The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-122
Author(s):  
Shawn Edrei
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Unnatural Narratology ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Magic Circle

AbstractThis paper will examine three contemporary video games – Undertale, The magic circle and Pony Island – with an eye towards delineating the ways in which their unique storyworlds and ontological structures align with recent trends in unnatural narratology. Specifically, these games contain interstitial diegetic spaces, and empower the player to move through ‘cracks’ in the façade of the fictional world by acting as a metaphorical programmer, manipulating game files and other extradiegetic components. The metaleptic processes enabled by these actions expose aspects of the respective storyworlds which have been deliberately concealed. Consequently, the games in question literalize existing theories regarding our projection and cognitive exploration of fictional worlds, as they are singular in their capacity for experimentation and transgression of established ontological frameworks.

scholarly journals The role of edible insects to mitigate challenges for sustainability

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
Raquel P. F. Guiné ◽  
Paula Correia ◽  
Catarina Coelho ◽  
Cristina A. Costa
Keyword(s):  
Nutritional Value ◽  
Animal Feed ◽  
World Population ◽  
Edible Insects ◽  
Strong Component ◽  
Human Food ◽  
The World ◽  
Food And Feed ◽  
Recent Trends

Abstract This review is focused on the utilization of insects as a new opportunity in food and feed products, including their commercialization both in traditional and new markets. It has been suggested that insects are considerably more sustainable when compared with other sources of animal protein, thus alleviating the pressure over the environment and the planet facing the necessity to feed the world population, constantly increasing. Many chefs have adhered to the trend of using insects in their culinary preparations, bringing insects to the plan of top gastronomy, highlighting their organoleptic qualities allied to a recognized high nutritional value. However, in some markets, insects or insect-based products are not readily accepted because of neophobia and disgust. Moreover, the insect markets, farming, and commercialization are experiencing a huge growth, in which the domain of animal feed is undoubtedly a very strong component. The future of insects as human food and animal feed seems promising in view of the recent trends and challenges.

The river fans out: Chinese fiction since the late 1970s

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
HENRY Y. H. ZHAO
Keyword(s):  
Western China ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Artistic Quality ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Mao Era

The 25 years of the post-Mao era of Chinese fiction is divided into two distinct stages: the pre-1989 period, and the post-1989 period. If this division is true about almost everything else in China, it is especially true with literature. This is because literature had been used as a lethal weapon for political struggle by Mao before and during his regime, and this tradition, though strongly challenged in the post-Mao era, still lingers, though in very different forms now and much watered down. Even the recent trends of art for art's sake, or for the sake of entertainment, or for the sake of religious consciousness, could also be read as political gestures, and are indeed treated as such by Chinese literary officialdom, and also by Western China experts. Despite the fact that Chinese fiction has been highly politicized, this paper will examine, as much as possible, the development of fiction as an art. Only the artistic quality can support my argument that recent novels from China deserve not only more scholarly attention but also more reader appreciation than they have hitherto received around the world.

Analyse des réseaux de personnages dans les textes de Leslie Kaplan : du postmodernisme à l’inconscient

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110024
Author(s):  
Murielle El Hajj
Keyword(s):  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Shed Light

The texts of Leslie Kaplan question the irreducible opposition between the real and the non-real. Her characters and their intentional absence confuse the repository and fictional worlds, not only to point out the thin margin between reality and fiction, but to underline the impossible delimitation between the real and the fictional, or even between the text and the world. This article studies the characters of Kaplan and aims to demonstrate their identity crisis through the study of their literary onomastic and the use of the neutral pronoun ‘it’ and allegoric expressions. In addition, the objective of this article is to shed light on the Kaplanian characters as Kunderian models, while stressing the particularity of their physionomy, which consists to present ‘fuzzy’ characters that are present and absent at the same time, engaging the reader in the fictional process as a try to complete the missing details. This article concludes that the Kaplanian characters are not only the prototypes of the postmodern being, but they are also introverted, psychopaths and a demonstration of different facets of the unconscious.

Recent trends in import and export of Rudraksha beads in India

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
Amar Nath Singh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Properties ◽  
Present Article ◽  
High Demand ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Import And Export ◽  
Prayer Beads ◽  
Religious Importance ◽  
Magnetic And Electrical Properties

The Rudraksha beads are traditionally used as prayer beads in Hinduism (especially Shaivism) throughout India. Apart from the religious importance, medicinal, bio-magnetic and electrical properties of the Rudraksha beads have also been reported. This commodity is in high demand from the devotees across the world. Therefore, this is in trade throughout the country and abroad. The recent trends in import and export of Rudraksha beads in India have been described in the present article, considering scant publications on this aspect.

scholarly journals The World of The Walking Dead – Transmediality and Transmedial Intermediality

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Beil ◽  
Hanns Christian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Adventure Game ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Nature ◽  
Walking Dead

Abstract As transmedia franchises increasingly populate our cultural environment, many questions arise about the effect of the different media involved in the depiction of storyworlds. Through the analysis of different examples, with special emphasis on the particular case of The Walking Dead, and drawing primarily from Henry Jenkins’s concept of “transmedia storytelling” and Jens Schroter’s concept of intermediality, this paper aims to show how different media aesthetics contribute to the process of storytelling and enrich the experience of the consumer. Usually overlooked in other analyses, we argue that these formal and aesthetical characteristics, such as the interactive nature of video games, call for a broader approach that transcends the accustomed search of common narrative aspects. This will be exemplified by a closer comparative look at the adventure game The Walking Dead: The Ganie (Telltale Games, 2012) and The Walking Dead: Survival Instiiict (Terminal Reality, 2013). The transformations that the different media demand contribute not only to the narrative, but also provide different tools for the construction of storyworlds and different ways to engage with it.

scholarly journals The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-107
Author(s):  
Y. Domanskii
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is in­capable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.

scholarly journals PLANNING OF PRIVATE GATED DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF GATED VS NON-GATED NEIGHBOURHOODS, CITY OF GURUGRAM, INDIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Kaushik
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
Neighbourhood Environment ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The City

The cities are expanding rapidly all over the world. India has also experienced this phenomenon and has continued the pace of growth. The recent trends in spatial growth of the cities are a new phenomenon in Indian urban landscape. The cities in India are witnessing development with the help of private developers for the last couple of decades. Being private properties these are by nature of exercising control have gates and boundaries. In scholarly literature these are called as Gated Community/Gated Development. Authors have argued them from various perspectives of anthropology, law, management and sociology etc. but very little has been discussed about their planning and morphology. Although, the rise of Gated Development is majorly attributed to the sense of fear and need for security, yet architects and urban designers, and even sociologist stress upon other methods to make the neighbourhoods secured. Hence the security aspects are not made part of the research here. The aspects of how these gated development impacts the perception of neighbourhood by residents is not touched upon. The paper discusses the distinction between the gated and non-gated neighbourhoods and also how residents perceive their neighbourhoods at large. For explaining this phenomenon, three neighbourhoods in the city of Gurugram in Haryana state in India have been identified as case study. These are identified on the basis of different morphological images that are identified. Space syntax and space cognition through sketch mapping is used for the analysis of the three neighbourhoods. The paper suggest that the continuity and connectivity of any spatial configuration is of utmost importance to make neighbourhood environment worthy of living life more socially connected.

scholarly journals Videojátékoktól a munka világáig – játékostipológiák és munkahelyi motiváció

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Richárd Fromann ◽  
Andrei Damsa
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Personality Profile ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Workplace Motivation ◽  
The World ◽  
Motivational Model ◽  
Organisational Personality

A videojáték-kutatás egyik közkedvelt területe a különböző játékostipológiák feltérképezése. Az ehhez kapcsolódó kutatások célja rendszerint az, hogy bemutassák a játékok mögött meghúzódó motivációs erőket, valamint kategorizálva, jól értelmezhető modellekbe ágyazva prezentálják ezeket. Jelen tanulmány két, egymáshoz szorosan kapcsolódó elméleti konstruktumot ismertet. Az első a JátékosLét Kutatóközpont által végzett kutatás eredményeként megalkotott F-modell, mely a videojátékosok motivációs dimenziói mentén kialakított tipológiát mutatja be, a második pedig a Szervezeti Személyiség Profil, az F-modell munkahelyi környezetbe ágyazott verziója. --- From video games to the world of work – player typologies and workplace motivation Player’s typologies are one of the most popular fields of videogame research. The main goal of these studies is to describe the motivational dimensions related to videogames and based on these factors to create well-defined player categories. This paper aims to present two connected models – one from the field of game research, and one from the aspect of workplace motivation. The F-model (for videogame player typology) was constructed using the data from the “JátékosLét Kutatás”, a Hungarian nationwide research project with more than 50,000 completed surveys. Based on the F-model, an organisational-focused motivational model was also created (Organisational Personality Profile). Keywords: videogame research, gamification, F-Model, Organisational Personality Profile (OPP)

West of the Magic Circle

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Japan And China ◽  
Magic Circle

This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document