Journal articles on the topic 'Nested transaction systems'

In this paper, we present, formalize and prove the correctness of recovery algorithm for our open and safe nested transaction model using I/O automaton model. Our nested transaction model uses the notion of a recovery point subtransaction in the nested transaction tree. It introduces a prewrite operation before each write operation to increase the potential concurrency. Our transaction model is termed as "open and safe" as prewrites allow early reads (before database writes on disk) without cascading aborts. The systems restart and buffer management operations are modelled as nested transactions to exploit possible concurrency during restart. Each non-access transaction, object, and the scheduler is modeled as I/O automaton. Each of these automata is specified with the help of some pre-and post-conditions. These pre-and post-conditions capture the operational semantics and the behavior of each automaton during recovery operations. Our proof technique makes use of assertional reasoning and provide many interesting invariant, thus gives a better understanding of our recovery algorithm.

A database system is a collection of data items, read or written by transactions in a possibly interleaved fashion. An interleaved execution is assumed to be correct if the sequence of the steps of the transactions, called history, is serializable, that is, the effect of the execution is equivalent to that of some serial execution of the same transactions. In this paper we give a new characterization of serializability that brings out the inherent problem of serialization explicitly. We then give a graph-theoretic analogue of serializable histories. We define a new class of graphs, called serializable graphs, whose properties are such that (i) a serializable graph can be associated with each serializable history, and this can be done for various notions of serializability of histories and for serializability under various sets of constraints, and (ii) a serializable history, in fact a serial one, can be associated with each serializable graph. We use serializable graphs to characterize, in an intuitive manner, serializable histories involving general multi-step transactions, where the same data item can be accessed by several read and write steps of a transaction in an arbitrary manner, and those involving nested transactions. We also define a new notion of serializability for nested transactions. This enables relating several acceptable concurrent executions of transactions, that are not serializable with the traditional transaction concept, to sequential behaviour. Serializability under this notion is also characterized. The main graph-theoretic properties used in these characterizations are a directed cutset matching property and graph contraction.

Since the Ethereum virtual machine is Turing complete, Ethereum can implement various complex logics such as mutual calls and nested calls between functions. Therefore, Ethereum has suffered a lot of attacks since its birth, and there are still many attackers active in Ethereum transactions. To this end, we propose a traceability method on Ethereum, using graph analysis to track attackers. We collected complete user transaction data to construct the graph and analyzed data on several harmful attacks, including reentry attacks, short address attacks, DDoS attacks, and Ponzi contracts. Through graph analysis, we found accounts that are strongly associated with these attacks and are still active. We have done a systematic analysis of these accounts to analyze their threats. Finally, we also analyzed the correlation between the information collected through RPC and these accounts and finally found that some accounts can find their IP addresses.

Automobile ownership models are an integral part of comprehensive transportation modeling systems. Recent work and ongoing advances in the area of activity-based travel demand modeling have recognized the need for increased experimentation with automobile choice models. On the other hand, while automobiles are very important in people's everyday lives, they also have a serious impact on the environment. This impact occurs at the micro level (pollution) as well as the macro level (emission of greenhouse gases and global warming). Such impacts have led to increased interest in reducing motor vehicle emissions. A household automobile type choice model was developed at a disaggregate level. The model can provide a direct forecast of consumer demand for personal-use vehicles given the available choices. A well-developed form of discrete choice modeling techniques, the nested logit model, was used to investigate the process of household automobile type choice decisions given that a transaction has occurred.

For advanced and complicated knowledge processing, we need to integrate various kinds of problem-solvers such as constraint solvers, databases, and application programs. A heterogeneous distributed cooperative problem solving system HELIOS achieves this integration by introducing capsule and environment modules. To integrate heterogeneous problem-solvers that may be implemented in different languages and may have different knowledge representations, those heterogeneity should be absorbed. Capsules and environments are introduced into HELIOS for this purpose. A capsule surrounds each problem-solver and translates the contents of communication to and from the internal representation and a common representation. We call an encapsulated problem-solver an agent. An environment is a module which provides a field giving common representation, and agents communicate and cooperate with each other in each environment. Since an encapsulated environment with its agents can be considered as an agent, agent-environment structures can be nested in HELIOS. For negotiation between agents, negotiation protocol can be defined in each environment. A negotiation strategy that suits the given negotiation protocol can be defined in each capsule of an agent. In this framework, we define a transaction-based negotiation protocol. To check the validity of HELIOS design and its implementation model on computers connected by network, we implemented an experimental version of HELIOS on UNIX workstations.

Gated communities have been the popular form of housing around the world to address social and safety issues over the past decade, including in Chinese cities. However, gated communities, despite being a more efficient system (less congested), have been criticized for their inefficiency to address the tragedy of the urban commons (overexploitation). Therefore, Ostrom’s self-organizing system (collective action) has been suggested as a sustainable approach to govern common resources but little empirical research has demonstrated how Ostrom’s collective action theory, associated with new institutional economics theory, is applied to the gated communities’ commons management. To address the research gap, the study, via a phenomenological case study, proposes a collective action model in which Ostrom’s eight design principles coupled with Williamson’s transaction cost and opportunism theories are used to improve commons management performance in gated communities. Using stratified purposive sampling, ten gated communities with various characteristics were selected in the Taigu district. In-depth semi-structured interviews were then held with community managers to collect valid data, which were subsequently subjected to content (thematic) analysis. As a result, by understanding and structuring the managers’ real experiences into a modified version of Ostrom’s eight principles, the study proposed a collective action model with low transaction costs in terms of enforcement in gated communities as well as reduced opportunistic behaviors of commoners. Specifically, the eight principles in the model include well-defined community members’ rights, commons management rules aligned with local needs and conditions, rights of residents to modify the commons management rules, monitoring systems overseen by community members, a graduated sanction system for rule violators, low-cost dispute resolution, unchallenged rule-making rights by community members, and a nested-tier management structure. The study findings contribute novel insights to the formulation of institutional strategies toward sustainable housing and building management for urban and community managers.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance implications associated with production outsourcing. Specifically, the paper analyzes the cost of goods sold for firms who outsource core manufacturing processes, using empirical data from a variety of industries. The paper seeks to better understand the influence of outsourcing on factory cost by looking at these in the context of related strategies, such as supplier integration, information technology (IT) implementation, and manufacturing process decisions. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on transaction cost economics, manufacturing strategy, and supply chain management literature to aid in predicting the performance to be expected when outsourcing production activities. Furthermore, the paper investigates the moderating effects of manufacturing strategies, supplier integration, and IT expenditures on outsourcing. The primary model is a two-way panel model for the cross-sectional and longitudinal data drawn from the MPI Census of Manufacturers Survey of US manufacturing plants. Findings – The analysis indicates that production outsourcing tends to shift costs among cost of goods sold (COGS) categories, but does not consistently reduce them as measured by overall COGS. The effects of production outsourcing on both the cost of labor and the cost of materials are strong, tending to decrease labor, and increase materials. Additionally, this study shows that a high level of supplier integration has a notable moderating influence on overall COGS, but that process strategies do not. Finally, this analysis indicates that IT expenditures were not influential as a moderator variable when outsourcing, but did have a marked influence on overall COGS, as well as on labor and materials costs. Originality/value – This research investigates the effects of outsourcing on the components of COGS, a level of analysis that is typically not looked at relative to outsourcing. This research also provides methodological contributions with the development of a nested random effects structural model for use with a secondary data source.

A key challenge in B2B and B2C applications involving dynamic composition of workflow activities is to ensure their reliable execution, in view of frequent failures in the internet environment where a composed service is executed. Existing approaches for transactional coordination of composite web services, consider forward and backward recovery alone, in order to maintain consistency in the case of failures. However, while achieving reliable execution, service cancellability is important due to the predominance of long running processes in business applications and frequently changing user requirements and business policies. If the execution of a long running process is not cancelled in the case of a changed requirement, the completion of the process results in wastage of resources and the outcome may no longer be useful. Hence, a transactional coordination framework named as Tx-FAITH is proposed to handle the cancellation recovery under the external interruption and cancellation of transactions. Tx-FAITH considers hierarchically composed web services whose components are recursively nested to form a composition and adapts a coordination approach based on context information. The proposed coordination and recovery approach when tested with 200 simultaneous users and with a database size of 0.35 million records, incurs only 10 seconds to process a request.

We investigate an extension of CTL (Computation Tree Logic) by past modalities, called CTL P, interpreted over Mazurkiewicz’s trace systems. The logic is powerful enough to express most of the partial order properties of distributed systems like serializability of database transactions, snapshots, parallel execution of program segments, or inevitability under concurrency fairness assumption. We show that the model checking problem for the logic is NP-hard, even if past modalities cannot be nested. Then, we give a one exponential time model checking algorithm for the logic without nested past modalities. We show that all the interesting partial order properties can be model checked using our algorithm. Next, we show that is is possible to extend the model checking algorithm to cover the whole language and its extension to [Formula: see text]. Finally, we prove that the logic is undecidable and we discuss consequences of our results on using propositional versions of partial order temporal logics to synthesis of concurrent systems from their specifications.

This paper describes and evaluates a scalable and efficient resilience scheme based on the concept of containment domains. Containment domains are a programming construct that enable applications to express resilience needs and to interact with the system to tune and specialize error detection, state preservation and restoration, and recovery schemes. Containment domains have weak transactional semantics and are nested to take advantage of the machine and application hierarchies and to enable hierarchical state preservation, restoration and recovery. We evaluate the scalability and efficiency of containment domains using generalized trace-driven simulation and analytical analysis and show that containment domains are superior to both checkpoint restart and redundant execution approaches.

Os sistemas de memória transitiva promovem a troca eficiente de informação, contribuindo para a inovação das equipas hospitalares. Estudos anteriores sugerem que os sistemas de memória transitiva podem ser mais úteis para tarefas repetitivas. Neste estudo, conciliamos estes resultados contraditórios argumentando que as eficiências de processamento dos sistemas de memória transitiva beneficiarão a inovação, porque os sistemas de memória transitiva ajudarão os membros da equipa a refletirem sobre os seus processos e metas. A amostra deste estudo incluiu 256 enfermeiros hospitalares (N=54 equipas). Os resultados sugerem que a reflexividade medeia positivamente a relação entre os sistemas de memória transitiva e a inovação das equipas. Este estudo contribui para a literatura ao clarificar de que forma é que as estruturas e processos cognitivos das equipas se combinam para influenciar a inovação das equipas hospitalares; e para a prática ao oferecer ideias para a gestão de equipas em ambiente hospitalar.

Globalization processes around the world affect the activities of economic entities, which in turn leads to changes in their accounting and taxation systems. The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the application of the simplified system of accounting and taxation of agrarian businesses of small businesses in order to identify problematic aspects and areas of state support for their functioning in the context of European integration. A study of the main aspects of the Association Agreement between Ukraine, on the one hand, and the European Union, the European Atomic Energy Community and their Member States, on the other hand, in terms of accounting and taxation. It is determined that the implementation of domestic legislation to the regulations of the European Union (directives) is tangible for both businesses and individuals. Analytical data on the activities of small busi-nesses in Ukraine, including agricultural enterprises, are presented. The results of the analysis show a decrease in the number of small enterprises for the period 2015-2019. At the same time, the volumes of produced and sold products of small businesses and micro-enterprises are growing, which testifies to the importance of the activities of these businesses. It is determined that the conditions of production and economic activity of business entities are accompanied by constant changes in current legislation, which causes uncertainty in their position in the competitive environment, leads to the risk of transactions and increased tax burden, and as a result – business closure or withdrawal in the shadows. "The current systems of taxation of small businesses are studied and their advantages and disadvantages are identified. The main criteria for assigning business entities to the group of small businesses in the agricultural sector, taking into account the Tax and Commercial Codes of Ukraine, as well as the provisions of the Law of Ukraine "On Accounting and Financial Reporting in Ukraine". The system of taxation and accounting of small agricultural enterprises is studied. It was found that the current situation in agriculture indicates the shortcomings and lack of efficiency of the tax system, which requires scientific and methodological support for a consistent and stable tax policy for this category of taxpayers, the use of tax incentives for small businesses, improving the simplified taxation of small businesses . Examining the organization of accounting for small businesses in the context of European integration, the framework of the feasibility of changes in the accounting system. It is noted that a certain problem is the inconsistency of financial and tax accounting for the formation of a harmonized information product for different groups of users. The opinion is expressed that the fiscal orientation of accounting should be reoriented to the needs of the management system and high-quality information support of stakeholders, including foreign investors. It is noted that the legislation on ac-counting and taxation systems, opening and registration of small and micro enterprises needs to be changed. In order to properly support the development of small business, it is proposed to create favorable conditions for taxation and a clear accounting system: providing information and financial support for the process of business organization and the transition to international accounting standards; organization of the system of training of entrepreneurs and retraining of accountants; streamlining mechanisms to protect the rights of small businesses.

RESUMOEste artigo analisa aspectos jurídicos relacionados a aplicativos de serviços de saúde, dentro do conceito de e-Saúde (saúde eletrônica), e a efetividade da proteção legal de dados pessoais sensíveis processados nesses sistemas. Para tais finalidades, a pesquisa aborda o panorama atual relativo à proteção de dados pessoais no Brasil, com foco na legislação específica relacionada à área da saúde e o sigilo das informações de pacientes. Será discutida ainda a legislação americana, conhecido como HIPAA, que regula especificamente as questões relativas à proteção de dados pessoais sensíveis de saúde. A metodologia do artigo fundamenta-se na técnica analítica, na qual são avaliados os aspectos formalistas da sistematização das regras e normas jurídicas, com foco no ordenamento jurídico e suas relações internas, somado ao enfoque hermenêutico interpretativo, que busca compreender as condutas humanas por meio da atividade discursiva interpretativa. O artigo conclui que embora existam o Marco Civil da Internet e legislações esparsas, ainda não existe um aparato legal que assegure a efetiva proteção de dados pessoais no Brasil, e disso decorrem abusos nas operações que envolvam tratamento de dados pessoais sensíveis dos usuários de aplicativos de saúde.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Sociedade da Informação; Marco Civil da Internet; Dados Pessoais. ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes legal aspects related to health service applications, within the concept of e-Health (electronic health), and the effectiveness of legal protection of sensitive personal data processed in these systems. For this, the research addresses the current panorama regarding the protection of personal data in Brazil, focusing on the specific legislation related to the health area and the confidentiality of patient information. It will also discuss the US legislation, known as HIPAA, which specifically regulates issues related to the protection of sensitive personal health data. The methodology of the article is based on the analytical technique, in which the formalistic aspects of the systematization of legal rules and norms, focusing on the juridical order and their internal relations are evaluated, together with the interpretive hermeneutic approach, which seeks to understand human conduct through of the interpretive discursive activity. The article concludes that although there is a Civil Internet Framework and scattered legislation, there is still no legal apparatus to ensure the effective protection of personal data in Brazil, and this is due to abuses in transactions involving the processing of sensitive personal data of users.KEYWORDS: Information Society; Brazilian Internet Law; Personal Data.

This paper presents a solution to check referential integrity constraints and conjunctive global constraints in a relational multi database system. It also presents the experimental results obtained by implementing this solution over a PC cluster with Oracle9i DBMS. The goal of those experimentations is to measure the time spent to check global constraints in a distributed systems. The results show that the overhead induced by our distributed constraint checking is reduced by 50% compared to a centralized checking of constraints.

PurposeThe aim of this study was to investigate the impact of the transactive memory system (TMS) on green innovation and examine the mediation role of the social network at all hierarchical levels.Design/methodology/approachThree hypotheses were examined by performing regression analyses on survey data from manufacturing firms in China. Especially, the nested sets of data from 389 individual observations nested in 53 work teams, including individual level and collective level have been investigated.FindingsThe study results show that the TMS has a positive effect on green innovation. Furthermore, the results indicate that at the team level, structure holes' mediation in this relationship is stronger than degree centrality; at the individual level, weak ties mediation in the relationship of specialization and green innovation is stronger than strong ties, conversely, strong ties mediation in the relationship of credibility and green innovation is stronger than weak ties.Originality/valueThis study expands previous research by highlighting the significance of multilevel social network elements in the context of the TMS and sustainable development and enriches the present research on green innovation.

‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

Introduction Amidst ecological collapse and environmental catastrophe, humankind is surrounded by indications that our habitat is turning against us in monstrous ways. The very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games. Such cultural manifestations of planetary catastrophe are particularly evident in video game monsters. These virtual figures continue monsters’ long-held role in reflecting the socio-cultural anxieties of their particular era. The horrific figures that monsters present play a culturally reflexive role, echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context. Media monsters closely reflect their surrounding cultural conditions (Cohen 47), representing “a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself” (Hutchings 37). Society’s deepest anxieties culminate in these figures in forms that are “threatening and impure” (Carroll 28), “unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory” (Kearney 4–5), and abject (Kristeva 4). In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change. Horrors from the Anthropocene A growing climate emergency surrounds us, enveloping us in the abject and aberrant conditions of what could be described as an ecological monstrosity. Monstrous threats to our environment and human survival are experienced on a planetary scale and research evidence plainly illustrates a compounding catastrophe. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a relatively cautious and conservative body (Parenti 5), reports that a human-made emergency has developed since the Industrial Revolution. The multitude of crises that confront us include: changes in the Earth’s atmosphere driving up global temperatures, ice sheets in retreat, sea levels rising, natural ecosystems and species in collapse, and an unprecedented frequency and magnitude of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires (United Nations Environment Programme). Further human activity, including a post-war addiction to the plastics that have now spread their way across our oceans like a “liquid smog” (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 258), or short-sighted enthusiasm for pesticides, radiation energy, and industrial chemicals (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 254), has ensured a damaging shift in the nature of the feedback loops that Earth’s ecosystems depend upon for stability (Parenti 6). Climatic equilibrium has been disrupted, and growing damage to the ecosystems that sustain human life suggests an inexorable, entropic path to decay. To understand Earth’s profound crisis requires thinking beyond just climate and to witness the interconnected “extraordinary burdens” placed on our planet by “toxic chemistry, mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people” which will continue to lead to the recursive collapse of interlinked major systems (Haraway 100). To speak of climate change is really to speak of the ruin of ecologies, those “living systems composed of many moving parts” that make up the tapestry of organic life on Earth (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 251). The emergency that presents itself, as Renata Tyszczuk observes, comprises a pervasiveness, uncertainty, and interdependency that together “affect every aspect of human lives, politics and culture” (47). The emergence of the term Anthropocene (or the Age of the Humans) to describe our current geological epoch (and to supersede the erstwhile and more stable Holocene) (Zalasiewicz et al. 1036–7; Chang 7) reflects a contemporary impossibility with talking about planet Earth without acknowledging the damaging impact of humankind on its ecosystems (Bulfin 142). This recognition of human complicity in the existential crisis engulfing our planet once again connects ecological monstrosity to the socio-cultural history of the monstrous. Monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, “are our children” and despite our repressive efforts, “always return” in order to “ask us why we have created them” (20). Ecological monstrosity declares to us that our relegation of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, toxic waste, species extinction, and much more, to the discursive periphery has only been temporary. Monsters, when examined closely, start to look a lot like ourselves in terms of biological origins (Perron 357), as well as other abject cultural and social markers that signal these horrific figures as residing “too close to the borders of our [own] subjectivity for comfort” (Spittle 314). Isabel Pinedo sees this uncanny nature of the horror genre’s antagonists as a postmodern condition, a ghoulish reminder of the era’s breakdown of categories, blurring of boundaries, and collapse of master narratives that combine to ensure “mastery is lost … and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction” (17–18). In standing in for anxiety, the other, and the aberrant, the figure of the monster deftly turns the mirror back on its human victims. Ecocritical Play The vast scale of ecological collapse has complicated effective public communication on the subject. The scope involved is unsettling, even paralysing, to its audiences: climate change might just be “too here, too there, too everywhere, too weird, too much, too big, too everything” to bring oneself to engage with (Tyszczuk 47). The detail involved has also been captured by scientific discourse, a detached communicative mode which too easily obviates the everyday human experience of the emergency (Bulfin 140; Abraham and Jayemanne 74–76). Considerable effort has been focussed upon producing higher-fidelity models of ecological catastrophe (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 248), rather than addressing the more significant “trouble with representing largely intangible linkages” between micro-environmental actions and macro-environmental repercussions (Chang 86). Ecocriticism is, however, emerging as a cultural means by which the crisis, and restorative possibilities, may be rendered more legible to a wider audience. Representations of ecology and catastrophe not only sustain genres such as Eco-Disaster and Cli-Fi (Bulfin 140), but are also increasingly becoming a precondition for fiction centred upon human life (Tyszczuk 47). Media artefacts concerned with environment are able to illustrate the nature of the emergency alongside “a host of related environmental issues that the technocratic ‘facts and figures’ approach … is unlikely to touch” (Abraham and Jayemanne 76) and encourage in audiences a suprapersonal understanding of the environmental impact of individual actions (Chang 70). Popular culture offers a chance to foster ‘ecological thought’ wherein it becomes “frighteningly easy … to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected” (Morton, Ecological Thought 1) rather than founder before the inexplicability of the temporalities and spatialities involved in ecological collapse. An ecocritical approach is “one of the most crucial—yet under-researched—ways of looking into the possible cultural impact of the digital entertainment industry” upon public discourse relating to the environment crisis (Felczak 185). Video games demand this closer attention because, in a mirroring of the interconnectedness of Earth’s own ecosystems, “the world has also inevitably permeated into our technical artefacts, including games” (Chang 11), and recent scholarship has worked to investigate this very relationship. Benjamin Abraham has extended Morton’s arguments to outline a mode of ecological thought for games (What Is an Ecological Game?), Alenda Chang has closely examined how games model natural environments, and Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne have outlined four modes in which games manifest players’ ecological relationships. Close analysis of texts and genres has addressed the capacity of game mechanics to persuade players about matters of sustainability (Kelly and Nardi); implicated Minecraft players in an ecological practice of writing upon landscapes (Bohunicky); argued that Final Fantasy VII’s plot fosters ecological responsibility (Milburn); and, identified in ARMA III’s ambient, visual backdrops of renewable power generation the potential to reimagine cultural futures (Abraham, Video Game Visions). Video games allow for a particular form of ecocriticism that has been overlooked in existing efforts to speak about ecological crisis: “a politics that includes what appears least political—laughter, the playful, even the silly” (Morton, Dark Ecology 113). Play is liminal, emergent, and necessarily incomplete, and this allows its various actors—players, developers, critics and texts themselves—to come together in non-authoritarian, imaginative and potentially radical ways. Through play, audiences are offered new and novel modes for envisioning ecological problems, solutions, and futures. To return, then, to encounters with ecological monstrosity, I next consider the visions of crisis that emerge through the video game monsters that draw upon the aberrant nature of ecological collapse, as well as those that foreground our own complicity as humans in the climate crisis, declaring that we players might ourselves be monstrous. The two case studies that follow are necessarily brief, but indicate the value of further research and textual analysis to more fully uncover the role of ecological monstrosity in contemporary video games. Breath of the Wild’s Corrupted Ecology The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) is a fantasy action-adventure game in which players adopt the role of the games series’ long-running protagonist, Link, and explore the virtual landscapes of fictional Hyrule in unstructured and nonlinear ways. Landscape is immediately striking to players of Breath of the Wild, with the game using a distinctive, high-definition cel-shaded animation style to vividly render natural environments. Within the first ten minutes of play, lush green grass sways around the player’s avatar, densely treed forests interrupt rolling vistas, and finely detailed mountains tower over the player’s perspective. The player soon learns, however, that behind these inviting landscapes lies a catastrophic corruption of natural order, and that their virtual enemies will manifest a powerful monstrosity that seems to mirror Earth’s own ecological crises. The game’s backstory centres around the Zelda series’ persistent antagonist, Ganon, and his use of a primal form of evil to overwhelm a highly evolved and industrialised Hyrulian civilisation, in an event dubbed the Great Calamity. Hyrule’s dependency on mechanical technology in its defences is misjudged, and Ganon’s re-appearance causes widespread devastation. The parallel between Hyrule’s fate and humankind’s own unsustainable commitment to heavy industry and agriculture, and faith in technological approaches to mitigation in the face of looming catastrophe, are immediately recognisable. Visible, too, is the echo of the revenge of Earth’s climate in the organic and primal force of Ganon’s destructive power. Ganon leaves in his wake an array of impossible, aberrant creatures hostile to the player, including the deformed humanoid figure of the Bokoblin (bearing snouts, arrow-shaped tails, and a horn), the sand-swimming spike-covered whale known as a Molduga, and the Stone Talus, an anthropomorphic rock formation that bursts into life out of otherwise innocuous geological features. One particularly apposite monster, known simply as Malice, is a glowing black and purple substance that oozes its way through environments in Hyrule, spreading to cover and corrupt organic material. Malice is explained by in-game introductory text as “poisonous bogs formed by water that was sullied during the Great Calamity”—an environmental element thrown out of equilibrium by pollution. Monstrosity in Breath of the Wild is decidedly ecological, and its presentation of unstable biologies, poisoned waters, and a collapsed natural order offer a conspicuous display of our contemporary climate crisis. Breath of the Wild places players in a traditional position in relation to its virtual monsters: direct opposition (Taylor 31), with a clear mandate to eliminate the threat(s) and restore equilibrium (Krzywinska 12). The game communicates its collection of biological impossibilities and inexorable corruptions as clear aberrations of a once-balanced natural order, with Hyrule’s landscapes needing purification at the player’s hands. Video games are driven, according to Jaroslav Švelch, by a logic of informatic control when it comes to virtual monsters, where our previously “inscrutable and abject” antagonists can be analysed, defined and defeated as “the medium’s computational and procedural nature makes monstrosity fit into databases and algorithms” (194). In requiring Link, and players, to scrutinise and come to “know” monsters, the game suggests a particular ecocritical possibility. Ecological monstrosity becomes educative, placing the terrors of the climate crisis directly before players’ avatars, screens, and eyes and connecting, in visceral ways, mastery over these threats with pleasure and achievement. The monsters of Breath of the Wild offer the possibility of affectively preparing players for versions of the future by mediating such engagements with disaster and catastrophe. Recognising the Monstrosity Within Set in the aftermath of the outbreak of a mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus (through exposure to which humans transform into aggressive, zombified ‘Infected’), The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog) is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game. Players alternate between two playable human characters, Ellie and Abby, whose travels through the infection-ravaged states of Wyoming, Washington, and California overlap and intertwine. At first glance, The Last of Us Part II appears to construct similar forms of ecology and monstrosity as Breath of the Wild. Players are thrust into an experience of the sublime in the game’s presentation of natural environments that are vastly capacious and highly fidelitous in their detailing. Players begin the game scrambling across snowbound ranges and fleeing through thick forests, and later encounter lush grass, rushing rivers, and wild animals reclaiming once-urban environments. And, as in Breath of the Wild, monstrosity in this gameworld appears to embody impurity and corruption, whether through the horrific deformations of various types of zombie bodies, or the fungal masses that carpet many of the game’s abandoned buildings in a reclamation of human environments by nature. Closer analysis, however, demonstrates that the monstrosity that defines the play experience of The Last of Us Part II uncannily reflects the more uncomfortable truths of the Anthropocentric era. A key reason why zombies are traditionally frightening is because they are us. The semblance of human faces and bodies that remain etched into these monsters’ decaying forms act as portents for our own fates when faced with staggering hordes and overwhelmingly poor odds of survival. Impure biologies are presented to players in these zombies, but rather than represent a distant ‘other’ they stand as more-than-likely futures for the game’s avatars, just as Earth’s climate crisis is intimately bound up in human origins and inexorable futures. The Last of Us Part II further pursues its line of anthropocentric critique, as both Ellie and Abby interact during the game with different groupings of human survivors, including hubristic militia and violent religious cultists. The player comes to understand through these encounters that it is the distrust, dogmatism, and depravity of their fellow humans that pose immediate threats to avatarial survival, rather than the scrutable, reliable, and predictable horrors of the mindless zombies. In keeping with the appearance of monsters in both interactive and cinematic texts, monsters’ most important lessons emerge when the boundaries between reality and fiction, human and nonhuman, and normality and abnormality become blurred. The Last of Us Part II utilises this underlying ambiguity in monstrosity to suggest a confronting ecological claim: that monstrous culpability belongs to us—the inhabitants of Earth. For video game users in particular, this is a doubly pointed accusation. As Thomas Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne observe of digital games, “however much their digital virtuality is celebrated they are enacted and produced in strikingly visceral—ontologically virtual—ways”, and such a materialist consideration “demands that they are also understood as objects in the world” (15). The ecological consequences of the production of such digital objects are too often taken for granted, despite critical work examining the damaging impact of resource extraction, electronic waste, energy transfer, telecommunications transfer, and the logics of obsolescence involved (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter; Newman; Chang 152). By foregrounding humanity’s own monstrosity, The Last of Us Part II illustrates what Timothy Morton describes as the “weirdly weird” consequences of human actions during the Anthropocene; those uncanny, unexpected, and planetarily destructive outcomes of the post-industrial myth of progress (Morton, Dark Ecology 7). The ecocritical work of video games could remind players that so many of our worst contemporary nightmares result from human hubris (Weinstock 286), a realisation played out in first-person perspective by Morton: “I am the criminal. And I discover this via scientific forensics … I’m the detective and the criminal!” (Dark Ecology 9). Playing with Ecological Monstrosity The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II confront players with an ecological form of monstrosity, which is deeply recursive in its nature. Players encounter monsters that stand in for socio-political anxieties about ecological disaster as well as those that reflect humanity’s own monstrously destructive hubris. Attention is further drawn to the player’s own, lived role as a contributor to climate crisis, a consequence of not only the material characteristics of digital games, but also their broader participation in the unsustainable economics of the post-industrial age. To begin to make the connections between these recursive monsters and analogies is to engage in the type of ecological thought that lets us see the very interconnectedness that defines the ecosystems we have damaged so fatally. In understanding that video games are the “point of convergence for a whole array of technical, cultural, and promotional dynamics of which [players] are, at best, only partially aware” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 19), we see that the nested layering of anxieties, fears, fictions, and realities is fundamental to the very fabric of digital games. Recursion, Donna Haraway observes in relation to the interlinked failure of ecosystems, “can be a drag” (100), but I want to suggest that playing with ecological monstrosity instead turns recursion into opportunity. An ecocritical approach to the examination of contemporary videogame monsters demonstrates that these horrific figures, through their primordial aesthetic and affective impacts, are adept at foregrounding the ecosystemic nature of the relationship between games and our own world. Videogames play a role in representing both desirable and objectionable versions of the world, and such “utopian and dystopian projections of the future can shape our acts in the present” (Fordyce 295). By confronting players with viscerally accessible encounters with the horror of an aberrant and abjected near future (so near that it is, in fact, already the present), games such as Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II can critically position players in relation to discourse and wider public debate about ecological issues and climate change (and further research could more closely examine players’ engagements with ecological monstrosity). Drawing attention to the symmetry between monstrosity and ecological catastrophe is a crucial way that contemporary games might encourage players to untangle the recursive environmental consequences of our anthropocentric era. Morton argues that beneath the abjectness that has come to define our human co-existence with other ecological actors there lies a perverse form of pleasure, a “delicious guilt, delicious shame, delicious melancholy, delicious horror [and] delicious sadness” (Dark Ecology 129). This bitter form of “pleasure” aptly describes an ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity: the pleasure of battling and defeating virtual monsters, complemented by desolate (and possibly motivating) reflections of the ongoing ruination of our planet provided through the development of ecological thought on the part of players. References Abraham, Benjamin. “Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion.” Games and Culture 13.1 (2018): 71–91. Abraham, Benjamin. “What Is an Ecological Game? 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