scholarly journals When I'm Sixty-Four: Beatles Rock Band and the Commodification of Nostalgia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaigris Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Theoretical Overview ◽  
Over Time

In 2009, only a few months after the game’s release, the popular trade magazine Advertising Age declared Beatles Rock Band one of America’s hottest brands ("America's hottest brands", 2009). This is quite a feat for a lowly video game, and begs that we consider the reasons for the game’s success as well a the potential social consequences for similar popular games. There are two major elements at work in the creation of Beatles Rock Band as a successful brand, and this paper conducts an analysis of the game in order to identify both of them. First of all, it explores the Beatles as a brand that continues to provide emotional and spiritual value for consumers, and how the feelings associated with this brand have developed intertextually since the band first gained international popularity in 1962. Secondly, this paper will show how Beatles Rock Band works almost like a documentary game, and in doing so rewrites history in order to capitalize on a white-washed and romanticized ideal of 1960s culture. As such, it will show the ways that the Beatles Rock Band draws on previous commercial texts associated with the Beatles brand to create an hyperreal fiction based on historic people and events. This paper is divided up into four sections. The first section will provide a theoretical overview of convergence, remediation, and the business of culture, and then will conduct a brief review of the methodology of digital game studies. The second section will look at the specifics of the game, and some of ways that the game has been marketed to the public at large. The third section will provide a description and overview of the Beatles as a brand, and the ways the brand continues to adapt and change over time in order to appeal to a broad and changing audience. Finally, the fourth section will discuss the commoditfication of nostalgia generally, and the specific ways that this game rewrites history to reproduce it as a commodity.

scholarly journals When I'm Sixty-Four: Beatles Rock Band and the Commodification of Nostalgia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaigris Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Theoretical Overview ◽  
Over Time

In 2009, only a few months after the game’s release, the popular trade magazine Advertising Age declared Beatles Rock Band one of America’s hottest brands ("America's hottest brands", 2009). This is quite a feat for a lowly video game, and begs that we consider the reasons for the game’s success as well a the potential social consequences for similar popular games. There are two major elements at work in the creation of Beatles Rock Band as a successful brand, and this paper conducts an analysis of the game in order to identify both of them. First of all, it explores the Beatles as a brand that continues to provide emotional and spiritual value for consumers, and how the feelings associated with this brand have developed intertextually since the band first gained international popularity in 1962. Secondly, this paper will show how Beatles Rock Band works almost like a documentary game, and in doing so rewrites history in order to capitalize on a white-washed and romanticized ideal of 1960s culture. As such, it will show the ways that the Beatles Rock Band draws on previous commercial texts associated with the Beatles brand to create an hyperreal fiction based on historic people and events. This paper is divided up into four sections. The first section will provide a theoretical overview of convergence, remediation, and the business of culture, and then will conduct a brief review of the methodology of digital game studies. The second section will look at the specifics of the game, and some of ways that the game has been marketed to the public at large. The third section will provide a description and overview of the Beatles as a brand, and the ways the brand continues to adapt and change over time in order to appeal to a broad and changing audience. Finally, the fourth section will discuss the commoditfication of nostalgia generally, and the specific ways that this game rewrites history to reproduce it as a commodity.

Why is Exit So Hard? Positive Feedback and Institutional Persistence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor St John
Keyword(s):  
Positive Feedback ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Competitive Dynamics ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Institutional Persistence ◽  
Capacity Constrained ◽  
Over Time

Chapter eight analyzes why institutions persist, even when they generate unintended consequences for the states that created them. The chapter sets out a typology of possible actions that governments can take to exit from investor–state arbitration. To date, governments have engaged in remarkably little exit. The second section explores how positive feedback has created a new constituency of law firms and investors with an interest in arbitration and therefore has led to a new politics of ISDS. The third section discusses other types of feedback that have stabilized and developed a dense web of commitments enshrining investor–state arbitration. The fourth section observes that over time, competitive dynamics emerged and define investor–state arbitration today: competition between law firms, arbitration organizations, and even jurisdictions hoping to host arbitrations makes exit and reform more difficult. The barriers to exit may be highest for capacity-constrained states.

scholarly journals Author Middle Initial Correction: "Desensitization to Fear-Inducing COVID-19 Health News on Twitter: Observational Study" (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Stevens ◽  
Yoo Jung Oh ◽  
Laramie D Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Health News ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Initial Correction ◽  
Over Time

BACKGROUND As of May 9, 2021, the United States had 32.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 (20.7% of confirmed cases worldwide) and 580,000 deaths (17.7% of deaths worldwide). Early on in the pandemic, widespread social, financial, and mental insecurities led to extreme and irrational coping behaviors, such as panic buying. However, despite the consistent spread of COVID-19 transmission, the public began to violate public safety measures as the pandemic got worse. OBJECTIVE In this work, we examine the effect of fear-inducing news articles on people’s expression of anxiety on Twitter. Additionally, we investigate desensitization to fear-inducing health news over time, despite the steadily rising COVID-19 death toll. METHODS This study examined the anxiety levels in news articles (n=1465) and corresponding user tweets containing “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus” over 11 months, then correlated that information with the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States. RESULTS Overall, tweets that shared links to anxious articles were more likely to be anxious (odds ratio [OR] 2.65, 95% CI 1.58-4.43, P<.001). These odds decreased (OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.2-0.83, P=.01) when the death toll reached the third quartile and fourth quartile (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.21-0.85, P=.01). However, user tweet anxiety rose rapidly with articles when the death toll was low and then decreased in the third quartile of deaths (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.37-1.01, P=.06). As predicted, in addition to the increasing death toll being matched by a lower level of article anxiety, the extent to which article anxiety elicited user tweet anxiety decreased when the death count reached the second quartile. CONCLUSIONS The level of anxiety in users’ tweets increased sharply in response to article anxiety early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, but as the casualty count climbed, news articles seemingly lost their ability to elicit anxiety among readers. Desensitization offers an explanation for why the increased threat is not eliciting widespread behavioral compliance with guidance from public health officials. This work investigated how individuals' emotional reactions to news of the COVID-19 pandemic manifest as the death toll increases. Findings suggest individuals became desensitized to the increased COVID-19 threat and their emotional responses were blunted over time.

scholarly journals Reception and Perception of May 1968 in Greece

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
Pantelis Kyprianos
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
May 68

How is May ’68 received in the public space? How has it been perceived in the collective consciousness in Greece since that day? To investigate the image of May ’68 portrayed by the mass media (public space) and the idea that young Greeks have of it today (collective memory), I relied on three categories of sources: i) Analysis of the texts referring to the events; ii) Interviewing former students who participated in the uprising against the Dictatorship at the Polytechnic in 1973; and iii) Discussions with today’s students to see whether or not they have an image of May ’68, and if so, what it is. This paper is made up of five sections. In the first I provide an overview of the situation in Greece in 1968, in the second I briefly set out the main positions on May ’68 of well-known French social scientists, and in the third I discuss how the period was perceived and the weight of its role in the uprising of Greek students at the Polytechnic in 1973. In the fourth section I paint a brief picture of how May ’68 has been viewed in Greece from the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 to today. Finally, in the fifth and final section, I summarise how today’s students perceive the events. 

Introduction: Why Game Production Matters?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olli Sotamaa ◽  
Jan Švelch
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Game Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
Rigorous Research ◽  
Video Game Development ◽  
Game Industry

In the introduction, the editors of this collection argue for the importance of game production studies at a point when the public awareness about the production context of video games has, arguably, never been higher. With so many accounts of video game development permeating player and developer communities, the task of game production studies is to uncover the economic, cultural, and political structures that influence the final form of games by applying rigorous research methods. While the field of game studies has developed quickly in the past two decades, the study of the video game industry and different modes of video game production have been mostly dismissed by game studies scholars and requires more attention.

Hybridity, So What?

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 219-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Mapping ◽  
Original Question ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Fine Tune ◽  
Over Time

Take just about any exercise in social mapping and it is the hybrids, those that straddle categories, that are missing. Take most arrangements of multiculturalism and it is the hybrids that are not counted, not accommodated. So what? This article is about the recognition of hybridity, in-betweenness. The first section discusses the varieties of hybridity and the widening range of phenomena to which the term now applies. According to anti-hybridity arguments, hybridity is inauthentic and ‘multiculturalism lite’. Examining these arguments provides an opportunity to deepen and fine-tune our perspective. What is missing in the antihybridity arguments is historical depth; in this treatment the third section deals with the longue durÈeand proposes multiple historical layers of hybridity. The fourth section concerns the politics of boundaries, for in the end the real problem is not hybridity – which is common throughout history – but boundaries and the social proclivity to boundary fetishism. Hybridity is a problem only from the point of view of essentializing boundaries. What hybridity means varies not only over time but also in different cultures and this informs different patterns of hybridity. Then we come back to the original question: so what? The importance of hybridity is that it problematizes boundaries.

Video Game Localisation for Fans by Fans

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 168-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Muñoz Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Impact

The aim of this paper is to show the particularities of the so-called “romhacking”, a methodology developed by amateurs to localise mainly classic video games. In the first section, the concept and origin of the term “romhacking” is presented. The second section offers an overview of the workflow followed by romhackers to localise video games. In the third section, an analysis of the differences between professional and amateur translations is given. The fourth section includes a discussion of the legal aspects of this practice. The paper concludes with a reflection on the impact of amateur translations on the video game localisation industry.

The changing ethos and personae of shop-window mannequins within consumer culture: Expressions of gendered embodiment

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Engdahl ◽  
Marie Gelang
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Window Displays ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Over Time

In this article, the invention of new forms of desire that target the gendered body in consumer culture is examined through the lens of the visual rhetoric of shop-window mannequins. The article is a result of cross-disciplinary research combining rhetorical and sociological theories and methods. Inspired by nonverbal methods and theories of embodiment, successive modernities and gender, the changing ethos and personae of mannequins from the 1930s until today are decoded. The shop window could be seen as a microcosm of consumer culture and is, therefore, interesting to study over time to unveil its shifting ideals. The empirical data consist of over 1000 pictures of window displays. Questions that are asked in analysing the empirical material are the following: (1) What ethos and personae do the shop-window mannequins nonverbally express? (2) How do the ethos and personae they nonverbally express change during the transformation of modernity? and (3) Are there any differences between the ethos and personae nonverbally expressed by the male and female mannequins, as well as within each gender? In the two first sections, a theoretical understanding of the concepts of ethos and persona as forms of embodiment that emerge through the interaction between the shop-window mannequins and the consumer is developed. In the third section, the empirical technique that has been used to capture the ethos and personae expressed by the shop-window mannequins is treated. In the fourth section, the notion of successive modernities is introduced, as the study aims to observe the transformation of the ethos and personae of male and female shop-window mannequins during the course of modernity. Also a gender perspective is added as the observation shows differences between and within each gender category. In the fifth section, the result of the analysis of the empirical materials is presented.

scholarly journals Desensitization to Fear-Inducing COVID-19 Health News on Twitter: Observational Study

10.2196/26876 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. e26876
Author(s):  
Hannah R Stevens ◽  
Yoo Jung Oh ◽  
Laramie D Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Coping Behaviors ◽  
Health News ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Over Time

Background As of May 9, 2021, the United States had 32.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 (20.7% of confirmed cases worldwide) and 580,000 deaths (17.7% of deaths worldwide). Early on in the pandemic, widespread social, financial, and mental insecurities led to extreme and irrational coping behaviors, such as panic buying. However, despite the consistent spread of COVID-19 transmission, the public began to violate public safety measures as the pandemic got worse. Objective In this work, we examine the effect of fear-inducing news articles on people’s expression of anxiety on Twitter. Additionally, we investigate desensitization to fear-inducing health news over time, despite the steadily rising COVID-19 death toll. Methods This study examined the anxiety levels in news articles (n=1465) and corresponding user tweets containing “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus” over 11 months, then correlated that information with the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States. Results Overall, tweets that shared links to anxious articles were more likely to be anxious (odds ratio [OR] 2.65, 95% CI 1.58-4.43, P<.001). These odds decreased (OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.2-0.83, P=.01) when the death toll reached the third quartile and fourth quartile (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.21-0.85, P=.01). However, user tweet anxiety rose rapidly with articles when the death toll was low and then decreased in the third quartile of deaths (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.37-1.01, P=.06). As predicted, in addition to the increasing death toll being matched by a lower level of article anxiety, the extent to which article anxiety elicited user tweet anxiety decreased when the death count reached the second quartile. Conclusions The level of anxiety in users’ tweets increased sharply in response to article anxiety early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, but as the casualty count climbed, news articles seemingly lost their ability to elicit anxiety among readers. Desensitization offers an explanation for why the increased threat is not eliciting widespread behavioral compliance with guidance from public health officials. This work investigated how individuals' emotional reactions to news of the COVID-19 pandemic manifest as the death toll increases. Findings suggest individuals became desensitized to the increased COVID-19 threat and their emotional responses were blunted over time.

scholarly journals Infomapa da mineração: Cartografias e convergências temáticas

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-76
Author(s):  
Eduardo Alvares da Silva Barcelos
Keyword(s):  
Public Debate ◽  
Open Pit ◽  
Open Pit Mines ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Illegal Mining ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Potential Damage

O Infomapa da Mineração: Cartografias e convergências temáticas é um esforço de sistematização de temas relevantes que compõem a questão mineral brasileira. O objetivo deste material é popularizar alguns ele­mentos que constituem a geografia da mineração no país e ampliar o debate público a partir de uma linguagem acessível que possibilite uma visão de conjunto sobre as dinâmicas da atividade mineral no Brasil. O material está dividido em quatro seções. A primeira seção apresenta a evolução dos processos minerários em todo território nacional em quatro recortes temporais. A segunda seção mostra a distri­buição das barragens de mineração segundo o dano potencial associado. A terceira seção traz a distribui­ção das minas ativas a céu aberto e as localidades com garimpo ilegal. E a quarta seção representa a densidade de conflitos no campo envolvendo a mineração. Palavras-chave: Mineração; cartografia; Brasil; conflitos.   Abstract The Mining Infomap: cartographies and thematic convergences is an effort to systematize relevant subjects that make up the Brazilian mineral issue. The aim of this material is to popularize some elements that constitute the geography of mining in the country, and to broaden the public debate based on an accessible language that allows an overall view of the dynamics of mineral activity in Brazil. The material is divided into four sections. The first section presents the evolution of mining processes throughout the country in four time periods. The second section shows the distribution of mining dams according to their associated potential damage. The third section shows the distribution of active open-pit mines and the locations of illegal mining. And the fourth section represents the density of conflicts in the countryside involving mining. Keywords: Mining; cartography; Brazil; conflicts.   Infomapa de la minería: Cartografías y convergencias temáticas Resumen El Infomapa de la Minería: cartografías y convergencias temáticas es un esfuerzo por sistematizar temas relevantes que componen el tema mineral brasileño. El objetivo de este material es popularizar algunos elementos que constituyen la geografía de la minería en el país y ampliar el debate público a partir de un lenguaje accesible que permita una visión global de la dinámica de la actividad minera en Brasil. El material se divide en cuatro secciones. La primera sección presenta la evolución de los procesos mineros en todo el territorio nacional en cuatro períodos de tiempo. La segunda sección muestra la distribución de las presas mineras según el daño potencial asociado. La tercera sección presenta la distribución de minas a cielo abierto activas y los lugares con minería ilegal. Y la cuarta sección representa la densidad de los conflictos rurales relacionados con la minería. Palabras clave: Minería; cartografía; Brasil; conflictos.

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