The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification

The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Meeting the Challenge of Interdependent Critical Networks under Threat : The Paris Initiative

NARisques à grande échelle;Gestion des crises internationale;Interdépendances;Infrastructures critiques;Anthrax;Initiative collective;Stratégie;Préparation des Etats-majors

Survival through networks: the 'grip' of the administrative links in the Russian post-Soviet context

© 2014 Taylor & Francis. Based on an analysis of the post-Soviet transformation experience of four defence sector organizations in a Russian region where the defence sector occupies a substantial part of the local economy, this article develops a typology of network relationships: Grooved Inter-relationship Patterns (Gr’ip) networks and Fluid Inter-relationship Patterns (Fl’ip) networks. This typology can be applied to a range of transition/emerging market and low system trust contexts. Gr’ip networks, in this case, represent the persisting legacy of the Soviet command-administrative system. Fl’ip networks are here an attempt by the defence companies to link into the civilian supply chains of a developing market economy. This article argues that Gr’ip networks had and still have a crucial role to play in Russian enterprises’ survival and development

The importance of India: restoring sight to Australia's strategic blind spot

 Executive summary Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has invited leading politicians and opinion makers in the region to a conference in early December in Sydney to discuss his vision of an Asia-Pacific Community and building inclusive institutions to discuss the full spectrum of security matters in the region. Besides wanting to ensure that Australia remains relevant rather than sidelined in any future setup, the main impetus behind Canberra’s push for top-down security architecture is to take a proactive approach in order to manage China’s rise and build institutions that can help ease current and future tensions. When Canberra looks northwards to Asia, it mainly sees China’s presence and ignores the other rising giant of the region: India. In important respects, India’s economic and strategic prospects appear more favourable than China’s. Even if we accept that the continued and rapid rise of China will be the most significant driver of change and potential instability in Asia, India’s role and its strategic weight in helping to ‘structurally’ constrain and manage a potentially disruptive China is poorly appreciated by Canberra. The paper traces the rise of ‘strategic India’ in Asia, the significance of the remarkable improvement in the US-India relationship, and the rapid progress made in bringing India into the existing regional security order. Image: brucetct / Flick

The Widening and Deepening of Innovation Policy: What Conditions Provide for Effective Governance?

In relation to the gradual and steady introduction of the systemic perspective and of new public management techniques in innovation policy-making during the past decade, many countries in the developed and developing world have been substantially widening and deepening their innovation policies. The introduction of new and more sophisticated policy instruments (deepening) has been accompanied by an expansion of the realm of action for innovation policy (widening). The main argument of this paper is that this remarkable governmental activism and experimentalism raises important analytical questions about the conditions under which innovation policy contributes to an effective governance of the innovation system. Hence, this paper has two main purposes. Firstly, it characterises in an unambiguous way the widening and deepening trends in innovation policy, problematising their possible effects on governance. And, secondly, it develops an analytical toolbox based on a series of theoretical assumptions about the political conditions for effective governance of innovation systems.Innovation Policy; Innovation System; Governmental Activism; Governmental Experimentalism

In arms' way: arms company and military involvement in education in the UK

Arms company and military involvement with schools and universities in the UK takes a number of forms and has a variety of effects. Countering mainstream narratives around national security, good and bad forms of globalisation, and economic competitiveness, I argue that these effects are best characterised as the commercialisation and militarisation of education in pursuit of state and corporate goals. These are both forms of instrumentalisation that damage the autonomous space educational establishments strive to provide. Such developments are not going unnoticed however, and resistance to them continues

Food Safety and Social Capital: A Double Side Connection

The globalisation of the agri-food system and the growing variety of food products and technologies have made it increasingly difficult for nation-states to regulate food safety and quality practices, giving rise to a shift from public to private governance, essentially in the form of private standards and TPC. The paper suggests that the current shift from public to private intervention calls for a different approach to the analysis of food safety policy, on both descriptive and normative ground. Two different concepts of social capital, one of trust and the other of power, are used in order to assess the welfare effects of the newest trends in food safety policy. Through the lens of social capital it is clear that private standards and TPC are not merely an impartial technical tool able to foster food markets efficiency and safety. Rather they are the means by which powerful actors in the chain discipline people and things in order to accomplish their own objectives

Strategic Behavior across Gender: A Comparison of Female and Male Expert Chess Players

This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects such as innate ability as well as other characteristics of the players. Most notably, the data contains an objective measure of individual playing strength, the so-called Elo rating. In line with previous research, we find that women are more risk-averse than men. A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.culture, gender, competitiveness, risk aversion, mixed-sex competition