Video games as American popular culture

Video games have moved, possibly surpassing even movies, into a central role in American popular culture in a relatively short time, and today there is increasing evidence that the video game console –to some extent, as much as the personal computer– has emerged as a central media device through which “convergence culture” is taking place. In the world of massively multiplayer online games, new (and very real) economies and cultures have evolved with striking rapidity, while on a very different scale we see casual games like Angry Birds (2009) and Candy Crush (2012) increasingly becoming integrated into the rhythms of everyday life. Perhaps more than any other aspect of popular culture, video games have blurred the distinction between work and play; the games we play (and work at) tell us about American popular culture and where it is going

The experience and exploration of worlds in single-player video games

The author indicates a few of the most common experiences that are encountered, particularly in single-player open-world games where exploration of the world plays a large part of the enjoyment of a game. The experiences mentioned in the essay are: arrival in the world, the gaining of an objective, the revelation of the expansiveness of the world, the first contact with the world’s residents, world routines, travel to the world’s boundaries, and the completist’s exhaustion of the world when one has seen and experienced everything.The author indicates a few of the most common experiences that are encountered, particularly in single-player open-world games where exploration of the world plays a large part of the enjoyment of a game. The experiences mentioned in the essay are: arrival in the world, the gaining of an objective, the revelation of the expansiveness of the world, the first contact with the world’s residents, world routines, travel to the world’s boundaries, and the completist’s exhaustion of the world when one has seen and experienced everything

Non-Abelian Tensor Multiplet Equations from Twistor Space

We establish a Penrose-Ward transform yielding a bijection between holomorphic principal 2-bundles over a twistor space and non-Abelian self-dual tensor fields on six-dimensional flat space-time. Extending the twistor space to supertwistor space, we derive sets of manifestly N=(1,0) and N=(2,0) supersymmetric non-Abelian constraint equations containing the tensor multiplet. We also demonstrate how this construction leads to constraint equations for non-Abelian supersymmetric self-dual strings.Comment: v3: 23 pages, revised version published in Commun. Math. Phy

Tunneling Conductance Between Parallel Two Dimensional Electron Systems

We derive and evaluate expressions for the low temperature {\it dc} equilibrium tunneling conductance between parallel two-dimensional electron systems. Our theory is based on a linear-response formalism and on impurity-averaged perturbation theory. The disorder broadening of features in the dependence of tunneling conductance on sheet densities and in-plane magnetic field strengths is influenced both by the finite lifetime of electrons within the wells and by non-momentum-conserving tunneling events. Disorder vertex corrections are important only for weak in-plane magnetic fields and strong interwell impurity-potential correlations. We comment on the basis of our results on the possibility of using tunneling measurements to determine the lifetime of electrons in the quantum wells.Comment: 14 pages, 5 Fig. not included, revtex, IUcm92-00

Anagram Sudoku (No.1)

The Anagram Sudoku is a new type of word puzzle that I invented recently. It officially makes its debut in this issue of Word Ways, and will later appear, with others, in my work-in-progress book, 101 Enigmatic Puzzles

Disk winds of B[e] supergiants

The class of B[e] supergiants is characterized by a two-component stellar wind consisting of a normal hot star wind in the polar zone and a slow and dense disk-like wind in the equatorial region. The properties of the disk wind are discussed using satellite UV spectra of stars seen edge-on, i.e. through the equatorial disk. These observations show that the disk winds are extremely slow, 50-90 km/s, i.e. a factor of about 10 slower than expected from the spectral types. Optical emission lines provide a further means to study the disk wind. This is discussed for line profiles of forbidden lines formed in the disk.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX, 3 ps figures, uses lamuphys.sty from Springer-Verlag, to be published in the proceedings of IAU Coll. 169 "Variable and Non-spherical Stellar Winds in Luminous Hot Stars" held in Heidelberg 199

Eta invariants for flat manifolds

Using H. Donnelly result from the article "Eta Invariants for G-Spaces" we calculate the eta invariants of the signature operator for almost all 7-dimensional flat manifolds with cyclic holonomy group. In all cases this eta invariants are an integer numbers. The article was motivated by D. D. Long and A. Reid article "On the geometric boundaries of hyperbolic 4-manifolds, Geom. Topology 4, 2000, 171-178Comment: 18 pages, a new version with referees comment

Lifetime of Two-Dimensional Electrons Measured by Tunneling Spectroscopy

For electrons tunneling between parallel two-dimensional electron systems, conservation of in-plane momentum produces sharply resonant current-voltage characteristics and provides a uniquely sensitive probe of the underlying electronic spectral functions. We report here the application of this technique to accurate measurements of the temperature dependence of the electron-electron scattering rate in clean two-dimensional systems. Our results are in qualitative agreement with existing calculations.Comment: file in REVTEX format produces 11 pages, 3 figures available from [email protected]