Internet Explorer: The Creative Administration of Digital Geography

This thesis is a creative response to the widespread uptake of Google Maps, Earth and Street View and their impact on the future of landscape as a cultural concept. ‘Creative administration’ is introduced as an idiosyncratic system for collecting and interpreting ideas about landscape. The artist’s virtual journeys through digital landscapes are revealed in a series of miniature paintings. Cultural geography contextualises these artworks and other artists’ responses within a broader understanding of contemporary landscape

VR Storytelling

The question of cinematic VR production has been on the table for several years. This is due to the peculiarity of VR language which, even if it is de ned by an image that surrounds and immerses the viewer rather than placing them, as in the classic cinematic situation, in front of a screen, relies decisively on an audiovisual basis that cannot help but refer to cinematic practices of constructing visual and auditory experience. Despite this, it would be extremely reductive to consider VR as the mere transposition of elements of cinematic language. The VR medium is endowed with its own speci city, which inevitably impacts its forms of narration. We thus need to investigate the narrative forms it uses that are probably related to cinematic language, and draw their strength from the same basis, drink from the same well, but develop according to di erent trajectories, thus displaying di erent links and a nities

Does the EU Commission really hate the US? Understanding the Google decision through competition theory

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available in print from Sweet and Maxwell or online via Westlaw.This article analyses EU competition law to identify its theoretical influences. It finds that there are two distinct periods. The first, the ‘mono-theoretical period’, is influenced by Ordoliberalism. The second, the ‘poly-theoretical period’, has a number of influences, not least the Chicago School, post-Chicago analysis and behavioural economics. These new theories refine the way the law is used to achieve Ordoliberal aims, in particular, the aim of protecting economic freedom. This insight is then used to analyse the EU competition law approach to software markets. This reveals that software markets have characteristics that allow dominant, up-stream software firms to conceal the choice consumers have (choice evasion) and undermine competition. Recommendations on how to avoid this abuse are made

Playing in the dark with online games for girls

Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency is part of a series of online free games aimed at young girls (forhergames.com or babygirlgames.com), where dozens of characters from fairy tales, children’s toys and media feature in recovery settings, such as ‘Barbie flu’. The range of games available to choose from includes not only dressing, varnishing nails or tidying messy rooms, but also rather more troubling options such as extreme makeovers, losing weight, or a plethora of baby showers, cravings, hospital pregnancy checks, births (including caesarean), postnatal ironing, washing and baby care. Taking the online game Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency as an exemplar of a current digital trend, the authors explore the workings of ‘dark digital play’ from a number of perspectives – one by each named author. The game selected has (what may appear to adults) several disturbing features in that the player is invited to treat wounds of the kind of harm that might usually be associated with domestic violence towards women

Playing in the dark with online games for girls

Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency is part of a series of online free games aimed at young girls (forhergames.com or babygirlgames.com), where dozens of characters from fairy tales, children’s toys and media feature in recovery settings, such as ‘Barbie flu’. The range of games available to choose from includes not only dressing, varnishing nails or tidying messy rooms, but also rather more troubling options such as extreme makeovers, losing weight, or a plethora of baby showers, cravings, hospital pregnancy checks, births (including caesarean), postnatal ironing, washing and baby care. Taking the online game Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency as an exemplar of a current digital trend, the authors explore the workings of ‘dark digital play’ from a number of perspectives – one by each named author. The game selected has (what may appear to adults) several disturbing features in that the player is invited to treat wounds of the kind of harm that might usually be associated with domestic violence towards women

To Archive or Not to Archive: The Resistant Potential of Digital Poetry

This essay addresses the much discussed problem of archiving digital poetry. Digital media are labile, and several writers of digital poetry are incorporating the media’s ephemerality into their poetics. Rather than rehash arguments that have been taking place within the field of digital media and digital poetics for years, I turn to the field of contemporary art curation and preservation, a field in which curators and archivists are struggling with the very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works that are made from ephemeral media. One particular digital poem that has recently broken, has recently become unreadable, is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott composed the poem in 2000, and he incorporated the poem’s inevitable obsolescence into the text of the poem itself. He has since refused to “fix” or “update” the poem, because he contends that that would make it something other than what it was intended to be. Rather, he is choosing to let the poem die because that is what the poem is supposed to do. This essay concludes with a discussion of the political implications of acknowledging the ephemerality of digital media, the resistant potential of the poem when its ephemerality is embraced, and some ways in which archivists can preserve the memory of the poem without necessarily preserving the poem itself

Theoretical Video Game Analysis: The Creation of Experience

The creation of experiences is a focused Masters by Research thesis in the field of media and specifically game studies. The purpose of this study is to introduce and investigate the effects of game design, specifically through the open world genre on the player's experience. This approach involves applying a phenomenological theory to games participation in order to analyses the ways in which narratives are unfolded for the gamer. This thesis specifically aims to determine how the individual gaming sessions determines the connection one makes in order to create memorable and meaningful participation. Qualitative research was conducted, such as observation and textual analysis, to collect material and evidence to support the subject of the thesis. Features include: comprehensive approaches and theory for analysing video games: exploration of the methodology to provide new perspective on video games both as an art and as a cultural medium: accounts of specific case studies as a focal point expanding on the academic, social and cultural dynamics of video games. The meaning games create whilst experiencing the content, cannot be defined and to a certain degree identified until brought into the range of human interaction. These features, combined within this thesis, allow for the conclusion that the experience of playing a game depends on the individual and their formulation of the subjective projection of the content. This thesis hopes to offer access to further research and detailed analysis, and thus make a small contribution to improving the understanding on the connection between the player[s], hardware and the software

Mosaic narrative a poetics of cinematic new media narrative

This thesis proposes the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative as a tool for theorising the creation and telling of cinematic stories in a digital environment. As such the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is designed to assist creators of new media narrative to design dramatically compelling screen based stories by drawing from established theories of cinema and emerging theories of new media. In doing so it validates the crucial element of cinematic storytelling in the digital medium, which due to its fragmentary, variable and re-combinatory nature, affords the opportunity for audience interaction. The Poetics of Mosaic Narrative re-asserts the dramatic and cinematic nature of narrative in new media by drawing upon the dramatic theory of Aristotle’s Poetics, the cinematic theories of the 1920s Russian Film Theorists and contemporary Neo-Formalists, the narrative theories of the 1960s French Structuralists, and the scriptwriting theories of contemporary cinema. In particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the prominent new media theorist, Lev Manovich, as a means of investigating and creating a practical poetics. The key element of the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is the expansion of the previously forgotten and undeveloped Russian Formalist concept of cinematurgy which is vital to the successful development of new media storytelling theory and practice. This concept, as originally proposed but not elaborated by Kazansky, encompasses the notion of the creation of cinematic new media narrative as a mosaic – integrally driven by the narrative systems of plot, as well as the cinematic systems of visual style created by the techniques of cinema- montage, cinematography and mise-en-scene

Symbolic Computation of Sequential Equilibria

The sequential equilibrium is a standard solution concept for extensive-form games with imperfect information that includes an explicit representation of the players' beliefs. An assessment consisting of a strategy and a belief is a sequential equilibrium if it satisfies the properties of sequential rationality and consistency. Our main result is that both properties together can be written as a single finite system of polynomial equations and inequalities. The solutions to this system are exactly the sequential equilibria of the game. We construct this system explicitly and describe an implementation that solves it using cylindrical algebraic decomposition. To write consistency as a finite system of equations, we need to compute the extreme directions of a set of polyhedral cones. We propose a modified version of the double description method, optimized for this specific purpose. To the best of our knowledge, our implementation is the first to symbolically solve general finite imperfect information games for sequential equilibria.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at AAMAS 202