Reflexivity, methodology and contexts in participatory digital media research: making games with Latin American youth in London

In this paper, I intend to explore the role played by reflexivity in grounding a more critical perspective when designing, implementing and analysing participatory digital media research. To carry out this methodological reflection, I will present and discuss a recently concluded research project on young people’s game-making in an after-school programme targeting Latin American migrants in London/UK. I will pay special attention to how my subjectivities influenced planning, data generation and analysis of this programme, and to how context, lived experiences, curricular decisions and interpersonal relationships shaped the kinds of knowledge produced through this research. Findings emerging from this experience included relevant dissonances between curricular design/decisions and the use of participatory approaches in game-making, and the limitations of traditional analytical categories within the Social Sciences field (e.g., gender and intersectionality) to understanding subjectivities expressed through game-making. This study offers relevant insights into the place of reflexivity in research on digital media production by young people by highlighting its complexity and by calling for more critical and less homogenising approaches to this type of research

Korean Soap Operas, Telenovelas and Sci-fi Conspiracies: A Game-making Experience with Latin American Youth in London

This paper explores a game-making programme for 14 Latin American migrants aged 13-18 in London/UK, carried out between October/2017-January/2018, where I investigated the relationships between game conventions, platforms and personal preferences in the curation of fluid identities through game production. Participants presented varying levels of affinity with games linked both to access issues and to other specific elements (e.g. perception of games in contemporary culture, gender). Questionnaires, observations, unstructured/semistructured interviews and gaming archives were employed to explore this participatory initiative and data was analysed through Multimodal Sociosemiotics. Findings remarked how shared understandings about digital games can find their way into platforms and act as “cultural-technical gatekeepers”, supporting or hindering the engagement with game-making of those often perceived as outsiders to gaming culture. This gatekeeping happens when there are “creative dissonances” between, for example, personal preferences and platforms aligned to normative/mainstream genres. These dissonances, however, can end up fostering subversive designs, contravening gaming conventions and potentially challenging traditional gaming boundaries. This insight is relevant for understanding “cultural-technical constraints” and subversive/non-mainstream game-making, especially in relation to innovation and appropriation of game-making resources/strategies by non-mainstream groups

“Emergent countries play, too!”: The Zeebo console as a (partial) decolonial project

The present paper discusses questions related to the histories of videogames, more specifically in how we approach videogames in Global South. By using Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s as an epistemic tool, I discuss the limitations of universalist, mainstream-centric epistemological models for exploring videogames as cultural phenomena. By investigating Zeebo’s discourses about piracy and players in the Global South, I argue that this platform can be seen as a partial decolonial project, destabilising conventional historical narratives about South-North relationships in videogames, but refraining from challenging a mainstream, Global North oriented epistemology. This exploratory work, therefore, elaborates on how a decolonial project of history of videogames, one that is more epistemically just to Global South, could be sought

Exploring game grammars: a sociosemiotic account of young people’s game-making practices

This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames

Studies on Systematic Effects of the Trigger on Flavour Tagging at the Generator Level

In this note is presented the systematic effect in the flavour tagging due to the trigger selection. We present a possible way to correct for the different wrong tagging rates for control and signal channels needed for the evaluation of some of the CP asymmetries that will be measured in the experiment. This study is performed at the generator level and uses as decays, Bs2DsPi as the control channel and Bs2PsiPhi and Bs2KK as signal channels

Hlt1 Muon Alley Description

This note describes the LHCb Hlt1 muon alley, which is part of the High Level Trigger. It is intended to confirm the L0 muon trigger and reduce the bandwidth. The performance presented here is done using about 1000 simulated data of some relevant muon channels and 200k of minimum bias events

Contribuição da física do solo aos estudos sobre manejo e conservação do solo.

Identificação morfológica e classificação do solo do local do experimento; Caracterização física e hídrica do solo; Determinação da percentagem de agregados por via úmida (método opcional); Descrição de perfil de solo (modelo); Ficha de análises físicas e químicas do perfil (modelo); Modelos de legenda e de tabelas para apresentação de resultados de caracterização física do solo.bitstream/item/36146/1/Contribuicao-da-Fisica.pd

Determinação da umidade a 1/10 de atmosfera na terra fina pela "mesa de tensão".

É apresentado um método opcional para a determinação da umidade a 1/10 de atmosfera ou para valores mais baixos de tensão, em amostras de solo (terra fina), utilizando-se a "mesa de tensão" desenvolvida por Oliveira.bitstream/item/36224/1/Determinacao.pd