The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game

The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over three months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation, and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad-hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players; and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design

Digital storytelling and Co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

How is creative expression and communication extended among whole populations? What is the social and cultural value of this activity? What roles do formal agencies, community-based organisations and content producer networks play? Specifically, how do participatory media and arts projects and networks contribute to building this capacity in the contemporary communications environment

Navigating disruption: mobile society and hurricanes Juan and Igor: a travelogue

In the course of a decade, two record-breaking hurricanes made landfall in Atlantic Canada: Juan (2003) and Igor (2010). During each hurricane, mobility networks central to the movement of people and goods (i.e. road, marine, air and rail) were disrupted, interrupting emergency services, commercial operations and personal transport. In some cases, alternate transport modes and routes emerged, while in other cases people and goods were rendered immobile. The anchoring idea for my research is that fossil fuel-powered transport contributes to climate change and climate change disrupts transport. The energetic boomerang comes full circle with severe weather events disrupting complex, weather-exposed transport networks. While linking specific weather events to climate change is tenuous, I explore these hurricanes as examples of the type of conditions (e.g. high winds, intense precipitation, storm surges) that are expected under a changing climate. To build societal resilience to extreme weather events, we need both theoretical and applied approaches to transport that incorporate recognition of climate change. Through this project I ask what responses and frames, particularly related to socialecological interactions, emerge when mobility networks are impacted by hurricanes. I examine sources of resilience and vulnerability (e.g. social, ecological, infrastructural), as well as ask how greater social and ecological resilience can be achieved. Using an inductive case study approach and drawing on media articles, legislative transcripts, policy documents and semi-structured interviews with key informants, I identify and analyze the resulting responses and frames as they pertain to social-ecological resilience and vulnerability. This research is grounded within the mobilities literature and informed by the disaster literature to elaborate an ecopolitics of mobility. I complement the applied areas of sustainable mobility (i.e. climate change mitigation) (Banister 2008) and resilience (i.e. transport, infrastructure, social-ecological) (Brown 2014; Folke 2010), with the theoretically oriented mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006), including the politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010). Further, I inflect the politics of mobility, which provides a nuanced approach to the analysis of power within mobility systems, with Foucault’s work on governmentality and circulation of societies and ecologies. In terms of practical contributions, I find that in the aftermath of Hurricanes Juan and Igor, reinstatement of mobility was an uppermost priority with a dominant tension between the frame ‘we’ve never seen anything like it’ and ‘we need to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.’ I develop a list of practices used for managing mobility in the preparation, response, recovery and mitigation phases of disaster, as well compare the resiliencies and vulnerabilities of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland’s mobility networks. In the case of Nova Scotia, a key source of vulnerability in the context of Hurricane Juan was the entanglement of trees and power lines. Key sources of resilience include the cultural instinct to batten down the hatches, the adaptable role of transit and the coordination of emergency services. Residents successfully, if somewhat precariously, governed their own mobility (i.e. governmobility). Further, the experience of successive intentional, technical and ecological adversities fostered a culture of all-hazards disaster readiness. In the case of Newfoundland and Labrador, a key source of vulnerability in the context of Hurricane Igor was the scale of road washouts combined with limited routes, modes (e.g. car, truck), fuel types and fuel storage. Key sources of resilience were coordination and cooperation among different levels of government, the private sector and residents demonstrating a high capacity to restore the road network to functionality within ten days and coordination among residents to cope in the interim. Based on the empirical case studies, I develop and elucidate three ideas that are valuable in reconceptualizing the social and environmental power dynamics inherent in transport networks: mobility webs, the ecopolitics of mobility and climate routing. I describe this set of concepts as an ecopolitical approach to mobility. Borrowing from the ecological concept of food webs, I use the term mobility webs to reflect the environmentally exposed, but also diverse and adaptable dimensions of contemporary transport networks arguing for an approach that cooperates with, rather than dominates, the environment. To underscore the view that transport networks and ecological flows are interwoven and, in an anthropogenic age, co-constructed, I forward the concept of an ecopolitics of mobility. Adapting Cresswell’s (2010) six elements of the politics of mobility – motive force, velocity, rhythm, route, experience and friction – to the interface of the environment and contemporary social-technical assemblages of mobility, I analyze socialecological power dynamics, including related sources of resilience and vulnerability to disrupt and reframe interactions between mobility and the environment. Informed by the disaster sociology of Freudenburg (2009), Klinenberg (2004) and Murphy (2009), I consider the possibilities for an ecologically reflexive modernization in the field of transport, extending the focus of transport resilience from restoring the status quo to include reflecting on the role of mobility in contemporary society (Beck 2015). I adapt the marine navigation concept of weather routing – the practice of altering a ship’s course to take maximum advantage of tidal, current and wind conditions to reduce the physical resistance of the ship moving through water – and posit the concept of climate routing. As conceived, climate routing involves six measures: creating a transport resilience task force, deliberating decentralization, internalizing externalities, planning for green and blue flows, rebranding redundancy and thinking flex. Primary considerations are lessening social-ecological contention, increasing resilience, questioning mobility practices and maintaining or increasing quality of life. In sum, my research offers innovative contributions by orienting mobilities research to social-ecological considerations – extending previous work on sustainable mobility even further – and orienting disaster sociology to mobility and related transport considerations

Accounting for changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services from a business perspective: Preliminary guidelines towards a biodiversity accountability framework

Biodiversity refers to the dynamics of interactions between organisms in changing environments. Within the context of accelerating biodiversity loss worldwide, firms are under increasing pressures from stakeholders to develop appropriate tools to account for the nature and consequences of their actions, inclusive of their influences on ecosystem services used by other agents. This paper presents a two-pronged approach towards accounting for changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services from a business perspective. First, we seek to analyze how Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) may be used by firms to identify and account for the interactions between their activities and biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES). To that end, we use dairy farming as a case study and propose general recommendations regarding accounting for changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services from a management accounting perspective. Secondly, after discussing the corporate reporting implications of the main environmental accounting approaches, we propose the underlying principles and structural components of a Biodiversity Accountability Framework (BAF) which would combine both financial and BES data sets; hence, suggesting the need for changes in business accounting and reporting standards. Because this would imply significant changes in business information systems and corporate rating practices, we also underline the importance of making the associated technological, organizational and institutional innovations financially viable. The BAF should be designed as an information base, coconstructed with stakeholders, for setting up and managing new modes of regulation combining tools for mitigating BES loss and remunerating BES supply

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications