Who Is the Note-Worthy Fan? Featuring Players in the Official Facebook Communication of Mainstream Video Games

Video game fans participate in the official promotion of video games, either voluntarily, or unwillingly when their fanworks are appropriated and used by video game publishers. The article provides a quantitative overview of the presence of fans in the official social media profiles of four selected mainstream games (Dragon Age: Inquistion, Evolve, Mortal Kombat X and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) during a one-year period from August 2014 to July 2015. Combining the traditional method of content analysis and Facebook data-mining, we explore the frequency with which fans appear in social media (including questions of various forms of fanworks and gender) and what user activity is generated by posts featuring fans and fan creations. Results show that fans or their fanworks are featured in 8–24% of all posts depending on a game and in the most common categories of painting and cosplay they generate a comparable level of user engagement as traditional promotional posts

Quantification and the language of later Shakespeare

In this paper we consider the status of quantitative evidence in literary studies, with an example from our own work using the software package Docuscope to investigate chronological ‘periods’ in Shakespeare’s career. We argue that quantitative evidence has a function in literary studies, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for traditional interpretative literary analysis. In our example, we show that linguistic analysis suggests three periods in Shakespeare’s career, defining a ‘period’ as a group of plays with similar linguistic features. We focus on the latest period, as this is the largest, and suggest that the ‘late style’ of Shakespeare may begin much earlier than traditionally thought. We analyse the features that the later plays share, and argue that from the late 1590s Shakespeare can be seen to be adopting features which are (a) closer to speech, and (b) indicate a shift from real-world denotation to a focus on communicating the subjectivity of the speaker

Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material

Videogames in the museum:participation, possibility and play in curating meaningful visitor experiences

In 2014 Videogames in the Museum [1] engaged with creative practitioners, games designers, curators and museums professionals to debate and explore the challenges of collecting and exhibiting videogames and games design. Discussions around authorship in games and games development, the transformative effect of the gallery on the cultural reception and significance of videogames led to the exploration of participatory modes and playful experiences that might more effectively expose the designer’s intent and enhance the nature of our experience as visitors and players. In proposing a participatory mode for the exhibition of videogames this article suggests an approach to exhibition and event design that attempts to resolve tensions between traditions of passive consumption of curated collections and active participation in meaning making using theoretical models from games analysis and criticism and the conceit of game and museum spaces as analogous rules based environments

Expansion of the current methodology for the study of the short-term liquidity problems in a sector

Purpose: The aim of this work consists of defining and applying a new methodology for the calculation of short-term financial ratios that more reliably approximate the solvency of a sector. Design/methodology: We begin with a classic sector analysis and propose the creation of ratios that limit the debt repayment on an individual level and that do not imply the compensation of aggregate balances, as occurs with the current formulas of calculation. Findings: The new methodology more reliably approximates the solvency of a sector by being able to estimate with greater precision its global capacity for short-term debt repayment. Research limitations: The limitations to the proposed sector ratios are the same as the limitations of the customary individual ratios. Therefore, to offer an example, the ratios do not correct the assumption that the only source of resources to meet current liabilities is made up by available and liquid assets. In other words, no new tools are proposed to include future income from sales by the companies. Practical implications: To be able to study the solvency of the different sectors that make up the economy with more uniform criteria. Social implications: The information provided by the new ratios obtained in this work proves to be relevant information in the case of wanting to determine the degree of dependence of companies in a sector on financial institutions, or in the case of wanting to determine the degree of dependence on aid in a subsidized sector. Originality/value: The proposal of new tools that go beyond the current limitations.Peer Reviewe