Parody Microbloggers as Chroniclers and Commentators on Russian Political Reality

In the political environment of contemporary Russia, government-controlled media dominate the discourse. However, the Internet still provides a platform for – and visibility to – alternative voices and ideas. Parody microblogging is a popular recent phenomenon of Russian-language social media. Users with satire accounts utilize the names of power holders, publish links to the news, and provide opinion and contextualization, as well as offering satirical commentary on corruption, the management of the country and media propaganda. This article studies the function of parody framing in critical microblogging in the Russian-language Twitter. It discusses accounts spoofing the elites as tactical media that disrupt the hegemonic discourse and interpret political reality for the Russian digital audience

First Person vs. Third Person Perspective in Digital Games: Do Player Preferences Affect Immersion?

Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives

Fashion Media and Sustainability

Fashion is among the biggest polluters, yet the media still promote throwaway fast fashion. Based on analysis of 1000+ media artefacts, this policy brief identifies patterns in the way journalists and influencers cover fashion which contribute to unsustainable buying behaviours. Researcher Anastasia Denisova proposes new regulatory measures and a more responsible approach from magazines and other media promoting more sustainable coverage of fashion topics

Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience

Good gaming experiences hinge on players being able to have a balance between challenge and skill. However, achieving that balance is challenging, so dynamic difficulty adjustment offers the opportunity to provide better gaming experiences through adapting the challenge in the game to suit an individual’s capabilities. The risk though is that in adapting the difficulty, players do not get a true sense of challenge, but rather some tailored, perhaps watered down experience. In this note, we report on a study, in which we used time manipulation as a method of simple adaptation in order to explore its effect on player experience (PX) and performance. Volunteers played a game in which the timer was adjusted based on their performance in the game, however they were not aware of the feature. The results showed that players in the experimental group found the game more immersive. This provides empirical support that dynamic difficulty adjustment could be used to improve the PX

The Placebo Effect in Digital Games

Play-testing of digital games is a crucial part of any game development process, used to gather feedback about the game and correct any existing and potential flaws with the design. However, due to the nature of human subject testing, the feedback being collected in such experiments is prone to biases. Players' expectations play a great role in dictating their gaming experience, which means the information players receive before trying a new game, as well as the knowledge they already possess, may affect their perception and experience of the game. Two studies were conducted in order to evaluate how priming players to expect a game technology can positively influence their experience. The results supported the hypothesis that even basic instructions can change players' perception of the game, and lead to a higher level of perceived immersion when knowing that the game contains an improved feature, the adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), while it is not present in the game

How to define 'viral' for media studies?

In this editorial for WPCC’s ‘Viral Media’ issue the author asks whether the metaphor of viral media has held up well since it was coined. Considering the debate she suggests a clear distinction – notwithstanding the major role of technology – of viral media, when compared to biological viruses, which is the role of emotions in driving virality. This is what ‘distinguishes the biological “virus” from its psychologically driven communication counterpart’. ‘Viral’ is indeed an ‘imperfect term for rapid spread of information’ but viral media items still have the potential to deliver ‘progressive ideas’. This editorial notes how the contents of the issue plays host to a variety of fresh perspectives in its themes such as corrupted play, journalistic choice, viral politics, voice and nostalgia. It also notes, referring to the issue’s interview with Kishonna Gray, the dangers of platforms simply standing aside to allow toxic viral messaging and racism. It may be impossible to counter ‘morally ambivalent’ memes with regulatory or any other kind of ‘vaccines’ though it might, the author concludes, ‘be reasonable to limit the expanse of the viral flows and to question the algorithmic patterns of digital platforms’ even as memes’ popularity and resistance to total marketing control preserve their continuing (if somewhat tarnished) reputation as a ‘digital darling’

Viral journalism. Strategy, tactics and limitations of the fast spread of content on social media: case study of the UK quality publications

Journalism has been under much strain in the recent decades. It has had to adapt to the changing rhythms of media consumption as much as to the benevolence of social media networks that constantly change algorithms of how journalism is displayed. At the same time, viral communication of all sorts – from memes to GIFs and widespread amateur entertaining videos – is seen by millions. The purpose of this article is to examine the effort of online journalism to compete with viral storytelling. ‘Viral journalism’ is defined as the strategy and tactics to promote quality media stories on the internet in order to gain maximum exposure and sharing. This phenomenon is not to be mistaken with ‘clickbait’, which entails catchy, but often misleading, headlines. This article is based on qualitative interviews with a variety of social media editors and other journalists in the UK: from The Economist to The Guardian. It reveals that quality UK media deploy a range of inventive engaging tactics, but reject virality as a long-term strategy. The media professionals interviewed raised many concerns about virality, indicating that exploiting viral technics may results in reputational damage and alienating loyal readers

The Convergence of Player Experience Questionnaires

Player experience is an important field of digital games research to understand how games influence players. A common way to directly measure players’ reported experiences is through questionnaires. However, the large number of questionnaires currently in use introduces several challenges both in terms of selecting suitable measures and comparing results across studies. In this paper, we review some of the most widely known and used questionnaires and focus on the immersive experience questionnaire (IEQ), the game engagement questionnaire (GEQ), and the player experience of need satisfaction (PENS), with the aim to position each of them in relation to each other. This was done through an online survey, in which we gathered 270 responses from players about their most recent experience of a digital game. Our findings show considerable convergence between these three questionnaires and that there is room to refine them into a more widely applicable measure of general game engagement

Challenge in Digital Games: Towards Developing a Measurement Tool

Challenge is arguably the most important experience that players seek in digital games. However, without a measure of how challenged players feel during the act of play, it is hard to design games that are neither too easy nor too hard and, therefore, truly enjoyable. Especially in industry, challenge is dominantly assessed by means of manual play testing in ad-hoc trials. The aim of this research is to create a more systematic, complete, and reliable instrument to evaluate the level of players' experienced challenge in games in the form of a questionnaire. This paper presents the key results from an extensive literature survey which will inform further development. We survey definitions of challenge, challenge types, and their relation to player experience based on the observations of game designers. We furthermore draw from empirical findings in a diverse range of fields such as game studies, human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI)