Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Minecraft (Game) – Juvenile literature”

Many scholars are enthusiastic about the potential learning opportunities present in the sandbox-style gaming environment, Minecraft. In the following case study, the authors explored the use of Minecraft in a high school literature class and the presentation of characterization and plot in three student-made machinima, or films made in the game world. The authors demonstrate that Minecraft offers a unique opportunity for students to display their creativity and understanding of concepts in ways that are more feasible than if they were attempted in the “real” world. It is also relevant to point out that the epistemology associated Minecraft is constructionist in its nature, which implicates a different style of instruction than is typically employed in the U.S. classroom. The authors pose some questions about the diffusion of games like Minecraft in the future, based on their discussion of similar technologies in the past.

This paper was prepared to highlight the changes which shaping the culture of children’s education in digital environments. The text include a theoretical review of the literature about: culture of education, digital environments, and children digital literacy. This paper reviews Jerome Bruner’s educational theory in reference to children digital literacy. The considerations contained in the article are based on examples of technologies such as: virtual reality, augmented reality, and the digital environment in Minecraft computer game. As a result of the analyses, it was concluded that the current technological possibilities have changed the way children participate in digital culture. It was concluded that the child from the recipient of digital media has become their active creator. It has been assumed that it is needed a new look for technologies potential for the development of children’s digital competences.

Looking at the ways in which players interact with computer games (thegameplays), we perceive predominance of character-centered and/or microcontrolled modes of interaction. Despite being well established, these gameplays tend to structure the games in terms of challenges to be fulfilled on an individual basis, or by thinking collectively but having to microcontrol several characters at the same time. From this observation, the paper presents a complementary gameplay in which the player is urged to face collective challenges by designingcharacter organizations. The basic idea is to make the player structure and control group of characters by definingorganizational specifications(i.e., definitions of roles, collective strategies, and social norms). During the game, commanded by the player, artificial agents are then instantiated to play the roles and to follow the strategies and norms as defined in the organizational specification. To turn the idea into practice, the paper proposes an abstract architecture comprising three components or layers. This architecture is materialized in a proof of concept prototype that combines the Minecraft game server, JADE agent platform, and MOISE+ organizational model. Variations and possibilities are discussed and the proposal is compared to related work in the literature.

With the development of the Internet, online games are becoming more and more popular. Boys, middle school students, and children have a higher percentage of minors playing online games, according to data from the 2020 National Research Report on Minors' Internet Use. The purpose of this paper is to study the reasons why minors are addicted to games and its impact on body and mind. Through literature reading and analysis, it is found that the important factors of teenagers addicted to the Internet are family factors and school factors. In the family, parents should try not to use mobile phones when they are with their children. In schools, schools should also teach students in accordance with their aptitude, pay attention to the all-round development of students, and enrich their cultural life.

ABSTRACTThe decline in the quality of the nation's character is characterized by the number of cases popping up that are not in accordance with norm values such as; rampant corruption, theft, murder, rape and juvenile delinquency cases such as brawls, free sex and drug abuse, to overcome this it is necessary to character education for children from an early age. The purpose of writing to find out how to improve the character of the nation based on Evidence Based. In the process of searching literature, several databases are used such as Pubmed, NCBI, goole shoolar and sciencedirect. It is expected that parents will set an example and instill good character in children and play a useful role playing game and prevent children from seeing unfavorable characters in the environment. With character education will develop the basic potential to be kind, think well, and behave well. Strengthening and building multicultural children's behavior, enhancing the competitive civilization of students in society. Keywork: Parenting, Game Types and Character Building

The article focuses on the theoretical and methodological aspects of the use of interactive learning and its advantages over traditional learning. The use of interactive learning in both secondary and higher education is analyzed. The research goal is to theoretically substantiate and highlight the introduction of methods of the model of training future Ukrainian language and literature teachers by means of interactive learning technologies, as well as to determine the factors of their choice. The main research methods used were analysis, generalization and modeling, observation, synthesis, systematization. The results of the conducted research allowed the author to reveal the qualities that a future teacher of Ukrainian language and literature should possess; to describe some pedagogical problems of training the future teachers of Ukrainian language and literature by means of interactive learning technologies.The benefit of this study is the defined content of interactive learning, which is believed to be a specially organized comfortable mutual learning of participants of the educational process as equal its subjects, which provides for their continuous active interaction, during which each of the students realizes and reflects all its knowledge and actions, feels successful and intellectually capable. The author identified such interactive learning methods of the model of training future teachers of Ukrainian language and literature in higher education institutions as: trainings, educational discussions; game technologies; interactive lectures: problem lectures, lecture-visualization, binary lecture, lecture-press conference, round table, cases, brainstorming. Moreover, the most used interactive learning methods of training future teachers of Ukrainian language and literature in universities are given and theoretically grounded; they are training, discussion, role playimg, method of «Spoiled phone», method of «remote project work Minecraft», «Сourt hearing», «Augmented reality», use of presentations. The author highlights their introduction into the work of the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University, states the positive aspects of interactive learning compared to classical one, determines seven factors for the choice of methods. As a result the author makes a conclusion that the use of interactive technologies not only contributes to the creation of an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual understanding in the educational institution, but also implements the basic principles of personality-oriented learning.

One of the five Ottawa Charter’s means of action is the concept of “healthy public policy,” which is an approach to health promotion that is integrated with public policy. This concept can be used as an approach/method in solving health problems at the broader policy level and involving all sectors comprehensively, not just health promotion at the community level and the partial health sector, so that public health problems can be resolved properly. We conducted a systematic review of health promotion policies or regulations using CCAT theory. The purpose of this study is to find the state of the art of research related to stakeholder synergy in online game addiction prevention policies in adolescents. References and literature for this systematic review were collected from the Proquest, ScienceDirect, Pubmed, and Google Scholar databases. The search uses the boolean phrases “OR” and “AND.” Keywords: policy or regulation, health promotion, and community coalition action theory. The results of the systematic review conducted by the researchers showed that of the twenty selected articles, three articles used the coalition/partnership dimension from the CCAT theory, four articles used the stakeholder dimension, two articles used the collaboration dimension, five articles discussed school health policies, policies related to gaming disorders. One article on the analysis of the juvenile contraceptive law, one article on the prevention of mental health disorders, one article on health promotion interventions, and two articles on risk factors and self-regulation focus on online gaming addiction in adolescents. This study concludes that in the future, further research is needed regarding health promotion policies to prevent online game addiction in adolescents to develop specific policy recommendations related to preventing online game addiction in adolescents.

The concept of place informs much of human meaning-making in both space and time. This paper seeks to bridge gaps between the literature on place and research on video games and virtual worlds by finding points of intersection between each field. I analyze the immensely successful independently-developed video game Minecraft through my own experience and an analysis of gameplay videos uploaded to YouTube. The game serves as an ideal framework within which to study place-making due to three core qualities that illuminate intersections in place and video game/virtual worlds literature: (a) alteration/change, (b) proximity, and (c) conflict/cooperation. I problematize dichotomies between “actual” and “virtual” versions of reality as well as “physical” and “social” constructions of place. Through this study, I use Minecraft as an example of the consistency of human place-making across environments, whether digital or physical.

A fairly large body of research has documented how digital games can be used in L1 education. However, there is still a lack of detailed studies on how literacy teachers go about teaching with games as multimodal texts in the classroom. Revisiting earlier empirical work on the use of the sandbox game Minecraft in primary school, the aim of this paper is to explore how a specific game challenge is enacted in practice as seen from a dialogic perspective. Drawing on theories on games and literacies, dialogic education, and teachers as professional practitioners, the paper presents the Game as Educational Challenge (GEC) model in order to understand how L1 teachers frame specific game challenges and facilitate dialogue with the students in relation to their game experiences. The model is used to reanalyse empirical examples of how teachers from three primary schools adopted a teaching unit with Minecraft through different pedagogical approaches. The findings show not only how the teachers’ framing of the game challenges reflected their familiarity with the game, but also how they taught and related the game challenges to curricular aims in different ways. Moreover, it is found that the teachers negotiated authorial positions quite differently when facilitating classroom discussions with students about their game experiences.

Immersive learning environments are some of the technological and cognitive artifacts that can support active teaching approaches, in which product and process evaluation can sustain significant learning even in remote contexts, if well designed and calibrated for the students in training. The paper delves into the experience of remote laboratory teaching conducted within the MineClass project between 2018 and 2021, during which the pandemic school saw a reduction at a national level of active and collaborative laboratory activities due to social distancing, both in-person and remotely. The study integrates results from case studies, qualitative and quantitative surveys, and semi-structured interviews directed at participants in the experimentation. Within the larger primary sample, a follow-up questionnaire was administered in 2022 with the aim of exploring the didactic use of the video game during the pandemic years; most respondents reported continuing laboratory teaching activities with Minecraft even to support distance learning after the conclusion of the MineClass project. The results show the positive impact of the experimentation in terms of perceived added value by teachers for the development of cross-cutting competences, increased motivation, involvement, and autonomy of their students. Conference organisers' note: This paper was granted the EDEN Best Research Paper Award, in cooperation with The UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change. It is a traditional award of EDEN Annual Conferences and Research Workshops. The appointed honourable jury blind selects 8-10 finalists and appoints only 1 Best Research Paper Award that is officially announced during the Gala dinner of the Conference. EDEN Best Research Paper Award competition is based on evaluation results on submission of Full Papers presented to the Annual Conference that follow five standard evaluation criteria: The paper deals with a research question. Rigorous examination/research methods are applied. Findings, results and outcomes are convincingly presented and critically examined. Conclusions are thoroughly discussed (including applicability, transferability, and further research. Literature is reviewed against state of the art. The composition of the honourable jury for the EDEN Best Research Paper Award is composed in cooperation with The UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change: Alfredo Soeiro, Chair, University of Porto, Portugal Orna Farrell, Dublin City University, Ireland Maria Rosaria Re, University of Roma Tre, Italy

It is widely agreed that play and games contribute to the good life. One might naturally wonder how games in particular so contribute? Granted, games can be very good, what exactly is so good about them when they are good? Although a natural starting point, this question is perhaps naive. Games come in all shapes and sizes, and different games are often good in very different ways. Chess, Bridge, Bingo, Chutes and Ladders, Football, Spin the Bottle, Dungeons & Dragons, Pac-Man, Minecraft and Charades are all games, and can all contribute to a good life, but each will characteristically enrich someone’s life in its own distinctive way. Some games facilitate socializing and sociability, other games improve physical fitness, some develop a sense of fair play and reciprocity, while others enhance concentration and analytic skills. Asking ‘what is good about games?’ and assuming a simple answer is as naïve as asking ‘what is good about fiction?’ or ‘what is good about sex?’ However, a less naïve question and philosophically interesting question is not hard to formulate. Plausibly, much of the heterogeneity of the value of games stems from the different kinds of instrumental value of different games. Perhaps we should therefore ask in what ways the activity of playing games is characteristically good for its own sake. Unfortunately, the philosophical literature on the non-instrumental value of playing games is sparse. One of the few sustained treatments of the topic can be found in an underappreciated exchange between Thomas Hurka and John Tasioulas. Interestingly, despite taking different views of what it is to play a game, they both make room for the non-instrumental value of play and achievement in game play and they both argue that these two goods stand in important an important explanatory relation. However, they take diametrically opposed views as to which of these good is more basic. Roughly, on Hurka’s view, the good of achievement is more basic, and it is because of the non-instrumental value of achievement that what Hurka calls “playing in a game,” which involves playing (full-stop), is itself non-instrumentally good because of the non-instrumental value of achievement. The idea is that if something is non-instrumentally good then loving that thing is also non-instrumentally good, and that playing in a game involves loving the activity for its own sake. In this way, the value of achievement in a game grounds the value of playing in a game. Tasioulas takes exactly the opposite approach. He argues that there must be something independently good about playing a game which grounds the value of achievement in that game. On his view, the typical grounding good or “framing value” of games is play itself – what I am here calling “playing (full-stop).” In this essay, I raise some objections to both Hurka’s view and Tasioulas’s view and develop a positive alternative conception of the non-instrumental value of games. I argue that while each view is insightful in its own way, neither gets things exactly right. For a start, the way in which they characterize the key concepts is problematic. Hurka’s definition of ‘play a game’, which he lifts from Suits, is problematic (for reasons Tasioulas notes), while both of their characterizations of play are problematic for reasons I rehearse here. They also take an unduly narrow view of the possible role of achievement in game play, both effectively conflating achievement with “excellence.” I argue, by contrast, that there is an important sense in which even someone who is not very good at the game by any objective standard can still reap the goods of achievements in games. At the same time, those who play games typically do not do so for the sake of achievements as such, though they may do something which is in a sense tantamount to this, or so I shall argue. Finally, I argue that neither Hurka’s “achievement first” order of explanation nor Tasioulas’s “play first” order of explanation is fully correct. I argue for what I call a “variable priority” view. On this view, the value of play (at least partly) sometimes grounds the value of achievement in a game, while in other cases the independently grounded value of achievement in a game provides a further ground for the value of play, though even in that case play is independently good for its own sake. I begin by laying out Hurka’s and Tasioulas’s views.

Introduction: Enthesitis-related arthritis is a specific subtype of juvenile idiopathic arthritis characterised by the co-presence of arthritis and enthesitis or the evidence of one of them coupled with at least two among sacroiliac joint tenderness, inflammatory back pain, presence of human leukocyte antigen-B27, acute symptomatic anterior uveitis, onset in a male child aged 6 years or older or history of spondyloarthropathy in a first-degree relative. Small joints like the sternoclavicular joint are rarely affected, and the prevalence of their involvement in enthesitis-related arthritis has been poorly assessed in the pertinent literature. Case report: The authors report an atypical case of left sternoclavicular joint arthritis/enthesitis in a 12-year-old male child with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. The B-mode sonographic findings of articular effusion, synovial hypertrophy and capsular bulging, coupled with the microvascular mapping with colour Doppler of the sternoclavicular joint, have been crucial to optimising the pharmacological approach in clinical practice. In this sense, the sonographic examination presented as a natural extension of the physical examination to accurately define the poor control of disease activity using first-line pharmacological agents. Discussion: The present case report can be considered the first to accurately report the B-mode and the colour Doppler findings of a pathological sternoclavicular joint in a patient enthesitis-related arthritis. Ultrasound imaging demonstrated intra-articular effusion, capsular bulging and synovial hypertrophy clearly defining sternoclavicular joint arthritis. Interestingly, the hypervascularisation involved both the synovial tissue and the capsule–bone interface – that is, the enthesis of the joint capsule – suggesting a potential co-existence of arthritis and enthesitis of the sternoclavicular joint in enthesitis-related arthritis patients. Conclusion: The high-resolution point-of-care ultrasound seems to be a potential ‘game changer’ in paediatrics to promptly optimise the pharmacological management in enthesitis-related arthritis patients. Indeed, unlike other imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging, modern high-frequency ultrasound transducers guarantee a superior spatial resolution of superficial joints and allow an accurate mapping of small-size and low-flow vascular elements of synovial and capsular tissues optimising the grading of disease activity and avoiding the use of contrast agent.

Introduction: Game Culture and GenderAs texts with the potential to help mediate specific forms of identity, video games are rich and complex sites for analysis. A tendency, however, still exists in scholarship to treat video games as just another kind of text, and work that explores the expression of masculine identity persists in drawing from cinematic analysis without proper consideration of game design and how these games are played (Triana). For example, insights from studies into horror cinema may illuminate the relationship between players and game systems in survival horror video games (Habel & Kooyman), but further study is needed to explore how people interact with the game.This article aims to build towards a scholarly definition of the term “Power Fantasy”, a concept that seems well established in wider discourse but is not yet well theorised in the scholarly literature. It does so through a case of the most recent reboot of Doom (2016), a game that in its original incarnation established an enduring tradition for high-action Power Fantasy. In the first-person shooter game Doom, the player fills the role of the “Doom Guy”, a faceless hero who shuttles between Earth and Hell with the sole aim of eviscerating demonic hordes as graphically as possible.How, then, do we begin to theorise the kind of automediation that an iconic game text like Doom facilitates? Substantial work has been done to explore player identification in online games (see Taylor; Yee). Shaw (“Rethinking”) suggests that single-player games are unexplored territory compared to the more social spaces of Massively Multiplayer Online games and other multiplayer experiences, but it is important to distinguish between direct identification with the avatar per se and the ways in which the game text mediates broader gender constructions.Abstract theorisation is not enough, though. To effectively understand this kind of automediation we also need a methodology to gain insights into its processes. The final part of this article, therefore, proposes the analysis of “Let’s Play” videos as a kind of gender identity performance which gives insight into the automediation of dominant masculine gender identities through Power Fantasy video games like Doom. This reflexive performance works to denaturalise gender construction rather than reinforce stable hegemonic identities.Power Fantasy and Gender IdentityPower Fantasy has become an established trope in online critiques and discussions of popular culture. It can be simply defined as “character imagines himself taking revenge on his bullies” (TVTropes). This trope takes on special resonance in video games, where the players themselves live out the violent revenge fantasy in the world of the game.The “power fantasy” of games implies escapism and meaninglessness, evoking outsize explosions and equally outsized displays of dominance. A “power gamer” is one who plays with a single-minded determination to win, at the expense of nuance, social relationships between players, or even their own pleasure in play. (Baker)Many examples apply this concept of Power Fantasy in video games: from God of War to Metroid: Prime and Grand Theft Auto, this prevalent trope of game design uses a kind of “agency mechanics” (Habel & Kooyman) to convince the player that they are becoming increasingly skilful in the game, when in reality the game is simply decreasing in difficulty (PBS Digital Studios). The operation of the Power Fantasy trope is also gendered; in a related trope known as “I Just Want To Be a Badass”, “males are somewhat more prone to harbour [the] wish” to feel powerful (TVTropes). More broadly, even though the game world is obviously not real, playing it requires “an investment in and commitment to a type of masculine performance that is based on the Real (particularly if one is interested in ‘winning’, pummelling your opponent, kicking ass, etc.)” (Burrill 2).Indeed, there is a perceived correlation (if not causation) between the widespread presence of Power Fantasy video games and how “game culture as it stands is shot through with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other biases” (Baker). Golding and van Deventer undertake an extended exploration of this disconcerting side of game culture, concluding that games have “become a venue for some of the more unsophisticated forms of patriarchy” (213) evidenced in the highly-publicised GamerGate movement. This saw an alignment between the label of “gamer” and extreme misogyny, abuse and harassment of women and other minorities in the industry.We have, then, a tentative connection between dominant gameplay forms based on high skill that may be loosely characterised as “Power Fantasy” and some of the most virulent toxic gender expressions seen in recent times. More research is needed to gain a clearer understanding of precisely what Power Fantasy is. Baker’s primary argument is that “power” in games can also be characterised as “power to” or “power with”, as well as the more traditional “power over”. Kurt Squire uses the phrase “Power Fantasy” as a castaway framing for a player who seeks an alternative reward to the usual game progression in Sid Meier’s Civilisation. More broadly, much scholarly work concerning gameplay design and gender identity has been focussed on the hot-button question of videogame violence and its connection to real-world violence, a question that this article avoids since it is well covered elsewhere. Here, a better understanding of the mediation of gender identity through Power Fantasy in Doom can help to illuminate how games function as automedia.Auto-Mediating Gender through Performance in Doom (2016) As a franchise, Doom commands near-incomparable respect as a seminal text of the first-person shooter genre. First released in 1993, it set the benchmark for 3D rendered graphics, energetic sound design, and high-paced action gameplay that was visceral and deeply immersive. It is impossible to mention more recent reboots without recourse to its first seminal instalment and related game texts: Kim Justice suggests a personal identification with it in a 29-minute video analysis entitled “A Personal History of Demon Slaughter”. Doom is a cherished game for many players, possibly because it evokes memories of “boyhood” gaming and all its attendant gender identity formation (Burrill).This identification also arises in livestreams and playthroughs of the game. YouTuber and game reviewer Markiplier describes nostalgically and at lengths his formative experiences playing it (and recounts a telling connection with his father who, he explains, introduced him to gaming), saying “Doom is very important to me […] this was the first game that I sat down and played over and over and over again.” In contrast, Wanderbots confesses that he has never really played Doom, but acknowledges its prominent position in the gaming community by designating himself outside the identifying category of “Doom fan”. He states that he has started playing due to “gushing” recommendations from other gamers. The nostalgic personal connection is important, even in absentia.For the most part, the critical and community response to the 2016 version of Doom was approving: Gilroy admits that it “hit all the right power chords”, raising the signature trope in reference to both gameplay and music (a power chord is a particular technique of playing heavy metal guitar often used in heavy metal music). Doom’s Metacritic score is currently a respectable 85, and, the reception is remarkably consistent between critics and players, especially for such a potentially divisive game (Metacritic). Commentators tend to cite its focus on its high action, mobility, immersion, sound design, and general faithfulness to the spirit of the original Doom as reasons for assessments such as “favourite game ever” (Habel). Game critic Yahtzee’s uncharacteristically approving video review in the iconic Zero Punctuation series is very telling in its assessment of the game’s light narrative framing:Doom seems to have a firm understanding of its audience because, while there is a plot going on, the player-character couldn’t give a half an ounce of deep fried shit; if you want to know the plot then pause the game and read all the fluff text in the character and location database, sipping daintily from your pink teacup full of pussy juice, while the game waits patiently for you to strap your bollocks back on and get back in the fray. (Yahtzee)This is a strident expression of the gendered expectations and response to Doom’s narratological refusal, which is here cast as approvingly masculine and opposed to a “feminine” desire for plot or narrative. It also feeds into a discourse which sees the game as one which demands skill, commitment, and an achievement orientation cast within an exclusivist ideology of “toxic meritocracy” (Paul).In addition to examining reception, approaches to understanding how Doom functions as a “Power Fantasy” or “badass” trope could take a variety of forms. It is tempting to undertake a detailed analysis of its design and gameplay, especially since these feed directly into considerations of player interaction. This could direct a critical focus towards gameplay design elements such as traversal and mobility, difficulty settings, “glory kills”, and cinematic techniques in the same vein as Habel and Kooyman’s analysis of survival horror video games in relation to horror cinema. However, Golding and van Deventer warn against a simplistic analysis of decontextualized gameplay (29-30), and there is a much more intriguing possibility hinted at by Harper’s notion of “Play Practice”.It is useful to analyse a theoretical engagement with a video game as a thought-experiment. But with the rise of gaming as spectacle, and particularly gaming as performance through “Let’s Play” livestreams (or video on demand) on platforms such as TwitchTV and YouTube, it becomes possible to analyse embodied performances of the gameplay of such video games. This kind of analysis allows the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of how such games mediate gender identities. For Judith Butler, gender is not only performed, it is also performative:Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. (214)Let’s Play videos—that show a player playing a game in real time with their commentary overlaying the on screen action—allow us to see the performative aspects of gameplay. Let’s Plays are a highly popular and developing form: they are not simple artefacts by any means, and can be understood as expressive works in their own right (Lee). They are complex and multifaceted, and while they do not necessarily provide direct insights into the player’s perception of their own identification, with sufficient analysis and unpacking they help us to explore both the construction and denaturalisation of gender identity. In this case, we follow Josef Nguyen’s analysis of Let’s Plays as essential for expression of player identity through performance, but instead focus on how some identity construction may narrow rather than expand the diversity range. T.L. Taylor also has a monograph forthcoming in 2018 titled Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, suggesting the time is ripe for such analysis.These performances are clear in ways we have already discussed: for example, both SplatterCat and Markiplier devote significant time to describing their formative experiences playing Doom as a background to their gameplay performance, while Wanderbots is more distanced. There is no doubt that these videos are popular: Markiplier, for example, has attracted nearly 5 million views of his Doom playthrough. If we see gameplay as automediation, though, these videos become useful artefacts for analysis of gendered performance through gameplay.When SplatterCat discovers the suit of armor for the game’s protagonist, Doom Guy, he half-jokingly remarks “let us be all of the Doom Guy that we can possibly be” (3:20). This is an aspirational mantra, a desire for enacting the game’s Power Fantasy. Markiplier speaks at length about his nostalgia for the game, specifically about how his father introduced him to Doom when he was a child, and he expresses hopes that he will again experience “Doom’s original super-fast pace and just pure unadulterated action; Doom Guy is a badass” (4:59). As the action picks up early into the game, Markiplier expresses the exhilaration and adrenaline that accompany performances of this fastpaced, highly mobile kind of gameplay, implying that he is becoming immersed in the character and, by performing Doom Guy, inhabiting the “badass” role and thus enacting a performance of Power Fantasy:Doom guy—and I hope I’m playing Doom guy himself—is just the embodiment of kickass. He destroys everything and he doesn’t give a fuck about what he breaks in the process. (8:45)This performance of gender through the skilled control of Doom Guy is, initially, unambiguously mediated as Power Fantasy: in control, highly skilled, suffused with Paul’s ‘toxic meritocracy. A similar sentiment is expressed in Wanderbots’ playthrough when the player-character dispenses with narrative/conversation by smashing a computer terminal: “Oh I like this guy already! Alright. Doom Guy does not give a shit. It’s like Wolf Blascowicz [sic], but like, plus plus” (Wanderbots). This is a reference to another iconic first-person shooter franchise, Wolfenstein, which also originated in the 1980s and has experienced a recent successful reboot, and which operates in a similar Power Fantasy mode. This close alignment between these two streamers’ performances suggests significant coherence in both genre and gameplay design and the ways in which players engage with the game as a gendered performative space.Nonetheless, there is no simple one-to-one relationship here—there is not enough evidence to argue that this kind of gameplay experience leads directly to the kind of untrammelled misogyny we see in game culture more broadly. While Gabbiadini et al. found evidence in an experimental study that a masculinist ideology combined with violent video game mechanics could lead to a lack of empathy for women and girls who are victims of violence, Ferguson and Donnellan dispute this finding based on poor methodology, arguing that there is no evidence for a causal relationship between gender, game type and lack of empathy for women and girls. This inconclusiveness in the research is mirrored by an ambiguity in the gendered performance of males playing through Doom, where the Power Fantasy is profoundly undercut in multiple ways.Wanderbots’ Doom playthrough is literally titled ‘I have no idea what I’m Dooming’ and he struggles with particular mechanics and relatively simple progression tools early in the game: this reads against masculinist stereotypes of superior and naturalised gameplay skill. Markiplier’s performance of the “badass” Doom Guy is undercut at various stages: in encountering the iconic challenge of the game, he mentions that “I am halfway decent… not that good at video games” (9:58), and on the verge of the protagonist’s death he admits “If I die this early into my first video I’m going to be very disappointed, so I’m going to have to kick it up a notch” (15:30). This suggests that rather than being an unproblematic and simple expression of male power in a fantasy video game world, the gameplay performances of Power Fantasy games are ambiguous and contested, and not always successfully performed via the avatar. They therefore demonstrate a “kind of gender performance [which] will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire” (Butler 211). This cuts across the empowered performance of videogame mastery and physical dominance over the game world, and suggests that the automediation of gender identity through playing video games is a complex phenomenon urgently in need of further theorisation.ConclusionUltimately, this kind of analysis of the mediation of hegemonic gender identities is urgent for a cultural product as ubiquitous as video games. The hyper-empowered “badass” digital avatars of Power Fantasy video games can be expected to have some shaping effect on the identities of those who play them, evidenced by the gendered gameplay performance of Doom briefly explored here. This is by no means a simple or unproblematic process, though. Much further research is needed to test the methodological insights possible by using video performances of gameplay as explorations of the auto-mediation of gender identities through video games.ReferencesBaker, Meguey. “Problematizing Power Fantasy.” The Enemy 1.2 (2015). 18 Feb. 2018 <http://theenemyreader.org/problematizing-power-fantasy/>.Burrill, Derrick. Die Tryin’: Video Games, Masculinity, Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 10th ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Ferguson, Christopher, and Brent Donellan. “Are Associations between “Sexist” Video Games and Decreased Empathy toward Women Robust? A Reanalysis of Gabbiadini et al. 2016.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 46.12 (2017): 2446–2459.Gabbiadini, Alessandro, Paolo Riva, Luca Andrighetto, Chiara Volpato, and Brad J. 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London: Routledge, 2013.Kim Justice. “Doom: A Personal History of Demon Slaughter.” YouTube, 16 Jan. 2017. 22 Feb. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtvoENhvkys>.Lee, Patrick. “The Best Let’s Play Videos Offer More than Vicarious Playthroughs.” The A.V. Club, 24 Apr. 2015. 22 Feb. 2018 <https://games.avclub.com/the-best-let-s-play-videos-offer-more-than-vicarious-pl-1798279027>.Markiplier. “KNEE-DEEP IN THE DEAD | DOOM – Part 1.” YouTube, 13 May 2016. 21 Feb. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCygvprsgIk>.Metacritic. “Doom (PS4).” 22 Feb. 2018 <http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/doom>.Nguyen, Josef. “Performing as Video Game Players in Let’s Plays.” Transformative Works and Cultures 22 (2016). <http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/698>.Paul, Christopher. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018.PBS Digital Studios. “Do Games Give Us Too Much Power?” 2017. 18 Feb. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9COt-_3C0xI>.Shaw, Adrienne. “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity.” New Media and Society 14.1 (2012): 28-44.———. “Rethinking Game Studies: A Case Study Approach to Video Game Play and Identification.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30.5 (2013): 347-361.SplatterCatGaming. “DOOM 2016 PC – Gameplay Intro – #01 Let's Play DOOM 2016 Gameplay.” YouTube, 13 May 2016. 21 Feb. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tusgsunWEIs>.Squire, Kurt. “Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. Katie Salen. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008. 167–198.Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.Triana, Benjamin. “Red Dead Maculinity: Constructing a Conceptual Framework for Analysing the Narrative and Message Found in Video Games.” Journal of Games Criticism 2.2 (2015). 12 Apr. 2018 <http://gamescriticism.org/articles/triana-2-2/>.TVTropes. Playing With / Power Fantasy. 18 Feb. 2018 <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/PowerFantasy>.———. I Just Want to Be a Badass. 18 Feb. 2018 <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IJustWantToBeBadass>.Wanderbots. “Let’s Play Doom (2016) – PC Gameplay Part I – I Have No Idea What I’m Dooming!” YouTube, 18 June 2016. 14 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQSMNhWAf0o>.Yee, Nick. “Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games.” Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. Eds. Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Sun. 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Abstract Effective management of wildlife requires a full understanding of population dynamics and knowledge of potential drivers that influence population growth. The Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus) is a popular upland game bird widely distributed across the northern United States and Canada that has experienced population declines within portions of its range in response to forest maturation and habitat loss. Although the species has been extensively studied, few efforts have been made to synthesize demographic data into a sensitivity analysis to guide management actions. We reviewed the literature and compiled Ruffed Grouse vital rates from 14 field studies conducted across four decades (1982−2018) within the Upper Great Lakes region of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, USA. We parameterized a deterministic matrix model to evaluate population dynamics and conducted sensitivity analyses to identify vital rates projected to have the greatest influence on the finite rate of population change (λ). Our modeling effort projected a stable but highly variable annual rate of population change (λ = 1.01; 95% CI = 0.88–1.14) for Ruffed Grouse in the Upper Great Lakes region. Stochastic rates of population change derived from spring drumming surveys (λ = 1.01; 95% CI = 0.61–1.45) and Christmas Bird Count surveys (λ = 0.99; 95% CI = 0.62–1.76) of the corresponding regional population provided validation of stable trends over the same time period as our demographic model. Prospective elasticities and variance-scaled sensitivities suggested λ would be greatly influenced by components of reproductive performance: nesting success, chick survival, and post-fledging juvenile survival. Retrospective analysis indicated that much of the overall variability in λ and annual productivity was also attributed to annual variation in nesting success. Management of this species has often focused on fall and overwinter survival, but population projection models provided little evidence that survival was the predominant factor affecting population growth of Ruffed Grouse in this region. A suite of confounding factors and demographic processes that drive population trends can differ significantly across a species’ range. In the Upper Great Lakes region, management efforts aimed at maximizing reproductive success would likely have the greatest potential influence on Ruffed Grouse population growth. Other types of systematic, regional survey data can also be useful for validating population trends derived from demographic modeling studies.

If Blake is right and the path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom then video games ought to provide plenty of shortcuts along the way. Wading through gore, dismemberment and the occasional bout of torture, violent games have pushed the limits of depiction of violence. While even video nasties pad the ‘money shot’ scenes of extremity with exposition and story (however flimsy), video games concentrate more carnage per minute than any other media form – so why are so many of us increasingly drawn to them as a leisure activity? Of course it is wrong to lump all video games together with violent games, as game critics are liable to do. US lawyer and anti-video game campaigner Jack Thompson describes games as ‘murder simulators’ that train players into violent responses through operant conditioning and rewards. He describes game playing as an antisocial, “”masturbatory activity”:http://www.netjak.com/review.php/1091”. Indeed it is mainly through the conduct of critics like Thompson and censors that games are visible in mainstream culture, which is ironic given the large audience that games have. In Australia, video games have been at the vanguard of the steady censorship creep which has been occurring over the last few years, banning games outright or forcing local distributors censored versions. Unless they are regular visitors to the Office of Film and Literature Classification website, or one of the watchdog sites, such as Refused Classification, most Australians are unaware that they are watching censored films, playing censored games. Earlier in 2006 the graffiti game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents under Pressure was banned on a little-used regulation that it promoted crime (in this case the crime was graffiti and fare evasion; the OFLC did not have an issue with the violence in the game). Since then, these ‘crime promotion’ principles have been extended to ban Islamic books, a return to direct political censorship in Australia. So what is it about games that have stirred regulators into action? Why are games convenient scapegoats to extend the net of censorship? It is certainly not because game playing is not a minority activity – a recent survey conducted by Bond University indicated that 76% of Australian households have game hardware, that the average age of gamers is 24 and that 38% of gamers were female. Perhaps it has to do with ambivalence toward the extreme content in games, even from those who play them. With a brief excursion through a set of recent video games I can sneak up behind the unsuspecting and slit their throats (Splinter Cell), shake down prostitutes (Grand Theft Auto), torture enemies with power tools (The Punisher) and tear off someone’s arm and beat them with it (Stubbs the Zombie). These are just the interactive elements, if we figure in the horrors we observe rather than perform in games like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill series we have a catalogue of extremity that surpasses the video nasties of the 1980s. The extremity does collect around violence and horror, sexual content is largely missing, at least from the games available through game retailers (the adult industry has their own interactive content). Recently the first Sex in Video Games conference was held in San Francisco, flagging emerging trends in this area. One of the more high profile games to be banned for sexual content in Australia, then released in an edited form was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because of the ‘hot coffee’ sexual content. What is striking about this content is that is was only accessible through a downloaded modification in the PC version and not accessible from the console versions – which did not stop the censors banning all versions of the game entirely. These concerns about extreme violence and sexual content are made more complicated when we go beyond elements scripted by game designers and begin to consider interactively generated content, emergent gameplay, online interaction and the ability to modify games. It is clear that this is media that is very different to older media forms, yet too often we criticise and censor the gaming experience using film as a benchmark. Concepts of realism, impact and justification are borrowed directly from film analysis, primarily because we lack a critical language to understand and discuss video games. But 50 Cent: Bulletproof is different to Salo, on so many levels. We do not understand the impact that video games have on us, and particularly the effect that they have on children. Media studies research does not help, being intractably locked between the those who see media as programming human behaviour and those who believe audiences are in control. As a result is all too easy to give into moral panics, on the basis of what games might do. Games are also a convenient scapegoat for other social problems, such as with the Columbine massacre. Regulators therefore take a conservative stance on video game dangers, using children as the benchmark for everyone. In Australia there is no R rating available to games. If games fulfil the criteria for an R, they are Refused Classification, in the same category as child pornography and extreme violent pornography. The federal laws control commercial distributors but the classification decisions also feed into ancillary state laws which give police wide powers to detain, search and prosecute those who distribute informally. This is of concern for game players but more worrying now that the principles used to regulate games have been extended to political texts. In Australia we also have the unusual principle that media which promote crime or instruct in the matter of crime can be refused classification and fall into the same regulatory net. This was the principle under which Getting Up was banned but has potential for growth to other games and media generally. There have only been a few decisions in this area but they make clear that censors have very broad discretion (most crime movies could fall foul of this provision), that the regulators have very little empirical evidence on what causes criminality and that they adopt a zero tolerance attitude to satire. So what does this increasing surveillance mean for the future of video games? For mainstream gaming not much, the industry has always had peripheral controversy. From the blocky extremity of 1982’s Custer’s Revenge to modern games like Reservoir Dogs (banned in Australia in June 2006) some developers have pushed the boundaries, usually overtly courting controversy but the backlash seems to be gaining momentum. The trend toward censorship of games in Australia would seem to bear the hallmarks of a moral panic, if not for the medium’s widespread penetration into our culture and the size of the audience. Most of the games which have been banned have passed unnoticed not being commercially successful or reviewed well overseas, but this censorship sets ugly precedents. Video games are yet to really develop an avant garde or art-house, but if they are, this process will be hampered by legal controls that do not understand the medium and are not committed to free expression as an ideal. It is clear that, for various reasons, there is little serious public discourse around games beyond what is lead by pro-censorship critics and regulators. The statistics indicate that the majority of Australians play games or at least have contact with someone who does, yet games enjoy little of the public discussion and criticism that films or television do, where the audience is presumed to be broader. Many gamers are even embarrassed to discuss their hobby, putting it on par with consumption of pornography as embarrassing, juvenile or as Thompson would suggest masturbatory. But just as pornography has become subject of more serious critical attention despite the potential cringe, so to do games. Part of the change will come as there is more critical academic engagement. This is not suggesting that games should ‘grow up’ or aspire to art. Part of their appeal lies in their engagement with the id, the potential for extremity. Rather than argue that games are valid despite their excesses, might we perhaps look to the excesses in order to understand the appeal? Don’t knock the pleasures of beating someone to death with their own arm until you’ve tried it. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Beattie, Scott. "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>. APA Style Beattie, S. (Nov. 2006) "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>.

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. 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Introduction This article arises from recent industry-partner research between the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, the LEGO Group, and Edith Cowan University (ECU), examining new ways of communicating children’s perspectives of digital citizenship to policy makers and industry in a project called Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables: Using Consultation and Creativity to Engage Stakeholders (Children, Policy Influencers, Industry) in Best Practice in India, South Korea, and Australia. We posed the research question: What are children’s everyday experiences of digital citizenship in these countries, and how might these contribute to digital citizenship policy and practice? In research roundtables, we immersed children aged 3 to 13 in a three-pronged child-centred multimodal methodology that included drawing, show-and-tell discussion, and a block building activity. It is this third block-related method that this article investigates: the project’s adoption of an activity using the LEGO® brick whereby the children expressed their views about their everyday digital worlds via brick toy constructions. In this article, we explain how such toy play can be used as a communicative strategy to give children agency so that they can creatively interject their voices into ongoing discussions about children’s digital citizenship. Such an approach takes a children’s rights perspective and considers the ethics of research with children, whereby “young children have rights; [and] they are agents and active constructors of their social worlds” (Sun et al.). The project was also subject to a rigorous human ethics approval process at ECU. This article highlights the benefits of the brick toy as a communicative device for amplifying children’s voices about their everyday experiences of media and digital cultures and ends by illustrating some of the children’s views depicted in their brick toy creations. Rationale Taking a child-centred approach using play-based participatory methods provides a window into children’s everyday media and digital cultures that may not be accessed through traditional qualitative techniques. Gennaro and Miller (xxxi) argue that “the impact of technology upon children remains so complicated to grasp, assessing the extent to which digital – and specifically social media – plays a role in the lives of youth is still a prerequisite for our discourse”. This provided an imperative for our research to find a child-centred method to grasp this complication. Furthermore, asking children about their experiences of media and digital cultures is a key aim of the Centre for the Digital Child researchers who led this project. It is also emphasised as a research imperative by the ‘Growing Up in a Connected World’ study conducted for UNICEF and the Global Kids Online team led by Sonia Livingstone in 2019. They identify that, if we are going to understand children’s media and digital cultures, we need to ask children about this: The starting point must be children themselves – asking about the barriers they face in accessing the internet, the opportunities they are discovering online and the digital skills they are acquiring. Children can also report on the online risks they have encountered and the possible harms, as well as on the support and protection they receive from family, friends, teachers, and wider society. (UNICEF 7) The Project: What We Did In 2022, ECU and Digital Child researchers conducted a series of research roundtables with a total of 45 children in India, the Republic of Korea, and Australia with the intention of gathering children’s perspectives of digital safety and citizenship. Subsequent adult roundtables were held in which the children’s views along with findings from a deep literature review were conveyed to the adult policy, education, and academic stakeholders. In the research, children were positioned as key stakeholders in conversations about their digital citizenship. Three children’s roundtables were held in each country: one for pre-primary school children (3-5 years of age), one for early primary school children (6-10 years of age), and one for late primary school children (10-13 year of age). The roundtables included three activities: first, the use of ten image cards depicting digital activities as icebreakers and as prompts for a drawing activity; second, a talking activity in which children explained their drawings and then talked about their experiences of digital citizenship; and third, a toy play activity in which children had access to a table of LEGO brick toys where they were asked to make a construction that showed the roundtable participants and facilitators something about their existing knowledges and comprehension of digital citizenship. It is the latter activity with brick toys that this article will explore. Multiple Play-Based, Child-Friendly Participatory Methods Play-based participatory methods such as visual prompts, drawing, and toy play, unlike a traditional qualitative focus group that centres on discussion, establish a less formal atmosphere for the children more akin to their recreational play activities. Not only do these methods build rapport, but they also elicit a more authentic reflective response from children. (For a review of participatory research with children, see Montreuil et al.) As Literat (88) argues about child-friendly methods, “unlike in interviews or focus group sessions where an instantaneous response is expected, the research participants are given time to reflect on their responses, which encourages active conceptualization and contemplation”. This additional time for reflection through multiple modes of communication – drawing, show and tell, talking, block play – also gives the child participants an opportunity to craft a more complete depiction of their digital lives, with the added advantage of more easily navigating age-defined literacy, language, and cultural boundaries. The variation and combination of three visual play-based activities along with the children’s verbal explanations of their creations attended to how “visual images and the verbal exchanges are central to the children’s meaning making process” (Tay-Lim and Lim 65). This approach aided in amplifying the children’s authentic voices in the research data gathered in the roundtables. The LEGO brick toy proved to be particularly effective as a mechanism for the children to communicate their views, as it had done in a preceding context, because it gave them a visual mode of expressing tacit experiences of media and digital cultures that had become embedded in their everyday lives. The Precedent of the Brick Toy to Communicate Children’s Views The inspiration for employing LEGO brick toys to communicate children’s views in the digital citizenship roundtables project came from work done by the LEGO Group itself. In 2021, the LEGO Group collated workshop feedback and survey data concerning climate change from over 6,000 children aged 8–18. The resulting ten requests depicted through brick constructions were conceptualised as Building Instructions for a Better World and were presented to climate and government policymakers who attended the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 (LEGO, Children Call; Building Instructions). Affirming our project’s adoption in January 2022 of LEGO toy play for children to communicate important perspectives of digital citizenship to adult stakeholders, LEGO subsequently developed their COP26 approach into the more general Build the Change strategy: “a powerful way for children to express their hopes and dreams for the future with LEGO bricks and other creative materials, plus their own imagination” (LEGO, Building the Change). This child-led and play-based pedagogical approach exemplifies the LEGO group’s ongoing remit for social good via its child-led brand framework and how the company is conscious of the leadership role it possesses in regard to education and its environmental footprint (Wood). It also demonstrated to the researchers of the Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables research project, though not concerning climate change activism, how the LEGO brick toy is a highly effective communicative tool through which children aged 3 to 13 can express their views about their digital lives to adults. Thus, we employed a LEGO brick toy building activity in our project’s play-based participatory research methods. As a creative visual method, such a way to capture a range of children’s views also aligned with the international research network, Global Kids Online, which advocates in its ‘Method Guide 8’ that creative visual methods are “useful for engaging children in joint knowledge production, as literacy is not required, and such methods are less associated with formal settings such as school” (Kleine et al. 9). Toy Play as a Research Method When children symbolise their experiences of digital contexts in brick toys, this is a form of symbolic play, a foundational element of children’s developing meaning-making (Vygotsky). The children’s representation of their lives in such play involves three things, as discussed by Bruner in his analysis of culture and education: thought and emotion enacted through physical action; expression through imagery; and the construction of symbols. LEGO brick toy play as a research method in the children’s digital citizenship project involves all three of these: firstly, children are actively enacting their thoughts about their digital lives through physical toy play; secondly, they create visual images via brick toy constructions as representations of their digital experiences; and thirdly, they are using the brick toys to symbolically express their inner worlds. In discussing their similar use of small world toys, which are “scaled down items for children to create and play with small-scale scenarios or world, typically toy animals and people”, Gripton and Vincent (226) identified that such methodological toy play has the “advantage of being within the child’s world and harnessing the children’s ability to communicate through symbolic representation and natural affinity to play” (238). In this way, the toy is a communicative device that does not require a dependence on written or verbal literacies, but rather multiliteracies common in the arts (Wright) that transcend age barriers and reflect children’s everyday cultures, including media and digital cultures. A Convergence of Children’s Cultures and Media Cultures Whilst it could be suggested that the use of the LEGO brick toys as a communicative tool too closely aligns with growing commercialisation of children’s play, reflecting the convergence of children’s cultures and media cultures (Ponte and Aroldi), we would argue that a project which attends to children’s perspectives of their digital lives needs to reflect the worlds, and the toy play in those worlds, that children currently inhabit. Indeed, it is children’s familiarity with LEGO that created a communicative shortcut that quickly facilitated the children’s expressiveness in the project across the age range 3 to 13. (DUPLO was used with the 3-5 year old age group; smaller LEGO bricks were used in groups 6-13.) This is not a commercial endorsement of the brick but an attempt to meet the children in their own play worlds. Our experience of children’s familiarity with LEGO echoed other research: “as a familiar medium, LEGO allows participants to express thoughts, share and reflect without relying on technical ability” (Hickman-Dunne and Pimlott-Wilson 94). LEGO has proved to be a ubiquitous element of toy play in the contemporary child’s life, not just in European cultures where the toy originated but across cultures. Certainly, the children in India and Korea were as familiar with LEGO as the children in Australia. Ponte and Aroldi (9) argue that “the connection between children’s cultures and media cultures can be considered a privileged area of innovation … [and] research into children’s and digital media is also an area of methodological innovation”. We see the use of LEGO brick toys in research as one such innovative method that attends to children’s authentic perspectives through participatory approaches. Children’s Rights Perspective Taking a participatory approach in the research method design of the Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables project meant that the researchers were not just attending to child-friendly methods whereby researchers “adopt practices that resonate with children’s cultures of communication, their own concerns and fit in to their everyday routines” (Christensen and James 2) but also paid due respect to “a global agenda of children’s rights in the digital age” (Livingstone and Bulger 1). Such rights around children’s digital lives came to further prominence in 2021 when the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child released General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment, “encouraging innovation in digital play and related activities that support children’s autonomy, personal development and enjoyment” (UNCRC 18). Whilst specifically referring to rights in digital contexts, as researchers from the Centre for the Digital Child we felt it was important to reflect in our research design this approach to children’s rights, and respect for children’s autonomy and enjoyment. We also were committed to the General Comment 25 principle of “children’s right to participate in the decision making that impacts their lives” (Third and Moody 9). Thus, we communicated the children’s perspectives including their LEGO brick toy creations to adult stakeholders and we also produced a children’s version of the final report for the project (See et al.). An Ethic of Empowerment When Researching Young Children In addition to this children’s rights perspective, we paid heed to the Early Childhood Australia (ECA) principle that research with young children should amplify their voices, ensuring they are afforded “the right to be heard”; thus the researchers were committed to ECA’s principle of “promoting children’s voice and participation in decision-making processes, and enabling greater opportunities to hear from children about their concerns” (ECA 3). Our child-participatory research about children’s experiences of digital safety and citizenship that employed the toy brick as a communicative device for amplifying children’s voices by contributing these perspectives back to policy making and influencing stakeholders is also aligned with moves for child participation in decision-making over recent years. For example, in 2015 the Irish Department of Youth Affairs released a National Strategy on Children and Young People’s Participation in Decision-Making, 2015 – 2020; in 2021, Save the Children released their publication Together We Decide about strengthening child participation in UN decision-making processes (Diop, Keating, and Trapp); and in 2022, the Council for Europe released Listen – Act – Change: Handbook on Children’s Participation for Professionals Working for and with Children (Crowley, Larkins, and Pinto). What all these child participation approaches have in common is a need to heed the voices of children and to amplify these voices so children can contribute to decisions being made about their digital and everyday lives. The researchers of the Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables project, through our adoption of the LEGO brick toy as a communicative device, agreed with Iivari (290) in ensuring that “children of today should be empowered in and through their digital technology education to switch from mere users of digital technologies created by adults to makers and shapers of such technologies and, along these lines, to transformers of culture”. Exemplars of the Children’s Toy Brick Creations It is not in the scope of this article to provide a complete analysis of the children’s brick creations; this can be found in the full report of the children’s digital citizenship roundtables project, which is available open access (Stevenson et al.), and the project final report (Jayakumar et al.). However, below we have included in this article a gallery of some of the children’s brick toy creations that exemplify the communicative outcomes of children across the age groups using the toy brick to convey their experiences of their digital and everyday lives. To amplify the children’s voices, we have included the children’s verbatim explanation of their creation. As mentioned previously, the toy brick creations for the 3-5-year-old roundtables used DUPLO, and the roundtables of age groups 6-10 and 11-13 used LEGO bricks. You will note that the youngest age group, 3-5 years of age (whose parents were often present in the roundtable groups), conveyed less about the digital in their toy creations and more about their everyday lives and loves. Interestingly, this young age group was able to convey their digital experiences more clearly via the drawing activities than the LEGO toy brick activity. (All names and identifying characteristics have been deidentified and/or removed.) Figure 1 (3–5 age group): Nabha explained that “Here are two cameras, and I’ve added flowers for decoration. Here is my window, and you can enter from here … there’s a bird which can fly … My castle!” Figure 2 (3–5 age group): Noah explained that “I’m going to do a Brontosaurus … I’m doing a dinosaur with a very long neck”. Figure 3 (6–10 age group): Mia conveyed her sense of digital safety and explained that “I’ve made a device that means there’s like a lock on it”. Figure 4 (6–10 age group): Jack also conveyed something about digital safety and explained that “it’s basically a[n] eye monster thing ... So, it’s supposed to symbol what you have to face when you do something wrong that you know you’re not supposed to do.” Figure 5 (11–13 age group): Han-Na, who was passionate building games, explained that “I mostly play Minecraft, and this is the character, and there’s a diamond underground … here … It’s difficult to find a diamond in the wild, but I found it.” Figure 6 (11–13 age group): Inesh conveyed nuanced ideas about digital safety and citizenship and made a LEGO representation of “a firewall to keep you safe online”. Figure 7 (11–13 age group): Gitali, who enjoyed a rich gaming life, explained that “I know it’s cute and not even scary. This monster has been inspired by the game Roblox.” Figure 8 (11–13 age group): Will, who recounted an experience of being cyber-stalked, explained that his creation represents “this person [who] tried to stalk me and I just decided to leave the game and then they somehow managed to find me all over again”. Figure 9 (11–13 age group): Nirav explained about his creation reflecting his room at home, “this is a PS5. This is a gaming setup - mouse, mouse pad, two speakers, computer, keyboard and CPU”. Figure 10 (11–13 age group): Sophia, who told us about an experience of online and offline bullying, explained that “this is my bully detector for online... If you aren’t a bully, it will turn the green bit but if you are a bully, it will turn to the pink and then it will kick you out.” Limitations There are limitations in both the application of the toy brick as a method and in what this article itself can address. Firstly, as a method, there is further work awaiting those interested in using toy play, particularly brick toy play, to apply this method in contexts that explore children’s everyday experiences in general, not just their experiences of the focus of this research project, children’s digital citizenship. Secondly, it is not possible in an article of this length to present a complex testing of the LEGO brick toy method against other forms of brick toy – that would be an entirely different project to the children’s digital citizenship project that we conducted. Furthermore, word limits mean it is not possible to present the full analysis of the children’s brick toy creations, and the authors would encourage those interested in more in-depth findings and more images of the children’s brick creations and drawings to seek these, as noted previously, in the report authored by Stevenson et al. Conclusion This article has explained the rationale for using the LEGO brick toy as part of participatory play-based methods in our recent research project, Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables: Using Consultation and Creativity to Engage Stakeholders (Children, Policy Influencers, Industry) with industry partner the LEGO Group, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, and Edith Cowan University. This rationale placed the child as the expert informant about the media and digital cultures in their everyday experiences of digital citizenship. Through multiple play-based, child-friendly participatory methods, following the precedent of the brick toy being used to communicate children’s views about climate change to adult climate policymakers, we sought the views about digital safety and citizenship of children aged 3 to 13 years in three Asia-Pacific countries – India, Korea, and Australia. We then conveyed these to adult stakeholders who contribute to and influence children’s digital citizenship policy in these countries. It is our view that such a participatory, play-centred approach respects children’s rights to express themselves in authentic and creative ways and is in keeping with the turn to children’s participatory frameworks that provide the steps for children to contribute to policy that impacts on their digital and everyday lives. From the experience of conducting the children’s roundtables in the project, we encourage other researchers to take a children’s rights approach and embed an ethic of empowerment through toy play-based methods when researching young children. We argue that such toy play in research provides vivid windows into children’s media and digital cultures, whilst at the same time empowering today’s digital child to be agentic in discussion that impact their digital futures. 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