Journal articles on the topic 'Gambling – Economic aspects'

This paper builds upon DeBoer's (2001) assertion that models of ancient North American cultural systems can be enriched by incorporating gambling as a dynamic and productive social practice using the case study of the Ancient Puebloan center of Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 800–1180). A review of Native North American, Pueblo, and worldwide ethnography reveals gambling's multidimensionality as a social, economic, and ceremonial technology in contrast to its recreational associations in contemporary Western society. I propose that gambling was one mechanism through which leaders in precontact North America—and, specifically, at Chaco Canyon—integrated diverse communities, facilitated trade, accumulated material wealth, perpetuated religious ideology, and established social inequality. I present evidence of gambling at Chaco Canyon in the form of 471 gaming artifacts currently held in museum collections in addition to oral traditions of descendant Native cultures that describe extensive gambling in Chacoan society.

AbstractGambling is a specific type of economic activity that significantly affects many aspects of society. It is associated mainly with negative impacts on the lives of individuals and their families, but it also has a positive economic impact on the public budgets of states, regions and municipalities. In this article, we focus on a geographic assessment of the development of gambling in the Czech Republic, which is based on a spatial analysis of data on licensed games and data on the revenues of municipalities arising from gambling. It turns out that the occurrence of gambling is strongly influenced by binary centre/periphery dichotomy, with the exception of the Czech-Austrian and Czech-German border areas which are characterised by a high concentration of casinos resulting from more rigid regulation of gambling on the other side of the border. In this research, the authors develop an innovative scientific discipline within Czech human geography: The geography of gambling.

Gambling as a form of economic activity exists in almost all countries of the world. Only the question of the form of its implementation is relevant: it can be an illegal activity, or an activity permitted by law in one or another country. Gambling is a very profitable business. For example, from January to October 2021, the gross revenue from games in the United States of America was 43.43 billion dollars [2]. Income from gambling is an important source of replenishment of the state budget of each country, which is why most states have legalized this type of activity by establishing mandatory gambling licensing and established requirements for gambling organizers. The article carries out a systematic analysis of the provisions of the legislation on gambling in a number of foreign countries, compares their experience and the basics of the mechanism of implementation of this activity in Ukraine. In particular, through the systematization of the elaborated regulatory legal acts on gambling in foreign countries, the main features of three models of conducting gambling business - British, American and European - were highlighted and outlined. The method of comparing models of gambling organizations makes it possible to highlight aspects of the national model that need improvement by adopting foreign experience. The most controversial is the prohibition of foreign representatives from conducting activities related to the organization of gambling in Ukraine, since such a ban significantly reduces the percentage of revenues to the state budget from the activities of world-famous gambling giants. The article examines the main aspects of the regulation of gambling in Ukraine and the world in the context of requirements for their organizers. The domestic and foreign models of regulation of the organization of the gambling industry were analyzed and their problematic aspects and positive practices were highlighted.

In the context of Georgia’s transition from a planned to a market economy, the regulation of gambling (specifically the gambling business) and its impact on various societal aspects present unique challenges. This dynamic forms a complex interplay among “business,” “society,” and the “state,” each with its distinct interests, advantages, and drawbacks. Notably, the casino industry plays a significant role within this landscape. This study analyzes and discusses the casino industry’s importance, examining both objective and subjective factors influencing its growth and development. Furthermore, it explores the positive and negative effects of the industry on stakeholders, considers fiscal determinants, and addresses financial and socioeconomic issues within this sub-sector. Based on theoretical and empirical analysis, the study provides relevant recommendations.

This paper mostly discusses legal and some economic aspects of games of chance as an economic activity. In that context, the negative effects of gambling and betting activities are pointed out, especially on the development and spread of social deviations due to the uncontrolled consumption of games of chance. The paper aims to indicate in what way, and to what extent, the legislation in the Republic of Serbia regulates gambling and betting activities, i.e., what impact the legislation has exclusively on the financial and marketing business aspects of the three most represented organizers of games of chance in this area. The first part of the paper points to the numerous specifics characterizing gambling and betting activities, i.e. special legal regulations that regulate each business segment in this activity. The second part of the paper presents a financial overview of the performance indicators of the three most represented organizers of games of chance. The final part of the paper is dedicated to the legal possibilities and restrictions to advertising games of chance, or the efforts of all three organizers to boost the promotion of their business by taking on socially responsible activities, keeping it with such an approach within the legal framework.

Gambling can be defined as a common name for a set of different games, behaviors and activities, which involve investing money or some other value, with risk and hope in anticipation of a positive outcome. With the development of society, gambling took on different forms and meanings depending on the socio-cultural norms and beliefs of a given era. Today we are talking about gambling as a generally accepted activity, present in different social contexts. Although most individuals participate in gambling as a fun social activity, a small group of people become seriously involved in gambling activities, which currently leads to the recognition of gambling as a behavioral addiction, known as ?gambling disorder?. Various public policy factors, economic factors, community factors, social norms, legislation, as well as media coverage of gambling have made a huge contribution to the popularization and liberalization of gambling. The aim of this paper is to summarize scientific knowledge about key socio-cultural aspects of gambling. Based on a review of relevant and recent literature, the paper will present the development of gambling throughout history, socio-cultural factors of gambling and the social implications of gambling.

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to demonstrate the importance and relevance of interpretive political analysis to gambling research and second, to analyze from the aforementioned perspective why politicians in Finland talk about gambling harm and gambling revenue the way they do. The speeches of the representatives in the Parliament of Finland during debates on gambling policy are analysed as political action. The analysis has three levels. The first focuses on the themes of the speeches. The results show that there are four distinct thematic dimensions in the speeches: gambling harm, revenue, regulatory system, and regulation. The second level of analysis establishes the contexts where certain themes typically occur. Typically, revenue is discussed in the context of the economic aspect of gambling while gambling harm is discussed in the context of the justification of the regulatory system. The third level of analysis explains why the themes occur in the contexts they do. The representatives´ acceptance of the self-evidence of the regulatory system forecloses any possibility of getting support for major changes to the system. This explains why the official policy aims of reducing and preventing gambling harm have not been realized. It is concluded that the approach introduced can help to understand the political aspects of gambling.

There is a long-standing gap in the market for a journal that provides an outlet for academics and practitioners who have an interest in the economic and business aspects of the rapidly growing international gambling market. This journal is designed to fill this gap.

The development of gaming business in the world as a form of entertainment and leisure service, on the one hand, led to the transformation of the principles, norms and rules of gambling supervision and management, and on the other hand, determined the change in the demand for gambling services and the behavior of consumers. The positive and negative aspects arising from the development of this business affect the socio-economic development of the country. Therefore, in order to implement the correct supervisory policy in the mentioned field, specialized bodies are created and operate to ensure a systematic approach to the control and regulation of this business. The policy issues of regulation and state supervision of gambling business in foreign countries is discussed in the article.

Online gambling has become a prominent phenomenon among students because it is considered a fast way to earn money instantly, even becoming the main source of income for some students to meet their daily needs. However, serious attention to this phenomenon arises because it is considered detrimental to the future of Indonesia's young generation, changing mindsets in earning a living and forming less productive personalities. Some cases involve students using money from their tuition fees to gamble without considering the risks, potentially threatening their ability to pay off educational costs. Therefore, this research aims to identify the factors driving students to engage in online gambling. Factors such as social, economic, situational aspects, learning environment, perception of winning, and perception of addiction influence students' tendencies in online gambling, while secretive attitudes, difficulty accepting advice, stubbornness, and reluctance to admit or avoid potential dangers are obstacles in dealing with this phenomenon.

A significant number of individuals engage in the gaming sector due to its association with financial prosperity. The gambling sector has experienced significant growth, leading to a heightened interest among the general public in its wealth and prosperity. Casinos that generate annual revenues in the billions have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of economic downturns. This research paper aims to investigate a relatively obscure domain within the gaming industry. It will employ a combination of scholarly theoretical analysis and empirical research to examine various aspects, including game categorization, the mechanics of gaming machines, effective marketing strategies employed by casinos, and the interplay between perceptions of gambling, psychological profiles, and behavioral patterns. The paper additionally investigates the efficacy of doubling and continuous betting techniques and provides recommendations pertaining to the marketing, management, and regulation of the gaming business.

Today's fraudsters try to use modern financial services and products provided by banking institutions to legalize criminal proceeds and finance terrorism. Moreover, money laundering through banks using operations related to gambling occupies a significant place and has already turned into a serious financial problem. Currently, Internet gambling is a multi-billion dollar, extensive, widely used industry; specific economic activity, which includes illegal ways of exchanging virtual assets for real money, which causes an imbalance in economic processes. The most acute problems with money laundering arise in the direction of activity on the Internet, and especially through gambling, games and sports totalizers. The purpose of this study is to identify money laundering schemes by bank clients through participation in game and sports totalizers, as well as to determine approaches to assessment, modeling aspects of the risk of legalization of funds from online gambling. Theoretical research methods, such as: abstraction, synthesis, grouping, were used to conduct research and obtain results. and empirical methods, namely: observation and description. In the course of the study, the existing schemes of money laundering through participation in Internet gaming and sports totalizers were highlighted. They point out that the existing regulatory measures regarding online gambling are mainly based on a passive policy of dealing with already received negative consequences. Global approaches to modeling, evaluation, and forecasting of certain aspects of gambling have been identified, which partially help in identifying and assessing the risk of laundering illegal funds: longitudinal modeling; a model for assessing the effectiveness of gaming companies in preventing fraud and money laundering, including on the Internet; a model of national and supranational risk assessment of the financial and non-financial sectors from the point of view of the threat of money laundering; a quantile regression model of in-game bets on a large online gambling data set to detect money laundering; a model for predicting the behavior of Internet players with the establishment of restrictions using machine learning algorithms using account data to identify the risk of legalization of illegal funds. A clear understanding of the types, ways, schemes of threats that can contribute to the laundering of illegal funds, as a result, will provide a practical opportunity for financial institutions to form automatic notifications about suspicious financial transactions, predict and control potential risks, for more efficient organization of their functioning and conducting financial transactions. The results of the conducted research will help, among other things, the state regulatory bodies to make certain changes to the existing state policy of combating the laundering of criminal funds and the financing of terrorism.

Gambling is not a new phenomenon in the society and to the field of scholars. The subject has been in existence since the ancient societies, nevertheless it has gained popularity with more human interactions and modernization. Of late, gambling has gained attention due to the age problem in which there is a concern of growing numbers of teenagers who engage in gambling activities. The main aim of this study was to assess the factors for increasing teenagers’ involvement in gambling activities. Thus, the objective of the study was to examine the effectiveness of legislation in controlling teenage gambling. The explorative study was conducted in Temeke district of Dar es salaam and it engaged both qualitative and quantitative methods. A sample of 99 participants was selected through simple random sampling, snow ball sampling and convenience sampling. The study employed in-depth interview and questionnaire to collect information that enabled the writing of this paper. Qualitative data was analyzed by use of thematic data analysis methods while quantitative data was analyzed with graphs and percentages of responses as well as paragraph explanations. The findings revealed that there are legislative factors that influence teenagers involvement into gambling activities, the factors include: ineffectiveness of Tanzania Gambling Act (TGA) of 2006, ineffectiveness of Gaming Board of Tanzania (GBT), District Administrative Secretary (DAS’) office, and Ward Executive Offices (WEO). The study recommended that the government should review the policies and clearly stipulate further restrictions and repercussions on areas concerning teenagers and/or under age involvement in gambling activities. Through the Regional Administration and Local Government Authority (RALG) departments and Ministry of Education Science and Technology (MoEST) to design awareness programs to the public and sensitize members of public on social and economic adverse effects of gambling to teenagers. Parents should be encourages to be responsible and accountable for the behaviors of their children. Also, the local government authorities should be training in technology aspects and equipped with resources to execute better on their roles in the communities.

AimsTo evaluate, in a sample of pathological gamblers, the effects of personality traits and psychiatric comorbidity on the severity of this condition.Methods40 patients were evaluated with the following instruments: EuropASI, modified for pathological gambling; MINI; TCI, and BIS-11. Univariate linear regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationships between different scales.ResultsAge of onset was influenced by Novelty Seeking and NS-1 subscale, with higher scores related to earlier onset, Harm Avoidance 2 subscale, with higher scores related to a later onset; the presence of a lifetime panic disorder was related with a later onset; A positive correlation was found between age of onset of pathological gambling and both cigarette and cannabis smoking. Higher NS1 scores were related to a higher amount of money spent during the last month, while higher scores on the HA2 and Cooperativeness 5 subscales were related to a lesser number of days in which the patient had gambled during the last month. Moreover, higher scores in Gambling severity scores are related with the presence of a comorbid alcohol or substance abuse or dependence, dysthymia, post traumatic stress disorder, bipolar II mood disorder, and with higher BIS-11 Motor Impulsiveness, Non-planned Impulsiveness and total scores.ConclusionsPersonality traits and psychiatric comorbidity influence the age of onset of gambling, the severity of gambling and the functional and economic impact of the disease on the patient’s life. An evaluation of these aspects is needed to determine treatment options with a greater understanding of the phenomenon.

The article discusses the problems of improving criminal liability for illegal activities in the organization or conduct of gambling, lotteries. The doctrinal positions on this issue, as well as the corresponding foreign experience, are analyzed. It is concluded that: 1) The Criminal Code of Ukraine should be supplemented by a general rule that will provide for criminal liability for all the most socially dangerous manifestations of violations of the established procedure for engaging in economic activities. Theoretically, such a projected prohibition could cover, among other things, unlicensed or other illegal activities related to the organization and conduct of gambling or lotteries, which, accordingly, would eliminate the need for the existence of a corresponding special rule; 2) however, the question of the inexpediency of the existence of a special criminal law norm dedicated to gambling and lotteries can be put on the agenda only when, based on the results of the corresponding painstaking expert developments, the following is formed: – firstly, a well-grounded and, which is no less important, a more or less stable circle of sublicensed types of economic activity, violation of the order of occupation of which should result in criminal liability; – secondly, an improved version of the corresponding general rule, the instructions of which should be correlated with the provisions of the regulatory legislation and within which there will be no room for those controversial aspects that were characteristic of the previously existing Articles 202 and 203 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine; 3) therefore, today the optimal way of criminal-legal counteraction to illegal activities in the organization or conduct of gambling or lotteries is the presence of an appropriate special norm (Article 203–2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).

Teaching students awareness about sustainable mobility has been lacking to date. There is a need to expand the themes being addressed in order to achieve a change in attitude. Society needs to design a curriculum that teaches about sustainable mobility to guarantee a better environment for future generations. This article presents the most important results of an experiment based on gamification to promote the education of sustainable mobility in primary school classrooms. This new teaching method, aimed at children aged 10–12 years old, applies non-gambling play metaphors to real-life tasks to motivate a change in attitude. The didactic approach was developed using the ClassCraft platform to create specific activities that consider the environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainable mobility. The initial analysis revealed a perception about sustainable mobility that focused on environmental problems with very little input on the economic and social aspects. The experience has shown that by using the gamified ClassCraft tool applying structured activities about all aspects of sustainable mobility, the pupils acquired new concepts that clarified the social and economic components and began to develop a conscience about how to become an active part in behavioural change.

The aim of this study was to evaluate tour guides’ perception of tourism sustainability using triple bottom line dimensions of economic, environmental, and socio-cultural aspects as informed by Social Exchange Theory. A structured questionnaire was self-administered to tour guides around Mikumi National Park in Tanzania. Descriptive and mean comparison tests were performed with results indicating that tour guides perceive tourism to have positive economic and environmental impacts. However, surveyed tour guides thought that tourism in the area stimulated prevalence of bad behaviours like prostitution, alcoholism, and gambling. Furthermore, the results indicate that tour guides perceive tourism to increase imbalance and inequality in economic benefits. The results complement previous studies by capturing tour guides’ views as well as testing the Social Exchange Theory. Furthermore, the results offer insights to destination managers and policy makers on possible interventions in furthering holistic and sustainable destination management. Keywords: Tourism, Culture, Tour Guides, Tanzania, Perception, Impacts

Research background: In negotiations, in modelling decision-making at both the individual and market levels, it is important to understand and be able to assess important aspects of economic behaviour. The theory of spectrum is proposed to be applied in modelling decision making. The object of the research is the possibilities of application of spectrum and game theories. Classical economic theory does not define subjective parameters of economic behaviour, therefore, when modelling market negotiation strategies, it is difficult to identify and evaluate appropriate parameters of economic behaviour required for decision-making in market negotiations. The spectrum theory approach can be used to model the economy, both at the individual and market levels, which is especially relevant in international business negotiations, where the modelling of solutions and various operations presents opportunities to assess subjective parameters. Purpose of the article: The aim of the paper is to investigate and compare the application of spectral decay and gambling theories in modelling market economy negotiations. Research methods: Scientific literature analysis, comparative, logical analysis and synthesis, comparative and generalization methods, game theory, quantum cognition methods. Findings & Value added: The article examines the basic principles of behavioural economics: the functions of assessing the psychological value and uncertainty of monetary gain or loss, how both theories take these principles into account: game and spectrum.

The paper investigates the normative regulation of socially dangerous consequences of economic crimes set forth in Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. A legislative structure of economic crimes is rather heterogeneous. Some of them are determined as formal (registration of illegal transactions with real estate — Art. 170; illegal organization and conduct of gambling — Art. 171.2, etc.); others are defined as economic (illegal obtaining of credit — Art. 176; abuse of securities issue — 185, etc.); and the third are defined as formal economic (illegal entrepreneurship — Art. 171; restriction of competition — Art. 178 et al.).The paper analyzes the negative aspects of including the criteria characterizing socially dangerous consequences in the norms-notes to Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, determines the significance of criminological peculiarities of economic crimes in determining the extent of damage caused by economic crimes of different types; the influence of the nature and amount of damage established in the law on the exemption from criminal liability for the commission of economic crimes.It is concluded that a law-maker needs a more uniform approach to determining the types and sizes of consequences caused by economic crimes (types should be, as a rule,” economic”, and the size should be the same for all the crimes) and to the placement of quantitative indicators of consequences (in the note to Article 1 where sequences are specified); to achieving compliance with the rules of differentiation of responsibility in the construction of basic and qualified crimes (large and especially large scale of consequences should be indicate only for the latter); to imposing "unfavorable” sanctions from the point of view of the legal consequences of economic crimes, and, on the contrary, to giving a “favorable” character to the exemption from criminal responsibility under Art. 76.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in comparison with the specified sanctions.

Doing business is one way to earn sustenance. As in a hadith Rasulullah PBUH states that ninety percent of sustenance lies in business, while the remaining ten percent is livestock. The point is that doing business will open nine doors to get wealth, while another door of sustenance is opened by breeding this shows how important business is in meeting the needs of human life, from the material side. Because ninety percent of the income obtained comes from business. A successful business cannot be separated from several things, one of which must be done based on trust, related to ethics, and related to profit. In practice, doing business according to Islamic law has been carried out by the Prophet Muhammad as a guide for Muslims, so that if a businessman does business according to the teachings of the Prophet, it is the same as carrying out the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. More and more entrepreneurs are implementing the behavior of the Prophet in their business, including customer-oriented by maintaining customer satisfaction, openness to customers by applying honest aspects of commerce, conducting healthy competition in the economic market, must pay attention to aspects of justice so that no party is oppressed. Feel disadvantaged when doing business. This study aims to determine the correct implementation of business based on the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and examine the messages conveyed by the Prophet Muhammad on the aspect of muamalah. This research uses a descriptive qualitative research method with secondary data or library research. Islamic business behavior that is free of usury (interest), gharar (uncertainty), and maysir (gambling) is considered better because of the value requirements. Therefore, extracting the values ​​of Islamic economic philosophy through the business behavior of Muhammad SAW is expected to be a solution for today's business behavior.

IntroductionThe sexual compulsive behavior also known as sex addition is the repetitive and intense sexual behavior of the individual. Although the few studies carried out, the prevailing rates vary between the 2% and the 20%.ObjectivesWe present the case of a 46-year-old male with psychiatric treatment records since he was 17 and a personality disorder group B diagnosis and depressive reactions reactive to environmental frustrations. Several short-, medium- and long-term hospitalizations. Currently he is admitted after having expressed some autolytic ideas.MethodologyThe patient started a treatment in the Unit of Addictive Behaviors. He says he started to frequent the brothels 10 years ago to satisfy his sexual needs, but gradually increased the frequency. Later, he started to have sex online, also in fee-paying web pages. This has had a negative influence in the different aspects of his life, leading him to economic stress and endless debts.ResultsBorderline personality disorder. 301.83 (F60.3).Other specified disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorder (sex). 312.89 (F91.8).Pathological gambling. 312.31 (F63.0).Persistent depressive disorder. 300.4 (F34.1).ConclusionsIt is clear that the compulsive sexual behavior is a disorder that includes repetitive, intrusive and distressing thoughts and leads to behaviors that affect negatively several aspects of the lives of people suffering such disorder, so that is why it is associated with other psychiatric disorders. Even though it has been described and discussed for years in literature, it is difficult to classify within psychiatric nosology and nowadays its categorization is still a challenge within the mental health.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

This research aims to delve into the implementation of the concept of maslahah in the revolving fund loan or financing program managed by the Cooperatives, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Revolving Fund Management Agency (LPDB-KUMKM). The research method employed is a literature review with a descriptive qualitative approach. Secondary data was obtained from various sources, including journals, relevant research, and books related to the research context. The results of the research indicate that LPDB-KUMKM has overall implemented the maslahah concept in its programs. This finding is reflected in several aspects. Firstly, LPDB-KUMKM has successfully fostered economic self-reliance for its cooperative and MSME partners through fund provision, training, and mentoring. Secondly, the institution ensures that all implemented programs adhere to the characteristics of Sharia compliance by avoiding elements of usury, ambiguity, and gambling. Thirdly, the institution conducts a comprehensive risk evaluation, encompassing credit risk, operational risk, and compliance risk. The fourth, LPDB-KUMKM actively engages in community empowerment through training programs, mentoring, and providing access to other resources. The fifth aspect encompasses LPDB-KUMKM's commitment to accountability and transparency at every stage of revolving fund management. Finally, the institution actively participates in an ongoing evaluation and improvement process to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of the implemented programs.

Islam is a religion which guide us in all aspects of our lives, Economic Activity is also an important aspect where Islam guided us that how it is important and how the one can do his activities as per Shariah guidelines described in Qur'an o sunnah, these are divine revelation for Muslims and defined principles under which one can do his economic activities. Islam give importance to economic activities but today, as Muslims, we seem to be very active in the field of worship and try our best to fulfill it, but we are very lack in the field of economic activities, although the field of economic activities is more important than worship. This is critical because the correctness of the acts of worship depends on the correctness of the economic activities as If the principles of Shari'ah are not observed in the economic activities, then its effects on the acts of worship are also compounded. But even so, if we look at our society, we see more people who are negligent in economic activities than in worship. Apparently, the religious class also looks weak in the economic activities. While there are many other reasons for this, one of the main reasons is the lack of knowledge and awareness about this important field of Shariah. Therefore, as a Muslim, it is our responsibility to know and follow all the commands that we do in our daily lives so that we can do the correct economic activities along with worship and one should also be able to perform his duties according to the law and be entitled to the pleasure of his God. The principle stated by the jurists in the economic activities is that economic activities are permissible in nature which means that any transaction in the field of economic activities other than acts of worship will be permissible in principle, provided that the transaction should be free from Shariah prohibitions. Therefore, any transaction, whether it was made fourteen hundred years ago, whether it is a transaction in today's modern age, or a transaction in the future, in principle this transaction will be ruled to be lawful until there is no Shari'ah prohibition in it. Now the question is what are those Shariah prohibitions? We can easily divide these Shari'ah prohibitions into four categories: General Prohibitions, interest, Uncertainty/Gambling and Violation of Islamic Law of Contract. In this paper importance of economic activities, conditions and Shariah prohibitions are defined.

The increasing number of predictions made in financial market indicated the error caused by representativeness. Representativeness heuristic is a popular study on subjective probability of an event. Researches have been made regarding the impact of representativeness heuristic on decision making. Previous studies have investigated the cause of representativeness from a psychological perspective. It has also been applied to financial cases. The study of representativeness provides an empirical guideline to investors in terms of making a prediction. This study uses case study to give a comprehensive overview on the impact of representativeness on two components of the market. This paper conducts further discussions regarding this heuristic in three aspects which are stock market, gambling and investment decisions. Representativeness bias is a very important theory in behavioral economics. Studying its influence mechanism can not only bring marginal expansion to the existing research, but also provide important reference for the behavior of investors. This paper is divided into five main parts, section one introduces representativeness heuristic and mention the connection between representativeness and economic field. Section two looks at previous studies on this heuristic, following by detailed analyses on three applications in the field of economy in section three. The method of case study is used in section three. Section four and five gives a conclusion of the content this paper and display of references respectively. The main finding of this paper is the influence of representativeness on predictions and decisions made by individuals and the superiority of firm in avoiding the negativity of representativeness. The findings illustrate the main difference between individuals and firms, giving a reference to individual investors to make a less affected decision.

In todays difficult economic climate, business managers must carefully consider all aspects of business operations to minimize waste and increase efficiency. The revenue cycle continues to be the primary area of fraud and abuse requiring strong, comprehensive internal controls (AICPA 2002). Internal controls in the revenue arena are now more important than ever. The current paper provides a control review checklist for hospitality revenue in the gaming industry. Extant studies have often focused on internal controls for the gambling operations of the gaming industry to the neglect of the hospitality portion of the industry. For many firms in the industry, the hospitality revenue can account for half of total firm revenue. The checklist we provide can be used as a general benchmark to perform preliminary evaluations of a companys internal control system in the hospitality arena. Auditors can compare their clients control objectives with the objectives that are presented. During preliminary investigations of the companys internal control system, auditors should review whether important control objectives have been omitted and whether the omission incurs or heightens risk. The control review checklist can also be used by CFOs or controllers in the gaming industry in reviewing whether their companys internal control systems are adequate. The checklist provides CFOs or controllers internal controls that external, independent auditors consider to be important.

Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued a religious advice (fatwa)that the Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare is not appropriate with sharia law. Thatreligious advice (fatwa) was issued through decisionfrom taken conjunction (ijtima’) by religious advice (fatwa) commissions of Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) at at-Tauhidiyah boarding school Cikura, Bojong, Tegal, Central Java, in the middle past of 2015.Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) alleged thatthe Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcarewhich started since the beginning of 2014 until today, in practice containing elements of gambling (maisir), deception (gharar), and usury (riba).Related to that problem, the author wanted to know the standing of problem of the Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare in proportion in a case study at the Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare in Jember regency, which dynamic and religious views. Therefore the aim of this study was to determine the practice of the Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare in Jember regency and to determine whether the existing mechanism in these institution is in conformity with the legal provisions of sharia economy or not.This study is qualitative research. The data collection methods that used are observation, interviews and documentation.The data obtained and analyzed using descriptive method.The validity of the data using perseverance techniqueor constancy observation.Based on the research that has been done, the result of this study are: 1) Practice ofthe Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare in serving members was in accordance to the provision of the National Social Security System (SJSN) Act Number 40 in 2004 and Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Act Number 24 in 2011 and some related regulations, such as a Presidential Regulation (Perpres); 2). According to the law of sharia economic perspective in the practice of that institution, there are several matters that appropriate to thesharia provisions, such as the mechanisms of participation and healthcare insurance. While in the aspects of the payment and fund management are not appropriate to the sharia provisions. There are extant elementsof gambling (maisir), deception (gharar), and usury (riba) in the Social Security Administrator Board (BPJS) Healthcare in Jember regency

Abstrak: Dalam konteks pariwisata halal, teori ekonomi syariah dapat membantu untuk memahami aspek-aspek ekonomi yang sesuai dengan prinsip syariah. Salah satunya dalam mengembangkan dan memasarkan produk pariwisata halal. Teori yang digunakan yaitu teori ekonomi syariah yang mencakup prinsip-prinsp dalam ekonomi Islam seperti terhindar dari yang namanya perjudian (maysir), terhindar dari ketidak jelasan atau ketidakpastian (gharar) serta larangan bunga (riba). Tujuan penelitian ini untuk mengidentifikasi potensi pada pasar pariwisata halal, mengetahui dampak ekonomi dari pariwisata halal terhadap masyarakat setempat serta mengembangkan strategi pemasaran yang efektif untuk menarik wisatawan internasional ke Indonesia. Metode yang dilakukan dalam penelitian ini yaitu menggunakan studi literatur. Dapat disimpulkan bahwa potensi pariwisata halal di Indonesia merupakan peluang tidak hanya berpengaruh terhadap pendapatan saja namun banyak hal yang tanpa kita sadari bahwa pariwisata halal merupakan penyumbang terbesar terutama bagi industri pariwisata di Indonesia. Selain juga penciptaan lapangan pekerjaan, peningkatan investasi dan pengembangan infrastruktur. Kesadaran akan pariwisata halal harus ditingkatkan agar tepat sasaran. Dengan adanya penelitian ini diharapkan dapar memberikan pemahaman, wawasan mengenai pariwisata halal serta manfaat bagi industri pariwisata serta khususnya masyarakat lokal. Sehingga masyarakat dapat mengembangkan serta mengoptimalkan potensi pariwisata halal yang kita miliki untuk menarik wisatawan Internasional. Kata Kunci: Potensi; Pariwisata Halal; Indonesia; Wisatawan Internasional Abstract: In the context of halal tourism, sharia economic theory can help to understand economic aspects that are in accordance with sharia principles, especially in the development and marketing of halal tourism. The theory used is the Islamic economic theory which includes principles in Islamic economics such as avoiding gambling (maysir), avoiding uncertainty or uncertainty (gharar) and prohibiting interest (usury). The purpose of this research is to identify potential in the halal tourism market, find out the economic impact of halal tourism on the local community and develop an effective marketing strategy to attract international tourists to Indonesia. The method used in this research is literature review. It can be concluded that the potential of halal tourism in Indonesia represents an opportunity that not only impacts revenue but also contributes significantly to the tourism industry in Indonesia. This includes job creation, increased investment, and infrastructure development. Awareness of halal tourism needs to be heightened for targeted efforts. With this research, it is hoped to provide understanding, insights into halal tourism, and its benefits for the tourism industry and, especially, the local community. This way, the community can develop and optimize the potential of halal tourism we possess to attract international tourists. Keywords: Potential; Halal Tourism; Indonesia; International Tourists

This study aims to analyze the forms and processes of socio-cultural change that occurred in the people of Lingai Village, Menggala Timur District, Tulang Bawang Regency, Lampung Province after the establishment of the oil palm industry (PT Menggala Sawit Indo) in the area. The method used in this research is qualitative method. Data collection is done by observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation. Taking informants using the snow ball technique, so as to obtain as many as 23 informants consisting of village officials, religious leaders, youth leaders, community leaders, and the general public. The results showed that the existence of palm oil industry in the countryside caused socio-cultural changes as follows: a) changes in courtesy, especially young people, however, in broad outline aspects of culture, language, and manners did not experience significant changes; b) changes in the intensity and number of people working together; c) intra and inter-community interactions that are getting better and the formation of integration in the community; d) the lively religious life and the abandonment of the old belief system; e) changes in consumption patterns and people's lifestyles; f) the increasing work ethic of the community; g) the formation of new social classes, namely factory workers who look successful occupy a new social status position and the occurrence of social mobility of society, especially in terms of their income and social status; h) the development of economic organizations; i) the development of new livelihoods in the non-agricultural sector; j) the emergence of social problems, such as gambling and alcoholic beverages; and k) changes in the way people view health and increase social security for health, especially for people who work in factories.

Global financial crisis in 2008 posted numerous questions about the reasons and triggers. In past three years world’s economic literature has been full of academic articles analysing each reason or trigger and scientific explanations of possible connections. Majority outcome was, that key factor was excessive use of derivatives and synthetic financial products, which were under regulated or not regulated at all. The outcome was that countries with developed financial markets introduced new regulations and controls in the field of derivatives and synthetic financial products. Term “systemic risk” was introduced in global financial market. But will this approach really prevent such global crisis? Submission is divided in three parts. First part deals with the theory of principle based regulation. Principle based regulation was firstly introduced in UK and latter accepted by European Union in the field of capital markets. It was a way, together with the Lamfalussy process, to make EU regulation acceptable for all member states. Instead of detailed prescribed behaviour, legislation texts prescribe only desirable goals. Implementation is left to each state or, even worse, to each supervised subject. So the implementation should depend on the capital market’s development, capital product’s structure, tradition, investment companies’ size etc. From a distant view, principle based legislation could be seen as a great legislation writing’s technique. It could be seen as an effective solution to regulate a fast developing field without need to change the regulation. But is it true? Second part of the submission addresses the legal questions and problems, connected to the principle based regulation starting with the validity of regulations. Broad definitions in Market in financial instruments Directive (MiFID), introduced for fast adaptation to new financial products and instruments, are now turning into dinosaurs. Contrary to US’s fast action, European Union is still discussing whether spot forex trade is financial instrument or not. On the other hand, broad and unclear definitions, represents a friendly environment for new casino’s financial products. Even recognised financial instruments (like derivatives and synthetic financial instruments) are recognised as gambling contracts by national courts within European Union. Problems with legal enforcement of financial contracts are mentioned also in common law’s literature. There are numerous pages describing the economic and financial essence of each derivative or synthetic financial instrument. But the chapters, dealing with the legal aspects, are short and end with a similar advice: “due to small number of case law and the danger, that courts could interpret such contracts as a gambling contract, we strongly advise to settle all disputes outside the court.” In case of numerous defaults unenforceability of contracts could be the poison pill for the trust in capital markets. Accepted solutions could also be a problem for administrative or criminal sanctions. Broad and unclear definitions could violate the basic principle “nullum crimen sine lege praevia.” And least but not last, in modern financial world sins are made in interpretations of details and not of principles. Third part of submission deals with the necessary assumptions for a workable principle based legislation. It starts with basic legal culture and generally accepted rule of law. It deals with the corporate culture, consumer’s organizations, financial markets and capable supervisors. Only when all the actors perform their expected roles, the principle based legislation could work properly.

Legalized gambling is a popular source of tax revenue in the United States. However, the ability to increase gambling tax revenue through higher tax rates is limited by the presence of nontaxable and cross-border substitutes. In July 2009, New Hampshire introduced a 10 percent tax on gambling winnings, substantially reducing the expected value of a gamble while leaving other aspects of gambling unaffected; the tax was repealed in May 2011. Using a novel data set and a difference-in-differences framework, I document significant reductions in New Hampshire lottery sales under the tax policy and estimate a price elasticity greater than −1. The response is consistent with informed choice by consumers, and larger changes in border areas provide suggestive evidence of cross-border shopping.

The development of modern society has brought about changes in several aspects including economic aspects which are marked by fintec (financial technology) used in transactions in online trading through the Shopee application present in the community as one of the solutions and conveniences obtained by providing transactions using known coins coins from the Shopee shake game. Before trading, play the shopee shake game to get coins with the benefits gained from the Shopee shake game. This study aims to find out transactions using game shopee coins and review Islamic law on online trading. This type of research is a field research. The object of research is about transactions using coins from the shopee shake game. The results of this study indicate that in the law of the shopee shake game coin service transactions on online buying and selling is legal because it is harmonious and the transaction requirements of the shopee shake game coin service on buying and selling online have been fulfilled. However, it is forbidden syar'i because by getting coins from the shopee shake game contains gambling elements and the gharar is real because the benefits of spending data packages and coins are unclear, some get a lot or he doesn't get anything so he loses. In giving discounts using coins it is not certain initially 50% now to 25% of the total checkout.Keywords: Buy and Sell Online; Shopee Shake Game; Shopee Gold Coins; Islamic law.ABSTRAKSemakin berkembangnya masyarakat modern membawa perubahan dari beberapa segi tidak terkecuali segi ekonomi yang ditandai dengan fintech(financial technology) yang dipakai dalam transaksi pada jual beli online melalui aplikasi Shopee hadir di masyarakat sebagai salah satu solusi dan kemudahan yang didapatkan dengan memberikan transaksi menggunakan koin yang dikenal koin dari game goyang Shopee. Sebelum bertransaksi bermain game goyang shopee untuk mendapatkan koin dengan untung-untungan yang didapatkan dari game goyang Shopee. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui transaksi dalam menggunakan koin game shopee dan  tinjauan hukum Islam terhadap jual beli online ini. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian lapangan. Adapun yang menjadi obyek penelitian adalah tentang transaksi dengan menggunakan koin dari game goyang shopee. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa hukum dari transaksi layanan koin game goyang shopee pada jual beli online yaitu  sah karena rukun dan syarat transaksi layanan koin game goyang shopee pada jual beli online sudah terpenuhi. Akan tetapi diharamkan syar’i karena dengan mendapatkan koin dari game goyang shopee mengandung unsur perjudian dan gharar-nya nyata karena untung-untungan dengan menghabiskan paket data dan koin tidak jelas, ada yang mendapat banyak atau ia tidak mendapat apa-apa sehingga ia rugi. Dalam pemberian potongan harga dengan menggunakan koin itu tidak pasti awalnya 50% sekarang menjadi 25% dari total checkout.Kata Kunci: Jual beli online; Game goyang shopee; Koin emas shopee; Hukum Islam.Â

An important factor in the development of tourism within transboundary territories may be unique tourist resources, or special areas. Border territories often turn into gambling zones, especially in those cases when the industry of gambling entertainment is prohibited in neighboring countries. In addition, a tourist product can be formed on the basis of unique tourist resources, united by a common idea or historical plot. You can get to know them only by traveling from a neighboring or nearby country. Tourists are attracted to the border space by duty-free trade, a large selection of goods, lower prices, convenient opening hours. On the basis of the Agreement, the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic will contribute to expanding cooperation in the field of tourism in order to familiarize citizens of their states with achievements in the field of economics, social development, culture, nature and sights, as well as historical monuments and national traditions of the peoples of the three countries. The parties will cooperate in the development of international tourism on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and, in order to increase the tourist flow, facilitate the simplification of visa and customs formalities, exchange lists of travel agencies. The Parties will facilitate the exchange of experience in all areas of international and domestic tourism, promote cooperation between the national tourism administrations of the Parties and other organizations involved in tourism and its development. The parties will also facilitate the dissemination of tourist information to attract the flow of tourists through the publication of promotional materials, the exchange of information, print media, exhibitions, films and the holding of various symposia and seminars. The parties will provide mutual assistance in the training of personnel of tourist complexes and facilitate the exchange of specialists of the relevant tourism authorities, assist the relevant departments and interested organizations in the creation of joint ventures and in the implementation of other investment projects in the tourism sector. The parties through the relevant tourism authorities will exchange views on cooperation, work experience in activities in international tourism organizations.

This article describes people's lives in the economy which are usually carried out individually or even in groups, either in a family, organization, or even a group of people who usually try to find a way to find the best way to fulfill their own economy. In Islam itself, at the beginning of the discussion, Islam often seemed classic, only focused on the metaphysical-transidental-normative area, without facing a future that is now a lot. Philosophy as the deepest aspect that influences human behavior is seen as something essential in providing solutions that occur in contemporary society, including one of contemporary Islamic economics. This research is a library research. Extracting information using the documentary method, reviewing and reviewing documents from various related sources. The results of the study indicate that in contemporary Islamic Economics, which positions the Qur'an and As-Sunnah as the legal basis, of course there are signs of halal and haram. There are several forms of transactions in society that are already common among them are ribawi transactions (interest), maisir (gambling), tadlis (fraud), ihtikar (hoarding), ghisysy (covering defects), ghabn (price fraud) and gharar (speculation), aspects of justice, efficiency, welfare. Whereas in Islamic consumption everyone should look at and try to prioritize maslahah compared to utility.

ABSTRACT Business Ethics in Sharia Economics which is based on Islamic principles which include justice, honesty, transparency, and avoiding riba (interest), maysir (gambling), gharar (excessive uncertainty), as well as respecting the rights of individuals and society in general, Business in sharia economics, it is expected to comply with Islamic laws in all aspects of its operations. Meanwhile, consumer behavior in sharia economics is also influenced by Islamic values, such as justice, generosity, honesty, and respect for the rights of consumers and producers. Consumers in a sharia economy are expected to avoid products or services that conflict with Islamic principles, such as alcohol, pork, or products that involve ribawi practices. The aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of how business ethics and consumer behavior can be regulated and implemented in the context of sharia economics, as well as to identify areas where there is a need for improvement or further development in appropriate business practices and consumer behavior. with Islamic principles. This research uses quantitative methods. This research data collection technique comes from official and trusted sources on Google, and we also carry out direct observations observing the behavior of business people and consumers. ABSTRAK Etika Bisnis dalam Ekonomi syariah yang didasarkan pada prinsip-prinsip islam yang mencakup keadilan,kejujuran,transparansi,dan menghindari riba (bunga), maysir (penjudian), gharar (ketidakpastian berlebihan), serta menghormati hak-hak individu dan masyarakat secara umum, Bisnis dalam ekonomi syariah diharapkan untuk mematuhi hukum-hukum islam dalam semua aspek operasionalnya.sedangkan Prilaku Konsumen dalam Ekonomi Syariah juga dipengaruhi oleh nilai-nilai Islam,seperti keadilan,kedermawanan,kejujuran,dan menghormati hak-hak konsumen serta produsen. Konsumen dalam ekonomi syariah diharapkan untuk menghindari produk atau layanan yang bertentangan dengan prinsip-prinsip islam,seperti alkohol,daging babi,atau produk-produk yang melibatkan praktik ribawi. Tujuan penelitihan ini adalah untuk mendapatkan pemahaman yang lebih baik tentang bagaimana etika bisnis dan perilaku konsumen dapat diatur dan dijalankan dalam konteks ekonomi syariah, serta untuk mengidentifikasi area-area di mana ada kebutuhan untuk perbaikan atau pengembangan lebih lanjut dalam praktik bisnis dan perilaku konsumen yang sesuai dengan prinsip-prinsip Islam.Penelitihan ini mengunakan metode kuantitatif. Teknik pengumpulan data penelitihan ini berasal dari sumber resmi dan terpercaya di googel,dan kami juga melakukan observasi secara langsung mengamati prilaku para pembisnis dan konsumen. .

This paper aims to portray the overall picture of poverty in the world and mentions the key solution to overcome poverty from a critical perspective. The data and figures were quoted from a number of researchers and organizations in the field of poverty around the world. Simultaneously, the information strengthens the correlations among poverty and lack of education. Only appropriate philosophies of education can improve the country’s socio-economic conditions and contribute to effective solutions to worldwide poverty. In the 21st century, despite the rapid development of science and technology with a series of inventions brought into the world to make life more comfortable, human poverty remains a global problem, especially in developing countries. Poverty, according to Lister (2004), is reflected by the state of “low living standards and/or inability to participate fully in society because of lack of material resources” (p.7). The impact and serious consequences of poverty on multiple aspects of human life have been realized by different organizations and researchers from different contexts (Fraser, 2000; Lister, 2004; Lipman, 2004; Lister, 2008). This paper will indicate some of the concepts and research results on poverty. Figures and causes of poverty, and some solutions from education as a key breaker to poverty will also be discussed. Creating a universal definition of poverty is not simple (Nyasulu, 2010). There are conflicts among different groups of people defining poverty, based on different views and fields. Some writers, according to Nyasulu, tend to connect poverty with social problems, while others focus on political or other causes. However, the reality of poverty needs to be considered from different sides and ways; for that reason, the diversity of definitions assigned to poverty can help form the basis on which interventions are drawn (Ife and Tesoriero, 2006). For instance, in dealing with poverty issues, it is essential to intervene politically; economic intervention is very necessary to any definition of this matter. A political definition necessitates political interventions in dealing with poverty, and economic definitions inevitably lead to economic interventions. Similarly, Księżopolski (1999) uses several models to show the perspectives on poverty as marginal, motivation and socialist. These models look at poverty and solutions from different angles. Socialists, for example, emphasize the responsibilities of social organization. The state manages the micro levels and distributes the shares of national gross resources, at the same time fighting to maintain the narrow gap among classes. In his book, Księżopolski (1999) also emphasizes the changes and new values of charity funds or financial aid from churches or organizations recognized by the Poor Law. Speaking specifically, in the new stages poverty has been recognized differently, and support is also delivered in limited categories related to more specific and visible objectives, with the aim of helping the poor change their own status for sustainable improvement. Three ways of categorizing the poor and locating them in the appropriate places are (1) the powerless, (2) who is willing to work and (3) who is dodging work. Basically, poverty is determined not to belong to any specific cultures or politics; otherwise, it refers to the situation in which people’s earnings cannot support their minimum living standard (Rowntree, 1910). Human living standard is defined in Alfredsson & Eide’s work (1999) as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (p. 524). In addition, poverty is measured by Global Hunger Index (GHI), which is calculated by the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) every year. The GHI measures hunger not only globally, but also by country and region. To have the figures multi-dimensionally, the GHI is based on three indicators: 1. Undernourishment: the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population (reflecting the share of the population with insufficient calorie intake). 2. Child underweight: the proportion of children under age 5 who are underweight (low weight for their age, reflecting wasting, stunted growth or both), which is one indicator of child under-nutrition. 3. Child mortality: the mortality rate of children under 5 (partially reflecting the fatal synergy of inadequate dietary intake and unhealthy environments). Apart from the individual aspects and the above measurement based on nutrition, which help partly imagine poverty, poverty is more complicated, not just being closely related to human physical life but badly affecting spiritual life. According to Jones and Novak (1999 cited in Lister, 2008), poverty not only characterizes the precarious financial situation but also makes people self-deprecating. Poverty turns itself into the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance. It leads the poor to the end of the road, and they will never call for help except in the worst situations. Education can help people escape poverty or make it worse. In fact, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from people in many places around the world, in both developed and developing countries (Lipman, 2004). Lipman confirms: “Students need an education that instills a sense of hope and possibility that they can make a difference in their own family, school, and community and in the broader national and global community while it prepare them for multiple life choices.” (p.181) Bradshaw (2005) synthesizes five main causes of poverty: (1) individual deficiencies, (2) cultural belief systems that support subcultures of poverty, (3) economic, political and social distortions or discrimination, (4) geographical disparities and (5) cumulative and cyclical interdependencies. The researcher suggests the most appropriate solution corresponding with each cause. This reflects the diverse causes of poverty; otherwise, poverty easily happens because of social and political issues. From the literature review, it can be said that poverty comes from complex causes and reasons, and is not a problem of any single individual or country. Poverty has brought about serious consequences and needs to be dealt with by many methods and collective effort of many countries and organizations. This paper will focus on representing some alarming figures on poverty, problems of poverty and then the education as a key breaker to poverty. According to a statistics in 2012 on poverty from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), nearly half the world's population lives below the poverty line, of which is less than $1.25 a day . In a statistics in 2015, of every 1,000 children, 93 do not live to age 5 , and about 448 million babies are stillborn each year . Poverty in the world is happening alarmingly. According to a World Bank study, the risk of poverty continues to increase on a global scale and, of the 2009 slowdown in economic growth, which led to higher prices for fuel and food, further pushed 53 million people into poverty in addition to almost 155 million in 2008. From 1990 to 2009, the average GHI in the world decreased by nearly one-fifth. Many countries had success in solving the problem of child nutrition; however, the mortality rate of children under 5 and the proportion of undernourished people are still high. From 2011 to 2013, the number of hungry people in the world was estimated at 842 million, down 17 percent compared with the period 1990 to 1992, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) titled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013” . Although poverty in some African countries had been improved in this stage, sub-Saharan Africa still maintained an area with high the highest percentage of hungry people in the world. The consequences and big problems resulting from poverty are terrible in the extreme. The following will illustrate the overall picture under the issues of health, unemployment, education and society and politics ➢ Health issues: According a report by Manos Unidas, a non- government organization (NGO) in Spain , poverty kills more than 30,000 children under age 5 worldwide every day, and 11 million children die each year because of poverty. Currently, 42 million people are living with HIV, 39 million of them in developing countries. The Manos Unidas report also shows that 15 million children globally have been orphaned because of AIDS. Scientists predict that by 2020 a number of African countries will have lost a quarter of their population to this disease. Simultaneously, chronic drought and lack of clean water have not only hindered economic development but also caused disastrous consequences of serious diseases across Africa. In fact, only 58 percent of Africans have access to clean water; as a result, the average life expectancy in Africa is the lowest in the world, just 45 years old (Bui, 2010). ➢ Unemployment issues: According to the United Nations, the youth unemployment rate in Africa is the highest in the world: 25.6 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. Unemployment with growth rates of 10 percent a year is one of the key issues causing poverty in African and negatively affecting programs and development plans. Total African debt amounts to $425 billion (Bui, 2010). In addition, joblessness caused by the global economic downturn pushed more than 140 million people in Asia into extreme poverty in 2009, the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned in a report titled The Fallout in Asia, prepared for the High-Level Regional Forum on Responding to the Economic Crisis in Asia and the Pacific, in Manila from Feb. 18 to 20, 2009 . Surprisingly, this situation also happens in developed countries. About 12.5 million people in the United Kingdom (accounting for 20 percent of the population) are living below the poverty line, and in 2005, 35 million people in the United States could not live without charity. At present, 620 million people in Asia are living on less than $1 per day; half of them are in India and China, two countries whose economies are considered to be growing. ➢ Education issues: Going to school is one of the basic needs of human beings, but poor people cannot achieve it. Globally, 130 million children do not attend school, 55 percent of them girls, and 82 million children have lost their childhoods by marrying too soon (Bui, 2010). Similarly, two-thirds of the 759 million illiterate people in total are women. Specifically, the illiteracy rate in Africa keeps increasing, accounting for about 40 percent of the African population at age 15 and over 50 percent of women at age 25. The number of illiterate people in the six countries with the highest number of illiterate people in the world - China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh and Egypt - reached 510 million, accounting for 70 percent of total global illiteracy. ➢ Social and political issues: Poverty leads to a number of social problems and instability in political systems of countries around the world. Actually, 246 million children are underage labors, including 72 million under age 10. Simultaneously, according to an estimate by the United Nations (UN), about 100 million children worldwide are living on the streets. For years, Africa has suffered a chronic refugee problem, with more than 7 million refugees currently and over 200 million people without homes because of a series of internal conflicts and civil wars. Poverty threatens stability and development; it also directly influences human development. Solving the problems caused by poverty takes a lot of time and resources, but afterward they can focus on developing their societies. Poverty has become a global issue with political significance of particular importance. It is a potential cause of political and social instability, even leading to violence and war not only within a country, but also in the whole world. Poverty and injustice together have raised fierce conflicts in international relations; if these conflicts are not satisfactorily resolved by peaceful means, war will inevitably break out. Obviously, poverty plus lack of understanding lead to disastrous consequences such as population growth, depletion of water resources, energy scarcity, pollution, food shortages and serious diseases (especially HIV/AIDS), which are not easy to control; simultaneously, poverty plus injustice will cause international crimes such as terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and money laundering. Among recognizable four issues above which reflected the serious consequences of poverty, the third ones, education, if being prioritized in intervention over other issues in the fighting against poverty is believed to bring more effectiveness in resolving the problems from the roots. In fact, human being with the possibility of being educated resulted from their distinctive linguistic ability makes them differential from other beings species on the earth (Barrow and Woods 2006, p.22). With education, human can be aware and more critical with their situations, they are aimed with abilities to deal with social problems as well as adversity for a better life; however, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from unprivileged people (Lipman, 2004). An appropriate education can help increase chances for human to deal with all of the issues related to poverty; simultaneously it can narrow the unexpected side-effect of making poverty worse. A number of philosophies from ancient Greek to contemporary era focus on the aspect of education with their own epistemology, for example, idealism of Plato encouraged students to be truth seekers and pragmatism of Dewey enhanced the individual needs of students (Gutex, 1997). Education, more later on, especially critical pedagogy focuses on developing people independently and critically which is essential for poor people to have ability of being aware of what they are facing and then to have equivalent solutions for their problems. In other words, critical pedagogy helps people emancipate themselves and from that they can contribute to transform the situations or society they live in. In this sense, in his most influential work titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1972), Paulo Freire carried out his critical pedagogy by building up a community network of peasants- the marginalized and unprivileged party in his context, aiming at awakening their awareness about who they are and their roles in society at that time. To do so, he involved the peasants into a problem-posing education which was different from the traditional model of banking education with the technique of dialogue. Dialogue wasn’t just simply for people to learn about each other; but it was for figuring out the same voice; more importantly, for cooperation to build a social network for changing society. The peasants in such an educational community would be relieved from stressfulness and the feeling of being outsiders when all of them could discuss and exchange ideas with each other about the issues from their “praxis”. Praxis which was derived from what people act and linked to some values in their social lives, was defined by Freire as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p.50). Critical pedagogy dialogical approach in Pedagogy of the Oppressed of Freire seems to be one of the helpful ways for solving poverty for its close connection to the nature of equality. It doesn’t require any highly intellectual teachers who lead the process; instead, everything happens naturally and the answers are identified by the emancipation of the learners themselves. It can be said that the effectiveness of this pedagogy for people to escape poverty comes from its direct impact on human critical consciousness; from that, learners would be fully aware of their current situations and self- figure out the appropriate solutions for their own. In addition, equality which was one of the essences making learners in critical pedagogy intellectually emancipate was reflected via the work titled “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by Jacques Rancière (1991). In this work, the teacher and students seemed to be equal in terms of the knowledge. The explicator- teacher Joseph Jacotot employed the interrogative approach which was discovered to be universal because “he taught what he didn’t know”. Obviously, this teacher taught French to Flemish students while he couldn’t speak his students’ language. The ignorance which was not used in the literal sense but a metaphor showed that learners can absolutely realize their capacity for self-emancipation without the traditional teaching of transmission of knowledge from teachers. Regarding this, Rancière (1991, p.17) stated “that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it”. This education is so meaningful for poor people by being able to evoking their courageousness to develop themselves when they always try to stay away from the community due the fact that poverty is the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance (Novak, 1999). The contribution of critical pedagogy to solving poverty by changing the consciousness of people from their immanence is summarized by Freire’s argument in his “Pedagogy of Indignation” as follows: “It is certain that men and women can change the world for the better, can make it less unjust, but they can do so from starting point of concrete reality they “come upon” in their generation. They cannot do it on the basis of reveries, false dreams, or pure illusion”. (p.31) To sum up, education could be an extremely helpful way of solving poverty regarding the possibilities from the applications of studies in critical pedagogy for educational and social issues. Therefore, among the world issues, poverty could be possibly resolved in accordance with the indigenous people’s understanding of their praxis, their actions, cognitive transformation, and the solutions with emancipation in terms of the following keynotes: First, because the poor are powerless, they usually fall into the states of self-deprecation, shame, guilt and humiliation, as previously mentioned. In other words, they usually build a barrier between themselves and society, or they resist changing their status. Therefore, approaching them is not a simple matter; it requires much time and the contributions of psychologists and sociologists in learning about their aspirations, as well as evoking and nurturing the will and capacities of individuals, then providing people with chances to carry out their own potential for overcoming obstacles in life. Second, poverty happens easily in remote areas not endowed with favorable conditions for development. People there haven’t had a lot of access to modern civilization; nor do they earn a lot of money for a better life. Low literacy, together with the lack of healthy forms of entertainment and despair about life without exit, easily lead people into drug addiction, gambling and alcoholism. In other words, the vicious circle of poverty and powerlessness usually leads the poor to a dead end. Above all, they are lonely and need to be listened to, shared with and led to escape from their states. Community meetings for exchanging ideas, communicating and immediate intervening, along with appropriate forms of entertainment, should be held frequently to meet the expectations of the poor, direct them to appropriate jobs and, step by step, change their favorite habits of entertainment. Last but not least, poor people should be encouraged to participate in social forums where they can both raise their voices about their situations and make valuable suggestions for dealing with their poverty. Children from poor families should be completely exempted from school fees to encourage them to go to school, and curriculum should also focus on raising community awareness of poverty issues through extracurricular and volunteer activities, such as meeting and talking with the community, helping poor people with odd jobs, or simply spending time listening to them. Not a matter of any individual country, poverty has become a major problem, a threat to the survival, stability and development of the world and humanity. Globalization has become a bridge linking countries; for that reason, instability in any country can directly and deeply affect the stability of others. The international community has been joining hands to solve poverty; many anti-poverty organizations, including FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), BecA (the Biosciences eastern and central Africa), UN-REDD (the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), WHO (World Health Organization) and Manos Unidas, operate both regionally and internationally, making some achievements by reducing the number of hungry people, estimated 842 million in the period 1990 to 1992, by 17 percent in 2011- to 2013 . The diverse methods used to deal with poverty have invested billions of dollars in education, health and healing. The Millennium Development Goals set by UNDP put forward eight solutions for addressing issues related to poverty holistically: 1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 2) Achieve universal primary education. 3) Promote gender equality and empower women. 4) Reduce child mortality. 5) Improve maternal health. 6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. 7) Ensure environmental sustainability. 8) Develop a global partnership for development. Although all of the mentioned solutions carried out directly by countries and organizations not only focus on the roots of poverty but break its circle, it is recognized that the solutions do not emphasize the role of the poor themselves which a critical pedagogy does. More than anyone, the poor should have a sense of their poverty so that they can become responsible for their own fate and actively fight poverty instead of waiting for help. It is not different from the cores of critical theory in solving educational and political issues that the poor should be aware and conscious about their situation and reflected context. It is required a critical transformation from their own praxis which would allow them to go through a process of learning, sharing, solving problems, and leading to social movements. This is similar to the method of giving poor people fish hooks rather than giving them fish. The government and people of any country understand better than anyone else clearly the strengths and characteristics of their homelands. It follows that they can efficiently contribute to causing poverty, preventing the return of poverty, and solving consequences of the poverty in their countries by many ways, especially a critical pedagogy; and indirectly narrow the scale of poverty in the world. In a word, the wars against poverty take time, money, energy and human resources, and they are absolutely not simple to end. Again, the poor and the challenged should be educated to be fully aware of their situation to that they can overcome poverty themselves. They need to be respected and receive sharing from the community. All forms of discrimination should be condemned and excluded from human society. When whole communities join hands in solving this universal problem, the endless circle of poverty can be addressed definitely someday. More importantly, every country should be responsible for finding appropriate ways to overcome poverty before receiving supports from other countries as well as the poor self-conscious responsibilities about themselves before receiving supports from the others, but the methods leading them to emancipation for their own transformation and later the social change.

The gambling business entails geo-economic opportunities for islands, especially in times of online gambling. However, it also involves risks like ill mental health, debt, and social problems. Furthermore, a heavy reliance on gambling revenues involves great moral dilemmas, especially when the gambling provision is operated within a not-for-profit public regime. This study concerns how these aspects are negotiated in the public discussion in Åland Islands, an autonomous group of islands situated between Finland and Sweden. By ruling of its regional parliament and the Finnish Lotteries Act, the Åland-based gambling monopoly company Ålands penningautomatförening (Paf) has the right to provide onshore gambling on the Islands, on the Internet, and on cruise ships trafficking the Baltic Sea. The study examines Paf’s role as a pillar of the local community, and the ways in which this position is sustained and contested. By analyzing a corpus of 862 online texts from local newspapers and public radio services from 2006–2018, this study demonstrates how Åland depends on an incongruous public construction of Paf as a responsible actor that is simultaneously criticized for not exercising greater transparency and responsibility, highlighting a contradiction between the provision of harmful gambling products and economic benefits for the community.

Abstract This article analyzes Money, Explained, a five-episode video series produced by the American explanatory journalism organization Vox and distributed globally by Netflix, as an exemplar of the recent proliferation of digital media content explaining economic issues to a general public. Such content reflects the increased prominence of news-about-relations in economic news coverage, a news form that aims to explain why current trends and events occur while also echoing early twentieth-century corporate pedagogic films and more recent personal finance journalism that instructs audiences on proper capitalist behavior. The Vox series considers several financial topics all centered on economic problems that individuals experience, involving get-rich-quick schemes, gambling, retirement saving, credit cards, and student loans. It focuses on individuals' psychological flaws as a cause for the problems they encounter and suggests that viewers can change their disposition and modify their individual behavior to surmount these problems. The series identifies some aspects of the economic system as unfair but does not consider the capacity of individuals to act collectively to restructure it.

Every economic and finance institution which operates based on shariah principles have to apply the Islamic syariah values. This provision has been set by the government, either by means of act or other regulations. The further technical provision is made by Dewan Syariah Nasional- Majelis Ulama Indonesia (the National Shariah Council-Indonesia Ulama Assembly) as the guidance in the fieldwork. Asuransi Takaful Keluarga (Family Takaful Assurance) is one of assurance sectors that its operational is based on the shariah principles. The result of a study showed that the contractapplicationthat is done has fulfilled the principles and prerequirements of syariah contracts. The model of contract that is operated is standard contract by considering the syariah aspects. In addition, it also attends to the contract principles such as permition, usefulness, justice, and other principles. Not only that, the done contract also has attended as maximal as possible to the syariah business ethics, by avoiding the syariah prohibitions such as gambling, deception, and unclearness in the contracts.

The paper aims to analyse the thoughts of Imam Abu Hanifah and Imam Syafi’i on sukuk instruments. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents the need yet destructive forces of globalization and free trade era in today’s civilization dominated by a capitalistic system which had inadvertently caused global financial crisis and accelerated the issue on poverty, knowledge deficiency and moral decadence. These destructive forces have led to the rise of the Islamic economy concept, amongst others on the need for sukuk instruments. The discussion focuses on sukuk instrument as sukuk has an important role in free trade to fulfill the increased extraordinary economic needs of Islamic countries as well as to realize the economic needs of the entire world. The second part of the paper then analyses the legal aspects of sukuk being a subject of ongoing debate among the experts of Islamic law that seemingly has a negative tendencies on the development of sukuk. The group that rejects sukuk are influenced by the qiyas (analogical) method of Imam Syafi‘i who assumed that sukuk has the conventional elements of risk (gharar) and gambling (maisir). The group that accepts sukuk is influenced by the thoughts of Imam Abu Hanifah who assumed that sukuk is a case of individual interpretation and judgment of Islamic law that should go through the ijtihad method. It is found that both schools of thoughts in essence accepted sukuk as an Islamic financial instrument. This is because Imam Abu Hanifah relied on the istihsan method whilst when Imam Syafi‘i digressed from the qiyas method and used the takhsis theory, the resource levels of legal sources theory and the language approach theory. These theories relied by Imam Syafi’i are all in essence the istihsan theory according to Imam Abu Hanifah.

AbstractThis paper proposes to forecast an important cognitive phenomenon called the Loss Aversion Bias via Hybrid Machine Learning Models. One of the unique aspects of this study is using the reaction time (milliseconds), psychological factors (self-confidence scale, Beck’s hopelessness scale, loss-aversion), and personality traits (financial literacy scales, socio-demographic features) as features in classification and regression methods. We found that Random Forest was superior to other algorithms, and when the positive spread ratio (between gain and loss) converged to default loss aversion level, decision-makers minimize their decision duration while gambling, we named this phenomenon as “irresistible impulse of gambling”.

At its core the quality of being fungible is the quality of being interchangeable, more specifically interchangeable with its likeness. Our currencies, ergo our financial systems, ergo our ways of life have been underpinned by the stability that a $5 note is worth the same as every other $5 note. This is perhaps why the word fungible has never really spilled over into everyday usage: it has traditionally been a word for legal documents and economics texts. However, in the last couple of years the word fungible has made its way out of the lecture theatres of law classes and into the headlines of mainstream news services. On the back of a crypto currency boom it seemed only logical that markets that utilised this new form of wealth would emerge, the most prominent of these being the, at times lucrative, NFT (non-fungible token) market. Defining an NFT is problematic, because it is more about what it isn’t than what it is. People who have searched online looking for a definition will probably find an article or video that starts off with a semantic definition, e.g. it is a digital token with a unique signature making it unlike other tokens that are similar, which is then followed up by a spuriously comprehensible but ultimately ephemeral analogy. These definitions perhaps suffer by their ulterior motive of making NFTs sound more ground-breaking and more revolutionary than they are. If you were to say NFTs are like digital snowflakes, in that no two are the same, that might help, but it doesn’t add anything to their significance because whilst we may notionally find the idea interesting that no two snowflakes are the same, we ultimately don’t really care, and this doesn’t make any snowflake more important or valuable than any other. However, imagine a scenario in late capitalism where a certain configuration of snowflake has an exchange value greater than other configurations, or a scenario where a snowflake is worth more because Elon Musk once owned it. In practice, NFTs are comparable to digital receipts that give the owner exclusive access to a piece of data. This data maybe a small digital image, it might be a gif, it might be a high resolution digital artwork, it might be anything that can be stored digitally. The allure or uniqueness of these pieces of data lies in their non-fungibility. They are acquired through a crypto currency exchange (more often than not Ethereum, but not necessarily so) and as such are verified and secure, though it is worth noting that in 2021 crypto currency theft totalled A$4.5b and money lost to crypto scams totalled A$11b (Lane). There is an irony that emerges here in that the digital culture that has allowed the proliferation of fungible content has given rise to its own non-fungible counter-culture. It is as if the digital annihilation of Benjamin’s aura has been replaced by an 8-bit digital aura. Every $5 note may still have exactly the same value as another $5 note, and the actual Mona Lisa may be less beguiling now you can own it on a tote bag, but not every Bored Ape (an avatar comprised of a cartoon ape, generated by an algorithm) has the same value as another Bored Ape (see Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics). For example, less than 0.5% of generated Bored Apes have gold fur, making them more desirable, and all of a sudden it begins to feel like a familiar market with familiar characteristics of supply and demand. 2020 was a turbulent year, so it’s understandable that the seeds of some culturally significant trends were overlooked. Amongst these was the boom in the trading card market. This saw trading cards – those things kids buy in packs with their pocket money – become an investor industry. Sale prices skyrocketed during global pandemic lockdowns: for example, a LeBron James 2003-4 Upper Deck Exquisite Rookie Patch Autograph card (numbered 14/23) sold at Golden Auctions for US$1.84m; another version of the same card sold in April of 2021 for US$5.2m. This boom in the trading card market rolled over into the early adoption of NFT technology within the sports trading card market, a development that has been generally glossed over. Well before Beeple’s sale of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (a collage of 5,000 digital artworks sold as an NFT) at Christie’s for slightly under US$70m (see Guardian), NFTs were breaking new ground in the sports card market in the form of NBA Top Shots (an official NBA product produced by Dapper Labs). When a person opens a digital pack of Top Shots they reveal “moments”, uniquely serial numbered highlight videos lasting a few seconds. Sales of NBA Top Shots totalled US$230m in 2020 (Young). There is perhaps little surprise in this early adoption of the investor/trading aspects of NFTs, given the crossover between pandemic-era sports card collectors and crypto currency speculators (Yahoo! Finance). Beyond these developments in NFT hobby collectibles, there has also been the development and gamification of NFT gambling in the form of horse-racing platforms like Zed Run. Zed Run allows users to race NFT horses in their virtual stable at the cost of a fee (payable in crypto currency), which is ostensibly a wager. Users can breed NFT horses with other NFT horses to create new NFT horses with unique characteristics, and then race them against other horses with comparable attributes. This platform, and ones like it, are playing a role in creating an unregulated gambling platform that operates on a global scale, at a time where many states in the USA are only years into a relaxed sports betting environment (in 2018 a Supreme Court ruling opened the door for all states to legalise sports betting; until that point sports betting was only legal in 4 states). It remains to be seen if the continued gamification of gambling will entrench itself further through means such as Zed Run, or if the practice will remain niche without the existence of a widely populated metasphere. It is clear that we are currently in the midst of a wave, potentially a flood, of NFT content, and a majority of this content exists as a variation of the theme “how to make money through NFTs”. NFTs are currently considered more for their potential profitability rather than their utility. The residue of this is that non-fungible markets seem to be replicating the traditional markets that they are notionally trying to subvert, and the practical uses of NFTs, e.g. as a solution to issues of digital ownership, are being overlooked. Perhaps this is the new manifestation of the neoliberal ideology, or perhaps it is the case in point that future generations will look back upon. Of course, there is an as yet generally unstated and significant point here, that what is being discussed is fungibility in terms of its non-ness. The mention of the term fungibility in a popular culture context immediately gives way to the consideration of the non-fungible, and the non-fungible is seemingly resolving itself, or at least can be understood, in the context of traditional wealth, with all of its fungible interchangeability. This issue of M/C Journal presents a range of insights and perspectives on this word that is increasingly flowing through discourses and practices. NFTs have a range of implications and a spectrum of potential uses depending on their context. But additionally, the usefulness of fungibility as a concept also comes into play here, as terminology traditionally shackled to other disciplines but increasingly pliable in the arts and humanities. This issue’s feature by Russell, “NFTs and Value”, meets some of the above issues head-on by immediately addressing the dichotomy of NFTs as the start of a new art format or NFTs as Western society’s most recent bubble market. Irrespective of these two positions there is an undeniable reality that these digital artefacts can potentially have real world wealth. Russell explores the potential underlying factors of this wealth and in turn what creates artistic wealth. Here a combination of factors such as the discourse around the work itself, or the place that work has in the context of Western art history are all considered as potential drivers of this new wave/bubble. Mason takes up the financial gains associated with some NFTs by examining the commodification of memes through the NFT format. In particular Mason considers the broader implications of this phenomenon outside of NFTs themselves by discussing the potential cultural and racial legacies at play. Mason’s work also notes the dominance of non-Black memes in the non-fungible market and the subsequent development of non-Black wealth that follows. Through this case study Mason touches upon an as of yet widely overlooked cultural implication of the non-fungible market, that of racial inequality and exploitation. In a different wing of the art world, Binns focusses on film, noting, after highlighting the significant ecological price and damage that comes with making transactions on prominent block chains, that the implications of NFTs on the film industry are still emerging. Despite the presence of some emerging marketplaces and vendors, the full utility of NFTs within the film industry remains untapped and unclear. Perhaps NFTs will supplement crowdfunding by offering exclusive memberships or perks (similar to the Bored Apes Yacht Club), or perhaps the fad will fade into the background without ever leaving an impression. In contrast, Robinson embraces the notion of fungibility as fungibility, stepping away from the contemporary discussion of “fungible” as being inherently “non-fungible” and looking at the interchangeability of identity and experience in online spaces. Through interviews Robinson considers how traditional notions of national and political identity are rendered fungible by digital spaces and how this aspect of fungibility manifests itself in invisibility, efficacy, and antagonism. This work is an important reminder of the suitability of fungible as a term in academic scholarship: Robinson’s notion of fungible citizenship opens up new perspectives in who we are, who we see ourselves to be, and to what we might aspire. Lyubchenko’s work is concerned with the place that NFT art has within a broader sense of art history. For Lyubchenko, crypto art can be considered as the culmination of the Dada movement, influenced by its various iterations such as Neo-Dadaism and Pop-Art. The result here is not so much a digital embodiment of the anti-art movement, arriving to land the final blow, but rather the newest form of anti-art, whose existence seems to only breathe life into that which it intends to kill. For Lyubchenko, crypto art it not so much a threat to traditional art forms, but rather a call to arms, a catalyst to regroup and reassert art’s timeless values. The place of the NFT in music is then the focus of Rogers et al., who seek to explore where music sits in the newly framed context of Web3. Whilst this position is not entirely constituted by the integration of NFT technology in music, it is at present a considerable factor and one that Rogers et al. explore through examination of functionality and discourse analysis. They note a degree of cynicism in the discourses surrounding popular music’s flirtation with NFTs, emerging largely from environmental impacts of blockchain ledgers and potential grey areas surrounding the industry’s legitimacy as a whole when it comes to claims of authenticity, security, and capacity. Interestingly they also note similarities in many of the cases they discuss with discourses surrounding previously emergent forms of music. Even seemingly banal music technologies in the past, such as the jukebox and the player piano, were subjected to comparable scrutiny. In the end time will give us a greater sense of whether the first few years of music within Web3 represent a cultural touchstone or a commercially driven false start. Finally, this collection progresses the discussion on how NFTs themselves present new opportunities for art practitioners. As Wilson notes, there is an inevitability that artists will begin to embrace the production of NFTs as part of the artistic process, as opposed to simply porting over existing artworks to the NFT format. Wilson considers his own work and Damien Hirst’s 2021 NFT works as examples of how considered and practical adoption of this new format challenges the neo-liberal economic conception of what NFTs are and what they are for. References Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub>. The Guardian. “Christie’s Auctions 'First Digital-Only Artwork' for $70m.” 12 Mar. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/mar/11/christies-first-digital-only-artwork-70m-nft-beeple>. Lane, Aaron M. “Crypto Theft Is on the Rise. Here’s How the Crimes are Committed, and How You Can Protect Yourself.” The Conversation 3 Feb. 2022. 15 Apr. 2022 <https://theconversation.com/crypto-theft-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-the-crimes-are-committed-and-how-you-can-protect-yourself-176027>. Yahoo! Finance. “Collector Coin Becomes First and Only Cryptocurrency for Card Collectors.” 30 June 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://finance.yahoo.com/news/collector-coin-becomes-first-only-185000184.html>. Young, Jabari. “People Have Spent More than $230 Million Buying and Trading Digital Collectibles of NBA Highlights.” CNBC 28 Feb. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/28/230-million-dollars-spent-on-nba-top-shot.html>.

This issue of M/C Journal called for a wide multidisciplinary exploration around the notion of ‘street’. The papers we received offered this diversity and range from discussions of everyday activities to seeing the street as a site for events, conflicts and the possibility of new learning. They explored a range of social meanings and cultural ramifications engaged in/on/off and around the notion of street. Street in its most conventional sense represents the link between physical places, but more than that, spaces where cultural negotiations are made. They are everyday spaces where the informal meets the formal, and the public meets the private. In other words, they are spaces where unanticipated, sudden encounters may take place, or where ordinary space may be made special. Their utilitarian purpose may be subverted and they become ‘special’ spaces and sites where Formula 1 races, charity runs, street parties, revolutions, protests, and markets occur. They may be formalised sites known for consumption, entertainment, and recreation or where drugs, sex and gambling are found behind closed doors. Feature: “Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood” Vanessa Raney’s piece, like many of the others, deals with the street as a site of potential political and social conflict. In this case, she describes elements of the urban experience of New York as represented in Seth Tobocman’s graphic novel War in the Neighbourhood. This centres on the relationships between squatters, the police, politicians and the media in a classic conflict about gentrification or the uses and ownership of urban space. Raney compares the representation of this battle in the novel, with historical and current conflicts about urban space and the place that street plays as a site for these conflicts. Street is not community in the sense beloved of current politicians – a banal consensus about law and order – but the site for contestation and in a few cases, resolution. Thus, streets are not accidents, they are shaped by social and economic changes, cultural imaginings and practices. In “Vigilant Citizens”, Cameron Muir investigates a conflict that took place under the guise of a public petition in the city of Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia in 2003. The petition was for the Carr government to “do something” about the “uncontrollable” criminal children who were taking over the streets. That the children were often Aboriginal was not directly mentioned. Muir tracks the media discursive practices and the government’s campaign of fear leading up to this moment of moral panic, arguing through the idea of Statecraft that the desired order for one’s streets can serve to exclude the rights of these others. Continuing of the theme of order and disorder in the public imagination, Irina Gendelman in “The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger” contrasts the reception given to a sculpted hobo, versus the real hobo on the streets of Seattle. Entwined within the figure of the real hobo are a range of prescribed representations, all of which demand a disciplining of the body and the public spaces – made safe for normalised occupations. Gendelman argues that this ‘othering’ is achieved in part through the control (Foucault) exterted via media discussions of what are the acceptable and stable boundaries of society. To conclude, Gendelman returns to Jane Jacobs’s argument that, as there is no one element that makes the city vibrant, so there is no singular investment that can create cultural capital in the city for all, but that inclusive, well-used public spaces remain one of the best ways to build trust among strangers.. We then move back to Australia, to “Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media” and the construction of its place-identity. The media can create shorthand for class and lifestyle differentiation in television land – think Coronation Street, Sesame Street, 42nd Street, Wisteria Lane (Desperate Housewives), or Ramsey Street (Neighbours). But in the local and community newspapers, these socio-economic distinctions come to be replaced by subcultural affiliations of localness. In his comparison between the two iconic gay and lesbian streets in Sydney, Andrew Gorman-Murray’s investigation is driven by the gay/lesbian newspaper discursive portrayals that recreate King Street as alternative and secondary to Oxford Street. His analysis re-emphasises the integral notion of places and streets as social and cultural constructs, open and liable for constant representations, manipulations and challenges. He argues that streets, like identities, are not stable in meaning, they are negotiated subjectively over time and shift according to the imagined constructs, in this case, of the local papers. Street is the social platform for urban displays of inclusion and exclusion: loitering on the street, street kids, living on the street, wrong side of the street, and graffiti on the street, all present conflicting notions surrounding shared city spaces. Melike Turkan Bagli and Sebnem Timur present a personal account of an accidental experience of loitering in a foreign street, “A Bodily Sign of ‘Doing Nothing’: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm”. Faced with this cultural translation at the moment of arrival, the author deliberates on the semiological and discursive impact of what ‘no loitering’ could mean. In hindsight and with adequate cultural context, the notion of loitering is made sense of in relation to the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law of 1992 and the element of criminality located in the Act. While loitering is clearly a cultural and historically specific term, its ambiguity to the reader emphasises the dissonance such public signs may serve. In the next article, Paula Geyh takes us above the street, transcending the street even, in “Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour”, to examine the popularity of parkour through a BBC advertisement. Such practices can commonly be regarded as a form of street culture even as their main purpose is to avoid the street! Street thus becomes the main structure against which parkour-ism can be defined. Geyh’s analysis of parkour as a form of physical poetics is dependent on the context of the urban cityscape and the ability of the body to transcend the street below. The street with its multiple meanings is once again defined as another form of social space, one that represents the barriers and repression of urban life. Knowing your back streets distinguishes one as a local rather than the outsider. Being street wise is integral to top selling computer games like Grand Theft Auto, Gangland or Sim City, where the strategy lies in competent negotiation of streets. Or, as Robert Sweeny in “Code of the Street: Videogames and the City” argues, many videogames centred around urban centres often reinvent ways of looking and imagining the street and its utilitarianism. Skateboarding and graffiti become challenges to the player, casting them as active agents of the city in games such as Tony Hawkes’s Underground and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure. Sweeny suggests that the players will perhaps harbour a different view of marginalised activities, having ‘performed’ them in the videogames. But what are the actual effects these games have on the players and their relationship with the cities? How is de Certeau’s idea of walking in the city appropriated for videogames when now the urban may be experienced more often via the screen than in actuality? Thus, this article posits the city as an interface which serves as an overriding context for game playing – and walking in the city may perhaps be read differently forever after an interactive walk. Finally, Andrew Hickey’s paper “Street Smarts/Smart Streets: Public Pedagogies and the Streetscape” considers the street as a site of instruction or learning. As we move through our streets we are bombarded by advertising messages, directed by public signage, influenced by our fellow walkers and disciplined by multiple codes of behaviour, implicit and explicit. The papers in this volume reflect different aspects of that learning – how do we learn how to be citizens? How do we learn about ownership and inequality? Exclusion and inclusion? At a time of high levels of insecurity in the global North, fear of crime and suspicion of outsiders, these papers suggest that the street still has things to teach us that we can not easily learn in other ways. The street is a particular form of public space, but one that, these papers suggest, precisely because of their role as marginal spaces and as sometime sites of context, cannot easily be replaced. Kate Oakley & Jinna TayM/C Journal ‘street’ Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA Style Oakley, Kate, and Jinna Tay. "Street." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Oakley, K., and J. Tay. (Jul. 2006) "Street," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>.

Exhibiting Procedural Generation Generative art toys are software applications that create aesthetically pleasing visual patterns in response to the users toying with various input devices, from keyboard and mouse to more intuitive and tactile devices for motion tracking. The “art” part of these toy objects might relate to the fact that they are often installed in art galleries or festivals as a spectacle for non-players that exhibits the unlimited generation of new patterns from a limited source code. However, the features that used to characterise generative arts as a new meditative genre, such as the autonomy of the algorithmic system and its self-organisation (Galanter 151), do not explain the pleasure of fiddling with these playthings, which feel sticky like their toy relatives, slime, rather than meditative, like mathematical sublime. Generative algorithms are more than software tools to serve human purposes now. While humans are still responsible for the algorithmically generated content, this is either to the extent of the simple generation rules the artists design for their artworks or only to the extent that our everyday conversations and behaviours serve as raw material to train machine learning-powered generation algorithms, such as ChatGPT, to interpret the world they explore stochastically, extrapolating it in an equivalently statistical way. Yet, as the algorithms become more responsive to the contingency of human behaviours, and so the trained generation rules become too complex, it becomes almost impossible for humans to understand how they translate all contingencies in the real world into machine-learnable correlations. In turn, the way we are entangled with the generated content comes to far exceed our responsibility. One disturbing future scenario of this hyper-responsiveness of the algorithms, for which we could never be fully responsible, is when machine-generated content replaces the ground truth sampled from the real world, leading to the other machine learning-powered software tools that govern human behaviour being trained on these “synthetic data” (Steinhoff). The multiplicities of human worlds are substituted for their algorithmically generated proxies, and the AIs trained instead on the proxies’ stochastic complexities would tell us how to design our future behaviours. As one aesthetic way to demonstrate the creativity of the machines, generative arts have exhibited generative algorithms in a somewhat decontextualised and thus less threatening manner by “emphasizing the circularity of autopoietic processes” of content generation (Hayles 156). Their current toy conversion playfully re-contextualises how these algorithms in real life, incarnated into toy-like gadgets, both enact and are enacted by human users. These interactions not only form random seeds for content generation but also constantly re-entangle generated contents with contingent human behaviors. The toy-being of generative algorithms I conceptualise here is illustrative of this changed mode of their exhibition. They move from displaying generative algorithms as speculative objects at a distance to sticky toy objects up close and personal: from emphasising their autopoietic closure to “more open-ended and transformative” engagement with their surroundings (Hayles 156). (Katherine Hayles says this changed focus in the research of artificial life/intelligence from the systems’ auto-poietic self-closure to their active engagement with environments characterises “the transition from the second to the third wave” of cybernetics; 17.) Their toy-being also reflects how the current software industry repurposes these algorithms, once developed for automation of content creation with no human intervention, as machines that enact commercially promising entanglements between contingent human behaviors and a mixed-reality that is algorithmically generated. Tool-Being and Toy-Being of Generative Algorithms What I mean by toy-being is a certain mode of existence in which a thing appears when our habitual sensorimotor relations with it are temporarily suspended. It is comparable to what Graham Harman calls a thing’s tool-being in his object-oriented rereading of Heidegger’s tool analysis. In that case, this thing’s becoming either a toy or tool pertains to how our hands are entangled with its ungraspable aspects. According to Heidegger a hammer, for instance, is ready-to-hand when its reactions to our grip, and swinging, and to the response from the nail, are fully integrated into our habitual action of hammering to the extent that its stand-alone existence is almost unnoticeable (Tool-Being). On the other hand, it is when the hammer breaks down, or slips out of our grasp, that it begins to feel present-at-hand. For Harman, this is the moment the hammer reveals its own way to be in the world, outside of our instrumentalist concern. It is the hint of the hammer’s “subterranean reality”, which is inexhaustible by any practical and theoretical concerns we have of it (“Well-Wrought” 186). It is unconstrained by the pragmatic maxim that any conception of an object should be grounded in the consequences of what it does or what can be done with it (Peirce). In Harman’s object-oriented ontology, neither the hammer’s being ready to serve any purpose of human and nonhuman others – nor its being present as an object with its own social, economic, and material histories – explicate its tool-being exhaustively. Instead, it always preserves more than the sum of the relations it has ever built with others throughout its lifetime. So, the mode of existence that describes best this elusive tool-being for him is withdrawing-from-hand. Generative art toys are noteworthy regarding this ever-switching and withdrawing mode of things on which Harman and other speculative realists focus. In the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) community, the current epicentre of generative art toys, which consists of videogame developers and researchers, these software applications are repurposed from the development tools they aim to popularise through this toy conversion. More importantly, procedural algorithms are not ordinary tools ready to be an extension of a developer’s hands, just as traditional level design tools follow Ivan Suntherland’s 1963 Sketchpad archetype. Rather, procedural generation is an autopoietic process through which the algorithm organises its own representation of the world from recursively generated geographies, characters, events, and other stuff. And this representation does not need to be a truthful interpretation of its environments, which are no other than generation parameters and other input data from the developer. Indeed, they “have only a triggering role in the release of the internally-determined activity” of content generation. The representation it generates suffices to be just “structurally coupled” with these developer-generated data (Hayles 136, 138). In other words, procedural algorithms do not break down to be felt present-at-hand because they always feel as though their operations are closed against their environments-developers. Furthermore, considered as the solution to the ever-increasing demand for the more expansive and interactive sandbox design of videogames, they not only promise developers unlimited regeneration of content for another project but promise players a virtual reality, which constantly changes its shape while always appearing perfectly coupled with different decisions made by avatars, and thus promise unlimited replayability of the videogame. So, it is a common feeling of playing a videogame with procedurally generated content or a story that evolves in real time that something is constantly withdrawing from the things the player just grasped. (The most vicious way to exploit this gamer feeling would be the in-game sale of procedurally generated items, such as weapons with many re-combinable parts, instead of the notorious loot-box that sells a random item from the box, but with the same effect of leading gamers to a gambling addiction by letting them believe there is still something more.) In this respect, it is not surprising that Harman terms his object-oriented ontology after object-oriented programming in computer science. Both look for an inexhaustible resource for the creative generation of the universe and algorithmic systems from the objects infinitely relatable to one another thanks ironically to the secret inner realities they enclose against each other. Fig. 1: Kate Compton, Idle Hands. http://galaxykate.com/apps/idlehands/ However, the toy-being of the algorithms, which I rediscover from the PCG community’s playful conversion of their development tools and which Harman could not pay due attention to while holding on to the self-identical tool-being, is another mode of existence that all tools, or all things before they were instrumentalised, including even the hammer, had used to be in children’s hands. For instance, in Kate Compton’s generative art toy Idle Hands (fig. 1), what a player experiences is her hand avatar, every finger and joint of which is infinitely extended into the space, even as they also serve as lines into which the space is infinitely folded. So, as the player clenches and unclenches her physical hands, scanned in real-time by the motion tracking device Leapmotion, and interpreted into linear input for the generation algorithm, the space is constantly folded and refolded everywhere even by the tiniest movement of a single joint. There is nothing for her hands to grasp onto because nothing is ready to respond consistently to her repeated hand gestures. It is almost impossible to replicate the exact same gesture but, even if she does, the way the surrounding area is folded by this would be always unpredictable. Put differently, in this generative art toy, the player cannot functionally close her sensorimotor activity. This is not so much because of the lack of response, but because it is Compton’s intention to render the whole “fields of the performer” as hyperresponsive to “a body in motion” as if “the dancer wades through water or smoke or tall grass, if they disturb [the] curtain as they move” (Compton and Mateas). At the same time, the constant re-generation of the space as a manifold is no longer felt like an autonomous self-creation of the machine but arouses the feeling that “all of these phenomena ‘listen’ to the movement of the [hands] and respond in some way” (Compton and Mateas). Let me call this fourth mode of things, neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand, nor withdrawing-from-hand, but sticky-to-hand: describing a thing’s toy-being. This is so entangled with the hands that its response to our grasp is felt immediately, on every surface and joint, so that it is impossible to anticipate exactly how it would respond to further grasping or releasing. It is a typical feeling of the hand toying with a chunk of clay or slime. It characterises the hypersensitivity of the autistic perception that some neurodiverse people may have, even to ordinary tools, not because they have closed their minds against the world as the common misunderstanding says, but because even the tiniest pulsations that things exert to their moving bodies are too overwhelming to be functionally integrated into their habitual sensorimotor activities let alone to be unentangled as present-at-hand (Manning). In other words, whereas Heideggerian tool-being, for Harman, draws our attention to the things outside of our instrumentalist concern, their toyfication puts the things that were once under our grip back into our somewhat animistic interests of childhood. If our agency as tool-users presupposes our body’s optimal grip on the world that Hubert Dreyfus defines as “the body’s tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt” (367), our becoming toy-players is when we feel everything is responsive to each other until that responsiveness is trivialised as the functional inputs for habitual activities. We all once felt things like these animistic others, before we were trained to be tool-users, and we may consequently recall a forgotten genealogy of toy-being in the humanities. This genealogy may begin with a cotton reel in Freud’s fort-da game, while also including such things as jubilant mirror doubles and their toy projections in Lacanian psychoanalysis, various playthings in Piaget’s development theory, and all non-tool-beings in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. To trace this genealogy is not this article’s goal but the family resemblance that groups these things under the term toy-being is noteworthy. First, they all pertain to a person’s individuation processes at different stages, whether it be for the symbolic and tactile re-staging of a baby’s separation from her mother, her formation of a unified self-image from the movements of different body parts, the child’s organisation of object concepts from tactile and visual feedbacks of touching and manipulating hands, the subsequent “projection of such ‘symbolic schemas’” as social norms, as Barbie’s and Ken’s, onto these objects (Piaget 165-166), or a re-doing of all these developmental processes through aesthetic assimilation of objects as the flesh of the worlds (Merleau-Ponty). And these individuations through toys seem to approach the zero-degree of human cognition in which a body (either human or nonhuman) is no other than a set of loosely interconnected sensors and motors. In this zero-degree, the body’s perception or optimal grip on things is achieved as the ways each thing responds to the body’s motor activities are registered on its sensors as something retraceable, repeatable, and thus graspable. In other words, there is no predefined subject/object boundary here but just multiplicities of actions and sensations until a group of sensors and motors are folded together to assemble a reflex arc, or what Merleau-Ponty calls intention arc (Dreyfus), or what I term sensor-actuator arc in current smart spaces (Ahn). And it is when some groups of sensations are distinguished as those consistently correlated with and thus retraceable by certain operations of the body that this fold creates an optimal grip on the rest of the field. Let me call this enfolding of the multiplicities whereby “the marking of the ‘measuring agencies’ by the ‘measured object’” emerges prior to the interaction between two, following Karen Barad, intra-action (177). Contrary to the experience of tool-being present-at-hand as no longer consistently contributing to our habitually formed reflex arc of hammering or to any socially constructed measuring agencies for normative behaviors of things, what we experience with this toy-being sticky-to-hand is our bodies’ folding into the multiplicities of actions and sensations, to discover yet unexplored boundaries and grasping between our bodies and the flesh of the world. Generative Art Toys as the Machine Learning’s Daydream Then, can I say even the feeling I have on my hands while I am folding and refolding the slime is intra-action? I truly think so, but the multiplicities in this case are so sticky. They join to every surface of my hands whereas the motility under my conscious control is restricted only to several joints of my fingers. The real-life multiplicities unfolded from toying with the slime are too overwhelming to be relatable to my actions with the restricted degree of freedom. On the other hand, in Compton’s Idle Hands, thanks to the manifold generated procedurally in virtual reality, a player experiences these multiplicities so neatly entangled with all the joints on the avatar hands. Rather than simulating a meaty body enfolded within “water or smoke or tall grass,” or the flesh of the world, the physical hands scanned by Leapmotion and abstracted into “3D vector positions for all finger joints” are embedded in the paper-like virtual space of Idle Hands (Compton and Mateas). And rather than delineating a boundary of the controlling hands, they are just the joints on this immanent plane, through which it is folded into itself in so many fantastic ways impossible on a sheet of paper in Euclidean geometry. Another toy relative which Idle Hands reminds us of is, in this respect, Cat’s Cradle (fig. 2). This play of folding a string entangled around the fingers into itself over and over again to unfold each new pattern is, for Donna Haraway, a metaphor for our creative cohabitation of the world with nonhuman others. Feeling the tension the fingers exchange with each other across the string is thus, for her, compared to “our task” in the Anthropocene “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway 1). Fig. 2: Nasser Mufti, Multispecies Cat's Cradle, 2011. https://www.kit.ntnu.no/sites/www.kit.ntnu.no/files/39a8af529d52b3c35ded2aa1b5b0cb0013806720.jpg In the alternative, in Idle Hands, each new pattern is easily unfolded even from idle and careless finger movements without any troubled feeling, because its procedural generation is to guarantee that every second of the player’s engagement is productive and wasteless relation-making. In Compton’s terms, the pleasure of generative art toys is relevant to the players’ decision to trade the control they once enjoyed as tool users for power. And this tricky kind of power that the players are supposed to experience is not because of their strong grip, but because they give up this strong grip. It is explicable as the experience of being re-embedded as a fold within this intra-active field of procedural generation: the feeling that even seemingly purposeless activities can make new agential cuts as the triggers for some artistic creations (“Generative Art Toys” 164-165), even though none of these creations are graspable or traceable by the players. The procedural algorithm as the new toy-being is, therefore, distinguishable from its non-digital toy relatives by this easy feeling of engagement that all generated patterns are wastelessly correlated with the players’ sensorimotor activities in some ungraspable ways. And given the machine learning community’s current interest in procedural generation as the method to “create more training data or training situations” and “to facilitate the transfer of policies trained in a simulator to the real world” (Risi and Togelius 428, 430), the pleasure of generative art toys can be interpreted as revealing the ideal picture of the mixed-reality dreamed of by machine learning algorithms. As the solution to circumvent the issue of data privacy in surveillance capitalism, and to augment the lack of diversity in existing training data, the procedurally generated synthetic data are now considered as the new benchmarks for machine learning instead of those sampled from the real world. This is not just about a game-like object for a robot to handle, or geographies of fictional terrains for a smart vehicle to navigate (Risi and Togelius), but is more about “little procedural people” (“Little Procedural People”), “synthetic data for banking, insurance, and telecommunications companies” (Steinhoff 8). In the near future, as the AIs trained solely on these synthetic data begin to guide our everyday decision-making, the mixed-reality will thus be more than just a virtual layer of the Internet superimposed on the real world but haunted by so many procedurally generated places, things, and people. Compared to the real world, still too sticky like slime, machine learning could achieve an optimal grip on this virtual layer because things are already generated there under the assumption that they are all entangled with one another by some as yet unknown correlations that machine learning is supposed to unfold. Then the question recalled by this future scenario of machine learning would be again Philip K. Dick’s: Do the machines dream of (procedurally generated) electronic sheep? Do they rather dream of this easy wish fulfillment in place of playing an arduous Cat’s Cradle with humans to discover more patterns to commodify between what our eyes attend to and what our fingers drag and click? Incarnated into toy-like gadgets on mobile devices, machine learning algorithms relocate their users to the zero-degree of social profiles, which is no other than yet-unstructured personal data supposedly responsive to (and responsible for regenerating) invisible arcs, or correlations, between things they watch and things they click. In the meanwhile, what the generative art toys really generate might be the self-fulfilling hope of the software industry that machines could generate their mixed-reality, so neatly and wastelessly engaged with the idle hands of human users, the dream of electronic sheep under the maximal grip of Android (as well as iOS). References Ahn, Sungyong. “Stream Your Brain! Speculative Economy of the IoT and Its Pan-Kinetic Dataveillance.” Big Data & Society 8.2 (2021). Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Compton, Kate. “Generative Art Toys.” Procedural Generation in Game Design, eds. Tanya Short and Tarn Adams. New York: CRC Press, 2017. 161-173. Compton, Kate. “Little Procedural People: Playing Politics with Generators.” Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, eds. Alessandro Canossa, Casper Harteveld, Jichen Zhu, Miguel Sicart, and Sebastian Deterding. New York: ACM, 2017. Compton, Kate, and Michael Mateas. “Freedom of Movement: Generative Responses to Motion Control.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2282, ed. Jichen Zhu. Aachen: CEUR-WS, 2018. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Intelligence without Representation: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 367-383. Galanter, Philip. “Generative Art Theory.” A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 146-180. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. ———. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 183-203. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968. Peirce, Charles S. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1878): 286-302. Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Trans. C. Gattegno and F.M. Hodgson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Risi, Sebastian, and Julian Togelius. “Increasing Generality in Machine Learning through Procedural Content Generation.” Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (2020): 428-436. Steinhoff, James. “Toward a Political Economy of Synthetic Data: A Data-Intensive Capitalism That Is Not a Surveillance Capitalism?” New Media and Society, 2022.

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