules presents her theory of men amidst shots at a bar to celebrate their heist:Jules: So, we were always told that we could be anything, do anything, and I think guys got, maybe not left behind but not quite as nurtured, you know? I mean, like, we were the generation of You go, Girl. We had Oprah. And I wonder sometimes how guys fit in, you know they still seem to be trying to figure it out. They’re still dressing like little boys, they’re still playing video games …Lewis: Well they’ve gotten great.Davis: I love video games.Ben: Oh boy.Jules: How, in one generation, have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford to … [Lewis, Davis, and Jason look down at themselves]Jules: Take Ben, here. A dying breed. Look and learn boys, because if you ask me, this is what cool is.Jules’s excessive drinking in this scene, which is followed by her vomiting into a rubbish bin, appears to reinforce Ben’s stable sobriety, alongside the culture of excess and rapid change associated with Jules through her gender and generation.Jules’s adoption of Ben as the model of masculinity is timely, given that she consistently encounters “sexism in business.” After every meeting with a potential CEO Jules complains of their patronising approach—calling her company a “chick site,” for example. And yet Ben echoes the sartorial style of the 1960s Mad Men era, which is suffused with sexism. The tension between Ben’s modelling of old-fashioned chivalry and those outdated sexist businessmen who never appear on-screen remains linked, however, through the iconography of the suit. In his book Mediated Nostalgia, Lizardi notes a similar tendency in contemporary media for what he calls “presentist versions of the past […] that represent a simpler time” (6) where viewers are constructed as ”uncritical citizens of our own culture” (1). By heroising Ben as a model of white middle-class managerial masculinity that is nostalgically enduring and endearing, this film betrays a yearning for such a “simpler time,” despite the complexities that hover just off-screen.Indeed, most of the other male characters in the film are found wanting in comparison to the retro masculinity of Ben. Jules’s husband Matt appears to be a perfect modern “stay-at-home-dad” who gives up his career for Jules’s business start-up. Yet he is found to be having an affair with one of the school mums. Lewis’s clothes are also condemned by Ben: “Why doesn’t anyone tuck anything in anymore?” he complains. Jason does not know how to speak to his love-interest Becky, expecting that texting and emailing sad emoticons will suffice, and Davis is unable to find a place to live. Luckily Ben can offer advice and tutelage to these men, going so far as to house Davis and give him one of his “vintage” ties to wear. Jules endorses this, saying she loves men in ties.The BriefcaseIf a feature of Ben’s experienced managerial style is longevity and stability, then these values are also attached to his briefcase. The association between Ben and his briefcase is established when the briefcase is personified during preparations for Ben’s first day: “Back in action,” Ben tells it. According to Atkinson, the briefcase is a “signifier of executive status […] entwined with a ‘macho mystique’ of concealed technology” (192). He ties this to the emergence of Cold War spy films like James Bond and traces it to the development of the laptop computer. This mix of mobility, concealment, glamour, and a touch of playboy adventurousness in a mass-produced material product manifested the values of the corporate world in latter 20th-century work culture and rendered the briefcase an important part of executive masculinity. Ben’s briefcase is initially indicative of his anachronistic position in All About Fit. While Davis opens his canvas messenger bag to reveal a smartphone, charger, USB drive, multi-cable connector, and book, Ben mirrors this by taking out his glasses case, set of pens, calculator, fliptop phone, and travel clock. Later in the film he places a print newspaper and leather bound book back into the case. Despite the association with a pre-digital age, the briefcase quickly becomes a product associated with Ben’s retro style. Lewis, at the next computer console, asks about its brand:Ben: It’s a 1973 Executive Ashburn Attaché. They don’t make it anymore.Lewis: I’m a little in love with it.Ben: It’s a classic Lewis. It’s unbeatable.The attaché case is left over from Ben’s past in executive management as VP for sales and advertising. This was a position he held for twenty years, during his past working life, which was spent with the same company for over 40 years. Ben’s long-serving employment record has the same values as his equally long-serving attaché case: it is dependable, reliable, ages well, and outlasts changes in fashion.The kind of nostalgia invested in Ben and his briefcase is reinforced extradiagetically through the musical soundtracks associated with him. Compared to the undifferentiated upbeat tracks at the workplace, Ben’s scenes feature a slower-paced sound from another era, including Ray Charles, Astrud Gilberto, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman. These classics are a point of connection with Jules, who declares that she loves Billie Holiday. Yet Jules is otherwise characterised by upbeat, even frantic, timing. She hates slow talkers, is always on the move, and is renowned for being late for meetings and operating on what is known as “Jules Standard Time.” In contrast, like his music, Ben is always on time: setting two alarm clocks each night, driving shorter and more efficient routes, seeing things at just the right time, and even staying at work until the boss leaves. He is reliable, steady, and orderly. He restores order both to the office junk desk and to the desk of Jules’s personal assistant Becky. These characteristics of order and timeliness are offered as an alternative to the chaos of 21st-century global flows of fashion marketing. Like his longevity, time is measured and managed around Ben. Even his name echoes that veritable keeper of time, Big Ben.The HandkerchiefThe handkerchief is another anachronistic object that Ben routinely carries, concealed inside his suit rather than flamboyantly worn on the outside pocket. A neatly ironed square of white hanky, it forms a notable part of Ben’s closet, as Davis notices and enquires about:Davis: Okay what’s the deal with the handkerchief? I don’t get that at all.Ben: It’s essential. That your generation doesn’t know that is criminal. The reason for carrying a handkerchief is to lend it. Ask Jason about this. Women cry Davis. We carry it for them. One of the last vestiges of the chivalrous gent.Indeed, when Jules’s personal assistant Becky bursts into tears because her skills and overtime go unrecognised, Ben is able to offer the hanky to Jason to give her as a kind of white flag, officially signaling a ceasefire between Becky and Jason. This scene is didactic: Ben is teaching Jason how to talk to a woman with the handkerchief as a material prop to prompt the occasion. He also offers advice to Becky to keep more regular hours, and go out and have fun (with Jason, obviously). Despite Becky declaring she “hates girls who cry at work,” this reaction to the pressures of a contemporary work culture that is irregular, chaotic, and never-ending is clearly marking gender, as the handkerchief also marks a gendered transaction of comfort.The handkerchief functions as a material marker of the “chivalrous gent” partly due to the number of times women are seen to cry in this film. In one of Ben’s first encounters with Jules she is crying in a boardroom, when it is suggested that she find a CEO to manage the company. Ben is clearly embarrassed, as is Jules, indicating the inappropriateness of such bodily emissions at work and reinforcing the emotional currency of women in the workplace. Jules again cries while discussing her marriage crisis with Ben, a scene in which Ben comments it is “the one time when he doesn’t have a hanky.” By the end of the film, when Jules and Matt are reconciling, she suggests: “It would be great if you were to carry a handkerchief.” The remaking of modern men into the retro style of Ben is more fully manifested in Davis who is depicted going to work on the last day in the film in a suit and tie. No doubt a handkerchief lurks hidden within.ConclusionThe yearning that emerges for a masculinity of yesteryear means that the intern in this film, Ben Whittaker, becomes an internal moral compass who reminds us of rapid social changes in gender and work, and of their discomfits. That this should be mapped onto an older, white, heterosexual, male body is unsurprising, given the authority traditionally invested in such bodies. Ben’s retro masculinity, however, is a fantasy from a fictional yesteryear, without the social or political forces that render those times problematic; instead, his material culture is fetishised and stripped of political analysis. Ben even becomes the voice of feminism, correcting Jules for taking the blame for Matt’s affair. Buchbinder argues that the more recent manifestations in film and television of “inadequate or incomplete” masculinity can be understood as “enacting a resistance to or even a refusal of the coercive pressure of the gender system” (235, italics in original), and yet The Intern’s yearning for a slow, orderly, mature, and knowing male hero refuses much space for alternative younger models. Despite this apparently unerring adulation of retro masculinity, however, we are reminded of the sexist social culture that suits, briefcases, and handkerchiefs materialise every time Jules encounters one of the seasoned CEOs jostling to replace her. The yearning for a stable masculinity in this film comes at the cost of politicising the past, and imagining alternative models for the future.ReferencesAtkinson, Paul. “Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form.” Journal of Design History 18.2 (2005): 191-205. Buchbinder, David. “Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate of Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television.” Canadian Review of American Studies 38.2 (2008): 227-245.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.Edwards, Tim. Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics. London: Routledge, 2010.Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1996.Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment. London: Anthem, 2014.Lizardi, Ryan. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. 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