Indoor Fireworks: The Pleasures of Digital Game Pyrotechnics

Fireworks in games translate the sensory power of a real-world aesthetic form to the realm of digital simulation and gameplay. Understanding the role of fireworks in games can best be pursued through through a threefold aesthetic perspective that focuses on the senses, on art, and on the aesthetic experience that gives pleasure through the player’s participation in the simulation, gameplay and narrative potentials of fireworks. In games ranging from Wii Sports and Fantavision, to Okami and Assassin’s Creed II, digital fireworks are employed as a light effect, and are also the site for  gameplay pleasures that include design and performance, timing and rhythm, and power and awe. Fireworks also gain narrative significance in game forms through association with specific sequences and characters. Ultimately, understanding the role of fireworks in games provokes us to reverse the scrutiny, and to consider games as fireworks, through which we experience ludic festivity and voluptuous panic

Indoor Fireworks: The Pleasures of Digital Game Pyrotechnics

Fireworks in games translate the sensory power of a real-world aesthetic form to the realm of digital simulation and gameplay. Understanding the role of fireworks in games can best be pursued through through a threefold aesthetic perspective that focuses on the senses, on art, and on the aesthetic experience that gives pleasure through the player’s participation in the simulation, gameplay and narrative potentials of fireworks. In games ranging from Wii Sports and Fantavision, to Okami and Assassin’s Creed II, digital fireworks are employed as a light effect, and are also the site for  gameplay pleasures that include design and performance, timing and rhythm, and power and awe. Fireworks also gain narrative significance in game forms through association with specific sequences and characters. Ultimately, understanding the role of fireworks in games provokes us to reverse the scrutiny, and to consider games as fireworks, through which we experience ludic festivity and voluptuous panic

Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts emotion recognition accuracy

Recent work (Rychlowska et al., 2015) demonstrated the power of a relatively new cultural dimension, historical heterogeneity, in predicting cultural differences in the endorsement of emotion expression norms. Historical heterogeneity describes the number of source countries that have contributed to a country's present-day population over the last 500 years. People in cultures originating from a large number of source countries may have historically benefited from greater and clearer emotional expressivity, because they lacked a common language and well-established social norms. We therefore hypothesized that in addition to endorsing more expressive display rules, individuals from heterogeneous cultures will also produce facial expressions that are easier to recognize by people from other cultures. By reanalyzing cross-cultural emotion recognition data from 92 papers and 82 cultures, we show that emotion expressions of people from heterogeneous cultures are more easily recognized by observers from other cultures than are the expressions produced in homogeneous cultures. Heterogeneity influences expression recognition rates alongside the individualism-collectivism of the perceivers' culture, as more individualistic cultures were more accurate in emotion judgments than collectivistic cultures. This work reveals the present-day behavioral consequences of long-term historical migration patterns and demonstrates the predictive power of historical heterogeneity

The effect of embodying the elderly on time perception

The present study investigated the perception of stimulus durations represented by elderly faces or by young faces. In a temporal bisection task, participants classified intermediate durations as more similar to a short or a long reference duration. The results showed that the durations represented by elderly faces were less often classified as "long" than the durations represented by young faces. According to internal clock models of time perception, this shortening effect is due to a slowing down of the speed of the internal clock during the perception of elderly faces. Analyses also revealed an interaction between sex of face and sex of participant such that this shortening effect occurred only when the participants share the same sex than the stimulus faces. As discussed, this finding is quite consistent with embodied cognition approaches to information processing, but alternatives accounts are also considered

Shadowplay: Simulated Illumination in Game Worlds

It has long been a commonplace in gaming communities that "good graphics does not equal good gameplay." This sentiment is amplified in the title of a Game Developers Conference 2003 presentation "Great game graphics . . . Who cares?" Originally growing partly out of resistance to hardware industry agendas, this platitude has, in extreme expressions, ossified into a simple and ultimately less-than-useful dichotomy. But given the capacity to dynamically engage the senses that is inherent in interactive media, a better question for us to pose is "what sort of visual experiences best support gameplay?" One way to approach this rather large question is to focus upon our experience of simulated illumination in gaming environments. For, despite skepticism towards game graphics, the fact is that there are currently a number of very enjoyable games in which light plays a key role. In "Thief 2"and ""Silent Hill 3"," categorized as "first person sneaker" and "survival/horror" games, respectively, a consideration of light can be found not only in the way in which the game spaces are illuminated, but also in the sensorium that is encoded into the game’s AI. In this sense, both players and non-playing characters respond to illumination decisions made by game designers and the gamers themselves. But before we investigate illumination decisions further, it is necessary to create a framework for analyzing the contribution of simulated illumination to the gaming experience. Quite clearly, we lack a vocabulary with which to speak and think about light in games and the effect upon the player. This paper will argue that a foundational understanding for studying lighting design in game environments can be forged by first surveying existing illumination practices. Pre-rendered 3d computer animation is created using similar digital tools, and the field has begun to develop it own form of cinematography. But the free navigation afforded by games requires us to look to other practices outside of filmic media, such as architectural lighting. Finally, games as interactive experiences must be examined for their own unique potentials. After all, in a game the player sees and is seen, illuminates and is illuminated in turn. The possibilities to manipulate light both as media convention and as sensory phenomenon, within an interactive environment of growing visual richness, makes game lighting one of the most intriguing areas of future design practice. I will begin by contending that it makes sense, from both a game development and research perspective, to consider simulated illumination as an independent element of the gaming experience. Whether one is a programmer or digital artist working at a game company, or a gamer using a level editor to produce something for their own enjoyment, there is a cluster of design decisions around the problem of light that can be made well or poorly. Light contributes powerfully to the "gameplay gestalt," defined by Craig Lindley as "a particular way of thinking about the game state from the perspective of a player, together with a pattern of repetitive perceptual, cognitive, and motor operations." (Lindley, 2002) Finally, if we hope that games might touch the same profound places that dreams do, I believe that illumination has an important role to play. We must, however, consider digital games not just as a repository for existing lighting practices, but also as a forum from which unique contributions to aesthetic expression can emerge. One of the most interesting experiences I have had in "Thief" 2" is the development of a kind of self-reflexive awareness about illumination. The degree to which one is present in light or darkness in a scene strongly affects one’s fortunes in the game, and is fed back to the player through the "glowing crystal" in the interface. This dynamic awareness is radically different from watching a movie, and even has the capacity to alter one’s sensitivity to illumination after one leaves the game. The contribution from the interface engages the player in the sort of "double consciousness" of the game as both mediated and directly felt that is, according to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, one of the most promising areas of future game development. (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004). Illumination decisions in games take many forms, are made by both designers and players, and have strategic and tactical consequences for the game experience. But whether one is seeking to evoke a world or set up the conditions for perception and interaction, light allows us to advance our goals for the felt game experience, be they the evocation of suspense, dread, comfort or ecstatic abandon. Light engages us through our bodies, our nervous systems. Digital games, in which light is made present through a combination of media conventions, computer graphics algorithms and sensory phenomena, thus represent an arena in which the aesthetics of light and the mechanics of perception are open for exploration and redefinition by designers and players alike. References: Lindley, Craig (2002). "The Gameplay Gestalt" in CGDC Conference Proceedings, Tampere, Finland. Salen, K. and Eric Zimmerman (2004) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, Cambridge MA

Das Medienprojekt "Auf die Deutschen zugehen" als intra-kulturelles Informations- und Reflexionsmedium von ERASMUS-/SOKRATES- und Programmstudierenden im Studienstandort Mainz.

Dieser Beitrag ist ein Ausschnitt aus der Praxis und berichtet über die Zusammenarbeit mit zwölf kontinuierlich aktiven Erasmus-/Sokrates- und Programm-Studierenden der Mittel-/Oberstufe

Ubc9 fusion-directed SUMOylation (UFDS

Abstract SUMOylation is a post-translational modification that is involved in the regulation of proteins of different cellular processes. Dependent on the transient, small SUMOylated portion of most target proteins, it is difficult to identify and characterize this modification and its functions, and it is even more difficult to study the interplay between SUMOylation and other modifications on a specific protein. To facilitate the analysis of protein SUMOylation and its interplay with other protein modifications, the UFDS (Ubc9 fusion-directed SUMOylation) system has been developed. The identification of new SUMOylation substrates and the elucidation of the interplay between STAT1 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 1) phosphorylation and SUMOylation demonstrate UFDS as a useful tool for analysing protein SUMOylation