Motivations of professional strippers

This research studied 470 different strippers across the globe through a content analysis of messages exchanged in a stripper-oriented discussion group. Stripping literature has primarily focused on the external rewards of stripping and has found that the primary motivation for engaging in stripping is the economic gain. This research revealed that there are other motivations to stripping beside just economic. Nonmonetary motivations were significantly important to the strippers; and were discussed more than monetary motivations. Significant unexpected findings included the fact that strippers feel that their job is similar to service type jobs. Multivariate analyses revealed that strippers who discuss non-economic motivations also tended to express economic motivations. Strippers who did hold monetary motivations were very unlikely to participate in any extra sexual favors or go to any illegal extent to make money. This is also contrary to the commonly reported interpretation that strippers are motivated only by economic rewards

H.E.L.P : A creative exercise in feminism and the buddy comedy.

This screenplay attempts to reconcile the author\u27s confusion on how to best enact social progress by examining and satirizing several competing feminist movements. Set in an off-kilter Los Angeles, the comedy tracks Alivia, a recent PhD grad who cannot leverage her education toward finding a job. In desperation, she joins a radical organization called the H.E.L.P. (Heroines for the Elimination of Loathsome Professors), which encourages her to take matters into her own hands. Inverting tropes from buddy comedies, cop-shows, ghost stories, and Bond movies, the screenplay grapples with how women are meant to break the glass ceiling and it may never fully come to an answer. In its current form, the screenplay is messy and unfocused; it is the hope of the author that the screenplay shows the active process of integrating academic discourse into an extremely silly comedy

Video Game Sound as Educational Space

Synergizing fields such as music theory, computing, musicology, cognition, and psychology, scholars and practitioners have approached game music from many directions. However, research on pedagogical usages of game music is still emerging. While many education scholars have researched game-based-learning (Bourgonjon et al, 2013; Simões, Redondo, & Vilas, 2013; Beavis, Muspratt, & Thompson, 2015; Hamari et al, 2016), music education authors have largely remained distant from ludomusicology (the study of music as it relates to play). I intend to bridge that gap by examining the intersections of game music and sound, player interaction, and learning. My research synthesizes the work of Naxer (2020) and Grasso (2020), as the latter has studied affective player experience regarding music and the former has considered the pedagogical implications of game elements in a music learning environment. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore experiences related to learning and sound in video games. I sought to answer the following research questions: How do players construct meaning from game sound? What are the educational spaces created by the interaction of game sound and players? Participants (N = 9) engaged in a virtual focus group interview designed around the popular model of Twitch streaming, as well as subsequent individual virtual interviews. I used an iterative coding process to analyze interview transcripts and Zoom chat text, through which themes of kinesonority and affect emerged

Batastrophe

Batastrophe is a four-player, split-screen, asymmetrical party game made in the Unity engine, utilizing four standard gamepads. One player is a bat, flying through the environment, while the other three players are humans trying to catch and remove the bat player from their house. The goal of the bat player is to damage as much of the environment as possible, while the goal of the human players is to eliminate the bat player quickly, keeping destruction to a minimum. Players take turns controlling the bat, competing to reach the highest score across four rounds. Each player has one turn as the bat and three as a character pursuing the bat

A decalogue to designing time loops in video games

Games have a history of repetition, from the days at the arcade where death meant meeting a paywall or restarting another day. To the first home consoles with short but difficult games where players restarted over and over from the first level when they got out of lives. Eventually games evolved into more and more accessible ways to let players save and load whenever needed, being able to finish longer and longer games in different sessions. As a result now replaying was out of the box, saving before a difficult encounter, loading an earlier state if the result of the players actions were unsatisfactory, etc. Leading to game design with bigger maps with more things to do and well, repeat. From 2017 and onwards a series of games launched to the market: Sexy Brutale (2017), Minit (2018), Outer Wilds (2019), Twelve Minutes (2021), Deathloop (2021) among others, some of these heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000). These games follow a simple rule that changes how they are perceived and played: A time limitation, in these games the clock is constantly ticking against the player and when the time limit finally arrives players are set back to the starting position of the game (or last checkpoint). Similarly to the games on the arcades or home consoles but not dependent on player skill within the movements of the player character inside the game. Instead the challenge proposition comes from the missing information about their surroundings, player actions within them and most importantly the constant changes that happen to the game world with the pass of time. Via the repetition of the time loop the players can learn the “whats” and “whens” of the world, learning the schedule of the things and interact with it. Getting access to new parts of the game gradually unlocking it as they get more knowledgeable about the loop as if playing a metroidvania whereas instead of getting new abilities they receive useful information. Until they master the time loop they are trapped in and become proficient traveling within it and eventually finish the game. This paper researches the answers to a question; What differentiates what makes a game with time loops from any other and how to design and develop them. Threatening the relation the player has with the game world exploring what makes a game into one of the genre, studying the state of the art and analyzing fully develop games in order to create guidelines to further help game developers that are faced with the challenge of designing a game with time loops as one of its fundamental pillars. And with those guidelines creating a level design document of our own to validate the assumptions and statements made after the research

Design and Evaluate Support for Non-musicians’ Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces

PhD thesis and supplementary videos produced in support of explaining the prototypes designed and used in PhD thesisIn the past few decades of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies, experience related topics are proposed as central concerns beyond usability when designing an interactive system. Based on two existing research frameworks within HCI: creativity support and engagement, this research contributes to this trend by asking how to design and evaluate support for novices’ creative engagement with digital interfaces. Drawing on HCI theories of experience, flow, engagement, and research on creative engagement in different domains, this research defines creative engagement as when the user is engaged in an active and constructive cognitive process, and in pursuit of a creative outcome. This thesis presents findings from three case studies to explore the effects of factors that might affect non-musicians’ creative engagement while musicking with interactive music systems. These factors include 1) the control metaphors of interfaces (painterly control metaphor and reactive control metaphor), 2) the task motivations (experiential and utilitarian goal) and features of musicking modes (replay and edit records), 3) the abstract visual stimuli (abstract and straightforward graphical scores, participants playing with or without design information). Based on a number of empirical findings, a systematic understanding of the effects of factors that may influence novices’ creative engagement and a descriptive model of creative engagement are proposed and discussed. This research has direct implications for the design of similar musical interfaces for novices in fields such as New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), as well as interfaces that are aimed at engaging non-experts in creative activities in HCI. Moreover, the mixed-methods approach adopted in this thesis provides informative evidence to conclude the research questions. The empirical evidence that the correlations between participants’ subjective feedback on creative engagement also suggests the potential of using the mixed-methods approach to evaluate creative engagement

Social networks as glocal products: The case of Facebook

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsThe appropriateness of following a globally standardized or locally adapted strategy in global marketing has been subject of an on-going debate for several decades. However, little research exists of how to follow standardization and adaptation (s/a) simultaneously and to take advantage of both strategies, in brief how to follow a GloCal approach. Thus, the purpose of this case study is to generate theoretical insights of how to follow a GloCal strategy, based on the case of Facebook. After reviewing critical points of current knowledge in the field of s/a, qualitative research via open-ended in-depth interviews from a sample of Facebook users from 16 different countries was conducted. The outcome supports that common needs and individual usage behavior of Facebook users favor a strategy that is simultaneously standardized and adapted, within different aspects of the product element. Results are presented narratively intertwined with theory and prior study results. Findings reveal that Facebook is following a GloCal approach. By abstracting from the case of Facebook to a general level theoretical insights are gained of how to follow s/a simultaneously. This work contributes to existing theory, since it is a starting point to close the research gap of how to follow s/a simultaneously in international marketing. Additionally, it exhibits the significance and importance of the GloCal approach. Regarding practitioners this work provides guidance on how to create synergies, while considering differences within their international marketing strategies

Games literacy and gaming capital : a theoretical and practical examination

The goal of this study is to examine the notion of video game literacy and gaming capital from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The study outlines a series of concepts to refine the ideas of gaming literacy, gaming capital, and how they interconnect, comparing those notions of literacy with learning to read and write traditional text. Concepts from the field of cognitive sciences are introduced to further discuss the idea of how people learn through action, how that action allows them to make more informed judgments in the future, and how digital games in particular enable players to learn as they play. A practical experiment is then engineered based on this research to test these concepts in practice, by observing test subjects of varying skill levels playing Super Mario Bros., and judging their ability to learn as they play in order to observe their personal capacity for games literacy, and observing the practical differences between games-literate players and non-literate players

Zephyr: The Tenth Issue

This is the tenth issue of Zephyr, the University of New England\u27s journal of creative expression. Since 2000, Zephyr has published original drawings, paintings, photography, prose, and verse created by current and former members of the University community. Zephyr\u27s Editorial Board is made up exclusively of matriculating students.https://dune.une.edu/zephyr/1010/thumbnail.jp