New Game Plus: A Study of Video Game Narratives

New Game Plus: A Study of Video Game Narratives is a scholarly thesis that examines three dominant narrative forms in video games, namely, linear, branching, and rhizomatic. These narrative forms help contextualize this study’s consideration of the history of video games which reveals the increasing sophistication of the medium as a form of storytelling. This thesis examines two different video games in each of the three categories and traces how more recent video games tend to use player interactivity to explore and reflect players’ morality. Common threads in the examined video games include moral dilemmas, socio-political issues, remediations of earlier narrative forms, game mechanics, and the effects of player agency on video game narratives

Video Abstracting at a Semantical Level

One the most common form of a video abstract is the movie trailer. Contemporary movie trailers share a common structure across genres which allows for an automatic generation and also reflects the corresponding moviea s composition. In this thesis a system for the automatic generation of trailers is presented. In addition to action trailers, the system is able to deal with further genres such as Horror and comedy trailers, which were first manually analyzed in order to identify their basic structures. To simplify the modeling of trailers and the abstract generation itself a new video abstracting application was developed. This application is capable of performing all steps of the abstract generation automatically and allows for previews and manual optimizations. Based on this system, new abstracting models for horror and comedy trailers were created and the corresponding trailers have been automatically generated using the new abstracting models. In an evaluation the automatic trailers were compared to the original Trailers and showed a similar structure. However, the automatically generated trailers still do not exhibit the full perfection of the Hollywood originals as they lack intentional storylines across shots

EXPATRIATES OF GOOD MOTHERHOOD: BEARING WITNESS, GUILT, AND BURDENS OF TRANSGRESSIVE MOTHERHOOD

To be an expatriate requires emotional stamina to withstand culture shock, loneliness, and self-doubt. To be an expatriate of “good” motherhood is no less shocking, no less lonely, and no less anxiety-inducing. This collection braids original creative pieces with critical inquiry into the roots of disorienting riptides of motherhood mythology. The creative pieces include flash nonfiction essays and poetry; the critical inquiry explores historical narratives, critical theory, feminist theory, and literary narratives. By braiding these different forms, the work aims to create a collage of cultural artifacts, whose composition can better illuminate the darkest corners of elusive motherhood mythology

Wonder, education, and human flourishing:Theoretical, empirical, and practical perspectives

The premise that underlies this volume is that there are strong interconnections between wonder, education and human flourishing. And more specifically, that wonder can make a significant difference to how well one’s education progresses and how well one’s life goes. The contributors to this volume – both senior, well-known and beginning researchers and students of wonder – variously explore aspects of these connections from philosophical, empirical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The three chapters that comprise Part I of the book are devoted to the importance of wonder for education and for human flourishing. Part II contains four chapters offering conceptual analyses of wonder and perspectives from developmental psychology and philosophy (Spinoza, Wittgenstein, philosophy of religion). The seven chapters that form Part III contain a wealth of ideas and educational strategies to promote wonder in education and teacher education. This volume not only underlines and articulates the importance of wonder in education and in life but also offers fresh perspectives, allowing us to look with renewed wonder at wonder itself