Aussie women game developers

Women are underrepresented in the digital games industry all over the world. In Australia, womens level of contribution to game development is much lower than the USA, Canada, and UK. Reviewing literature from the areas of computer science, information technology, and digital games, this study focuses on the impact of social, structural and cultural aspects, and how these factors might influence women choosing a career in the Australian digital games industry. Using a mixed-method, Grounded Theory approach, a large-scale census of Australian digital game studios was conducted, and followed up by semi-structured interviews of a small group of women game developers. Findings reveal that the number of women game developers in Australia has recently increased, and although work culture stereotypes and poor workplace conditions persist overseas, Australian women are not experiencing these issues. However, getting interested in digital game development is still a major obstacle in convincing young women to enroll in game development degrees at university. Once enrolled though, attrition is a problem that has been attributed to teaching styles, lack of confidence and how male peers treat female students in their first year. Those women, who eventually graduate and pursue a career in digital games, more often share the influence of strong parents, male siblings, and enjoyed playing games from a young age

Extensible Detection and Indexing of Highlight Events in Broadcasted Sports Video

Content-based indexing is fundamental to support and sustain the ongoing growth of broadcasted sports video. The main challenge is to design extensible frameworks to detect and index highlight events. This paper presents: 1) A statistical-driven event detection approach that utilizes a minimum amount of manual knowledge and is based on a universal scope-of-detection and audio-visual features; 2) A semi-schema-based indexing that combines the benefits of schema-based modeling to ensure that the video indexes are valid at all time without manual checking, and schema-less modeling to allow several passes of instantiation in which additional elements can be declared. To demonstrate the performance of the events detection, a large dataset of sport videos with a total of around 15 hours including soccer, basketball and Australian football is used

Spartan Daily April 16, 2012

Volume 138, Issue 38https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1037/thumbnail.jp

Ariel - Volume 4 Number 6

Editors David A. Jacoby Eugenia Miller Tom Williams Associate Editors Paul Bialas Terry Burt Michael Leo Gail Tenikat Editor Emeritus and Business Manager Richard J. Bonnano Movie Editor Robert Breckenridge Staff Richard Blutstein Mary F. Buechler J.D. Kanofsky Rocket Weber David Maye

The Daily Gamecock, Monday, January 30, 2017

https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/gamecock_2017_jan/1006/thumbnail.jp

Scenario House

Scenario House, a gallery based installation, is comprised of a room constructed as a family room within a domestic space, a television with a looped video work and a sound componant played through a 5.1 sound system. The paper is intended to give my work context in relation to the processes leading up to its completion. This is achieved through clarification of the basis for the installation including previous socio-political discourses within my art practice. It then focuses on ways that the installation Scenario House is based on gun practice facilities such as the Valhalla Shooting Club. Further it gives an explanation of the actual production, in context with other art practices. It was found that distinctions between war as a game and the actual event are being lost within simulation revenge scenarios where the borders distinguishing gaming violence, television violence and revenge scenarios are increasingly indefinable. War can then be viewed a spectacle where the actual event is lost in a simplified simulation. Scenario House as installation allows audience immersion through sound spatialisation and physical devices. Sound is achieved by design of a 5.1 system played through a domestic home theatre system. The physical design incorporates the dual aspect of a gun shooting club and a lounge room. Further a film loop is shown on the television monitor as part of the domestic space it is non-narrative and semi-documentary in style. The film loop represents the mediation of the representation of fear where there is an exclusion of the other from the social body. When considering this installation it is important to note that politics and art need not be considered as representing two separate and permanent realities. Conversely there is a need to distance politicised art production from any direct political campaign work in so far as the notion of a campaign constitutes a fixed and inflexible space for intellectual and cultural production. Finally this paper expresses the need to maintain a critical openness to media cultures that dominate political discourse. Art practices such as those of Martha Rosler, Haacke and Paul McCarthy are presented as effective strategies for this form of production

Tasha: A practice-based problematisation of Australian comedy cinema’s representation of gender, family and nationhood

Between 2007 and 2012, 140 fictional feature films were financed with the assistance of Australian film funding bodies. Of these 140 films, only 31 featured female protagonists and of these 31 films, only 8 were comedies (see Appendix B). These figures show statistically, Tasha, the creative film component of this research project, is not a typical Australian comedy film; it is the story of Tasha, an unemployed girl from Girrawheen in her early twenties, who has lost her sense of identity. As Australian films such as Little Fish¸ Candy, Jedda and Muriel’s Wedding would suggest, this is certainly not an uncommon premise in Australian national cinema. However, this is not all there is to know about Tasha; she is preoccupied, not by a love interest or by a drug addiction, but by ninjutsu, and vigilantism. This is where Tasha finds its unique approach to Australian cinema’s historic treatment of the woman-centred narrative. That said, beneath Tasha’s unconventional surface arguably lies a truly Australian comedy film. The exegesis component of this project re-interprets Bazin’s question, “Qu\u27est-ce que le cinéma?” (What is cinema?), with a theoretical framework inspired by Australian film theorist Tom O’Regan’s influential text, Australian National Cinema. The exegesis begins by looking at Australian national cinema as a whole, then narrowing the focus to Australian comedy cinema. O’Regan (1996) describes Australian cinema as a national cinema; a cinema that embodies Australian culture, society and history. The focus is on Australian comedy film texts, and their social, political and cultural contexts. Tasha, the creative film project, is what O’Regan would term a “problematisation” of Australian comedy cinema. The key argument of this project is that Australian national comedy films are uniquely Australian, cinematic explorations of individual identity, socio-cultural identity, landscape and family. Australia laughs about what it knows best, these four narrative and aesthetic preoccupations being central to Australian socio-cultural values and attitudes, to understanding the concept of Australianness. Australian comedy cinema is a problematic genre unto itself. The theoretical component of this project is a profile of Australian comedy cinema’s homogenised representation of Australianness. Tasha is then presented as an alternative. This investigation aims to both improve, and demonstrate an understanding of Australian comedy cinema as a problematisation of gender, culture, landscape, family and identity. Tasha responds to the research question, “What is Australian comedy cinema?” by revealing that even an Australian action comedy with exciting stunts and fight scenes, is still a story of an individual’s sense of identity, family, and place. Such stories are arguably the hallmark of Australian comedy cinema; this carries a uniquely Australian sense of quirkiness. It remains the domain of the underdog: the battlers, larrikins, and of course the ockers. It still carries the same messages; never forget who you are, who your friends and family are, or where you came from. Despite its unconventional narrative, subject matter, soundtrack and aesthetics, Tasha proves to be no exception; it is still easily identified as a truly Australian comedy film

February 11, 2013

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia