Sense of agency and the role of entertainment in Infinite Jest’s “Living Dead”

This paper attempts to betoken the relevance of emotions in the representation of the body and in the 'reviving' of the self in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The novel discerns a world where the oversaturation of choices in entertainment has revered a tradition of ennui and addiction as part of the hedonistic search for pleasure. This is of a particular importance to the understanding of the destruction of the self which is consequently framed in the paradoxically position of the 'abject', as one who rejects the self over unreachable pleasure. On the basis of this new definition of entertainment, characters are annularly entrapped in non-agent actions to escape this deadly and stultifying entertainment (through sports, media and/or drugs). Moreover, entertainment invalidates its original meaning as it evokes no true stimuli in the characters in the novel. This significantly shows how individuals are unable to feel any emotion or attachment to the external world. As a consequence, their mind is prosthesized and has lost control over the body which thus suggestively explains why bodies in the novel are described as malleable, machine-like and deformed. This can be enlightened from a neuropsychologist perspective with the claim that emotions play a key role in representing the body. If one feels a detachment from the body and no 'sense of agency', one may state to feel non-existent or dead as no external stimuli evokes emotions in them. Cotard syndrome helps to reveal how the lack of emotions disables a correct representation of the body giving way to the belief that one may be dead, non-existent or deformed. The discussion will lay on how Infinite Jest is a novel, among other things, about the struggle to regain feeling and the lost self from a body perspective and its validating connection to the mind.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

Respectability, morality and disgust in the night-time economy: exploring reactions to ‘lap dance’clubs in England and Wales

The night-time economy is often described as repelling consumers fearful of the ‘undesirable Others’ imagined dominant within such time-spaces. In this paper we explore this by describing attitudes towards, and reactions to, one particularly con- tentious site: the ‘lap dance’ club. Often targeted by campaigners in England and Wales as a source of criminality and anti-sociality, in this paper we shift the focus from fear to disgust, and argue that Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) are opposed on the basis of moral judgments that reflect distinctions of both class and gender. Drawing on documentary analysis, survey results and interview data collected during guided walks, we detail the concerns voiced by those anxious about the presence of lap dance or striptease clubs in their town or city, particularly the notion that they ‘lower the tone’ of particular streets or neighbourhoods. Our conclusion is that the opposition expressed to lap dance clubs is part of an attempt to police the bound- aries of respectable masculinities and femininities, marginalizing the producers and consumers of sexual entertainment through ‘speech acts’ which identify such enter- tainment as unruly, vulgar and uncivilized. These findings are considered in the light of ongoing debates concerning the relations of morality, respectability and disgust

Differentiating normal and problem gambling: a grounded theory approach.

A previous study (Ricketts &amp; Macaskill, 2003) delineated a theory of problem gambling based on the experiences of treatment seeking male gamblers and allowed predictions to be made regarding the processes that differentiate between normal and problem gamblers. These predictions are the focus of the present study, which also utilised a grounded theory approach, but with a sample of male high frequency normal gamblers. The findings suggest that there are common aspects of gambling associated with arousal and a sense of achievement. The use of gambling to manage negative emotional states differentiated normal and problem gambling. Perceived self-efficacy , emotion management skills and perceived likelihood of winning money back were intervening variables differentiating problem and normal gamblers.</p

Attributes affecting the level of tourist satisfaction with and loyalty towards theatrical performance in China: Evidence from a qualitative study

This study seeks to explore attributes affecting the level of tourist satisfaction with and loyalty towards theatrical performance in China. Based on four focus group discussions with 31 participants, the study identifies 34 attributes that affect the level of tourist satisfaction with theatrical performance, and groups them into five categories: stage, performance, venue, service, and tourist-related attributes. The findings on tourist loyalty reveal that most of the respondents would not watch the same theatrical performance alone in the future; however, they would recommend it to others. The study concludes with a discussion of the rich and insightful findings and their implications for tourism industry practitioners

Emoticon-based Ambivalent Expression: A Hidden Indicator for Unusual Behaviors in Weibo

Recent decades have witnessed online social media being a big-data window for quantificationally testifying conventional social theories and exploring much detailed human behavioral patterns. In this paper, by tracing the emoticon use in Weibo, a group of hidden "ambivalent users" are disclosed for frequently posting ambivalent tweets containing both positive and negative emotions. Further investigation reveals that this ambivalent expression could be a novel indicator of many unusual social behaviors. For instance, ambivalent users with the female as the majority like to make a sound in midnights or at weekends. They mention their close friends frequently in ambivalent tweets, which attract more replies and thus serve as a more private communication way. Ambivalent users also respond differently to public affairs from others and demonstrate more interests in entertainment and sports events. Moreover, the sentiment shift of words adopted in ambivalent tweets is more evident than usual and exhibits a clear "negative to positive" pattern. The above observations, though being promiscuous seemingly, actually point to the self regulation of negative mood in Weibo, which could find its base from the emotion management theories in sociology but makes an interesting extension to the online environment. Finally, as an interesting corollary, ambivalent users are found connected with compulsive buyers and turn out to be perfect targets for online marketing.Comment: Data sets can be downloaded freely from www.datatang.com/data/47207 or http://pan.baidu.com/s/1mg67cbm. Any issues feel free to contact [email protected]

ELVIS: Entertainment-led video summaries

© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 6(3): Article no. 17 (2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1823746.1823751Video summaries present the user with a condensed and succinct representation of the content of a video stream. Usually this is achieved by attaching degrees of importance to low-level image, audio and text features. However, video content elicits strong and measurable physiological responses in the user, which are potentially rich indicators of what video content is memorable to or emotionally engaging for an individual user. This article proposes a technique that exploits such physiological responses to a given video stream by a given user to produce Entertainment-Led VIdeo Summaries (ELVIS). ELVIS is made up of five analysis phases which correspond to the analyses of five physiological response measures: electro-dermal response (EDR), heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RR), and respiration amplitude (RA). Through these analyses, the temporal locations of the most entertaining video subsegments, as they occur within the video stream as a whole, are automatically identified. The effectiveness of the ELVIS technique is verified through a statistical analysis of data collected during a set of user trials. Our results show that ELVIS is more consistent than RANDOM, EDR, HR, BVP, RR and RA selections in identifying the most entertaining video subsegments for content in the comedy, horror/comedy, and horror genres. Subjective user reports also reveal that ELVIS video summaries are comparatively easy to understand, enjoyable, and informative

Digital advertising storytelling: consumer educommunication

This is a revision of the concept of digital storytelling to get a definition from a point of view of consumer educommunication. This is how new digital advertising storytelling can modify consumer roles and behaviors. So, in this text, we do a literature revision to explain the advantages of storytelling for digital marketing, the main common mistakes in digital advertising storytelling and what should a good storytelling strategy include. Besides, we make a description about media you have to use, the demand and growth of visual content and other digital marketing Trends for next years.El presente texto es una revisión del concepto de storytelling para alcanzar una definición desde el punto de vista de la educomunicación del consumidor. Esto es: cómo el actual storytelling publicitario digital puede modificar los roles y comportamientos de los consumidores. De este modo, hacemos una revisión de la literatura para explicar las ventajas del storytelling para el marketing digital, los principales errores en el storytelling publicitario y que debería incluir una buena estrategia pensada por y para un storytelling. Asimismo, hacemos una descripción sobre los medios más adecuados para utilizar, así como la demanda y crecimiento del contenido visiaul y otras tendencias del marketing digital para los próximos años