Analysis of Russian and global game studies: ludology vs. narratology

The author reviews the past-to-present academic literature on game studies from the perspective of ludology and narratology. The academic study of video games has grown substantially since 2001 - the year Game Studies started publishing its first articles. Yet both ludology and narratology remain a particularly new field, especially in the Russian academic field, and many of its discussed themes have yet to attain widespread recognition. The academic articles published between 2017 and 2022 were reviewed to provide understanding of the current state of the research on ludology and narratology in various research areas. The corpus was gathered by searching publications in international database Scopus. Each article was categorized according to the type of database, period of time, the country of publication, the field of study and the frequency of citations. The applied method of quantitative research allows tracking the development of research within five years in the field of game studies. Several proposals for further research in this field were put forward. The main hypothesis of this work is that one type of methodology is more applicable than the other, considering the background. The author concludes that one type of methodology can prevail in research - depending on the region of the published article

Impact of the Level and Structure of the Tax Burden on Citizens Inequality

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of the structure and level of the tax burden on inequality of citizens, using the example of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The hypothesis was that the structure and level of the tax burden affect citizens inequality. This hypothesis was tested using a correlation and regression analysis of the dependence of citizens inequality level on the tax burden structure by decomposing it into separate taxes. The Gini coefficient and the share of income of the tenth decile group were chosen as indicators of inequality. The calculations were carried out using the Data Analysis in MS Excel for the years 2000 and 2020 on the basis of statistical data from the World Bank and OECD. The data set formed for the study contains about 1 thousand indicators. The share of all taxes in GDP has the closest relationship with inequality: it explains the dynamics of the level of inequality by 53–74%. The severity of the tax burden has a more significant impact on inequality than its structure. The decrease or increase in the share of a tax in the structure of the tax burden characterizes the weakening or strengthening of the impact of this tax on inequality. The change in the structure of the tax burden in OECD countries in 2020 compared to 2000 contributed to the smoothing of citizens inequality by increasing the share of income tax while reducing the share of indirect taxes. The relationship between the indicators of tax burden and inequality is non-linear. It fits into the concept of A. Laffer. Establishing the type of this dependence will make it possible to solve the problem of optimizing the structure of tax burden in order to smooth inequality

Optical Absorption and Raman Spectroscopy Study of the Fluorinated Double-Wall Carbon Nanotubes

Double-wall carbon nanotube (DWNT) samples have been fluorinated at room temperature with varied concentration of a fluorinating agent BrF3. Content of the products estimated from X-ray photoelectron data was equal to CF0.20 and CF0.29 in the case of deficit and excess of BrF3. Raman spectroscopy showed considerable decrease of carbon nanotube amount in the fluorinated samples. Analysis of optical absorption spectra measured for pristine and fluorinated DWNT samples revealed a selectivity of carbon nanotube fluorination. Nanotubes with large chiral angle are more inert to the fluorinating agent used