No B.S.: The Contemporary Practice of Game Education, Design, and Development

This interview is excerpted from a series we conducted in 2010 with Quentin Rezin, a scripter/level designer at inXile Entertainment (http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/). Prior to joining inXile, Rezin studied computer science at the University of Arkansas and interned at Disney Interactive Studios/Buena Vista Games. He is currently working on Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

Evoking the Inexpressible: The Fine Art and Business of Games

This interview is excerpted from a series we conducted in early 2010 with Brian J. Moriarty,  Professor of Practice at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Moriarty has been developing games for the better part of 30 years, and has worked for Analog, Infocom, LucasArts, Rocket Science, Mpath, Hearme, Skotos Tech, and ImaginEngine. He has produced a host of critically and commercially acclaimed titles, including Wishbringer, Trinity, Beyond Zork, and Loom, which earned MacWorld's Adventure Game of the Year in 1990

Sustaining Software Preservation Efforts Through Use and Communities of Practice

The brief history of software preservation efforts illustrates one phenomenon repeatedly: not unlike spinning a plate on a broomstick, it is easy to get things going, but difficult to keep them stable and moving. Within the context of video games and other forms of cultural heritage (where most software preservation efforts have lately been focused), this challenge has several characteristic expressions, some technical (e.g., the difficulty of capturing and emulating protected binary files and proprietary hardware), and some legal (e.g., providing archive users with access to preserved games in the face of variously threatening end user licence agreements). In other contexts, such as the preservation of research-oriented software, there can be additional challenges, including insufficient awareness and training on unusual (or even unique) software and hardware systems, as well as a general lack of incentive for preserving “old data.” We believe that in both contexts, there is a relatively accessible solution: the fostering of communities of practice. Such groups are designed to bring together like-minded individuals to discuss, share, teach, implement, and sustain special interest groups—in this case, groups engaged in software preservation. In this paper, we present two approaches to sustaining software preservation efforts via community. The first is emphasizing within the community of practice the importance of “preservation through use,” that is, preserving software heritage by staying familiar with how it feels, looks, and works. The second approach for sustaining software preservation efforts is to convene direct and adjacent expertise to facilitate knowledge exchange across domain barriers to help address local needs; a sufficiently diverse community will be able (and eager) to provide these types of expertise on an as-needed basis. We outline here these sustainability mechanisms, then show how the networking of various domain-specific preservation efforts can be converted into a cohesive, transdisciplinary, and highly collaborative software preservation team. [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.

Preface: A Community of Players

The articles in this section were initially developed for and presented at the 2010 conference of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (http://swtxpca.org/). The conference, which began as a small, regional meeting in the 1970s, has since become international in scope, with upwards of a thousand presentations delivered by participants from dozens of countries. Yet despite its size, the conference maintains a friendly, casual, and intellectually robust atmosphere

Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper

Over the last four decades, electronic games have profoundly changed the way people play, learn, and connect with each other. Despite the tremendous impact of electronic games, however, until recently, relatively few programs existed to preserve them for future generations of players and researchers. Recognizing the need to save the original content and intellectual property of electronic games from media rot, obsolescence, and loss, the Game Preservation Special Interest Group of the International Game Developers Association has issued a white paper summarizing why electronic games should be preserved, problems that must be solved to do so, some potential solutions, and why all these issues should matter to everyone interested in electronic games and play in general. In the white paper, the editing of which was partially supported by the Preserving Virtual Worlds project and by funds from the Library of Congress, its editor and six authors (Rachel Donahue created a survey for IGDA members not included in this article) issue a call for heightened awareness of the need to preserve electronic games—endangered by relatively rapid electronic decay and intellectual neglect alike—for play scholarship and for the culture of the twenty-first century

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification

Differences in relative and absolute effectiveness of oral P2Y12 inhibition in men and women: a meta-analysis and modelling study

ObjectiveTo estimate the absolute treatment effects of newer P2Y12 inhibitors (ticagrelor and prasugrel) compared to clopidogrel in men and women with acute coronary syndrome (ACS).MethodsWe searched Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) for randomised controlled trials of oral P2Y12 inhibitors for acute stroke or ACS. Age and sex-specific mortality was obtained for all patients admitted to hospital with myocardial infarction in Scotland from 2006 to 2010 (prior to introduction of prasugrel or ticagrelor).ResultsFrom 9,277 articles, 9 fulfilled our inclusion criteria. Three trials compared newer P2Y12 inhibitors to clopidogrel in ACS, in which the treatment rate ratio (RR) for major adverse cardiovascular events in men was 0.80 (95% CI 0.69 to 0.93). For the same outcome, across all 9 trials the sex-treatment interaction RR was 1.08 (95% CI 0.98 to 1.19). Combining these estimates yielded a treatment RR in women of 0.86 (95% CI 0.72 to 1.04). 17,842 women and 27,818 men were admitted to hospital with myocardial infarction. Mortality was higher for women than men for all-cause (5708, 32.0% versus 5891,21.2%), cardiovascular(4032, 22.6% versus 4117, 14.8%) and bleeding (193, 1.1% versus 228, 0.8%) deaths. On applying the sex-specific RRs to this population, the absolute risk reduction for mortality at 1- year was similar for women and men for all-cause (2.30% (95% CI -0.92 to 5.22) versus 2.47% (95% CI 0.62 to 4.10)), cardiovascular (2.70% (95% CI -0.63 to 5.74)) versus 2.72% (95% CI 0.92 to 4.35)) and bleeding (-0.27% (95% CI -1.06 to 0.30) versus -0.18% (95% CI -0.71 to 0.24)) deaths.ConclusionNewer P2Y12 inhibitors may be slightly less efficacious in women than men, but the absolute risk reduction is similar in both sexes