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Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2020

Ewan Kirkland

This chapter explores how the narrative-based walking simulator What Remains of Edith Finch ludifies traditions of Gothic fiction. Combining Gothic themes of death, the family and…

Abstract

This chapter explores how the narrative-based walking simulator What Remains of Edith Finch ludifies traditions of Gothic fiction. Combining Gothic themes of death, the family and the family curse, the game involves the protagonist investigating her abandoned childhood home where every family member died a dramatic and untimely death. Sealed rooms, preserved since their inhabitants’ demise, contain shrine-like displays including a document of some form allowing players to experience the last moments of each Finch. Play involves penetrating these spaces, according to the ludo-Gothic emphasis on boundary crossing, piecing together interactive narrative fragments consistent with Gothic fiction’s patchwork storytelling. In accessing each lost manuscript, players engage in a generically specific process of multi-media trans-subjectivity, experiencing various first person perspectives and engaging with numerous gameplay interfaces. The title’s series of ambiguous unreliable narratives, its refusal of a consistent subjective position, and unreal dream-like sensation contribute to the game’s Gothic atmosphere. In a restriction of videogame agency and control, consistent with horror games, no player option is available other than to complete each pre-determined death. Gothic pastiche, a compulsion to repeat the past, and the embalming processes of photographic media are variously employed across these sequences. Play evokes the melancholy heroine, consumed by maternal loss, masochistically replaying her family’s sorrowful past, hunting for lost objects and exhuming the ghosts of her history. With its nested narrative, morbid preoccupation and ambivalent supernatural presence, the game effectively translates Gothic traditions into the videogame medium.

Details

Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-037-0

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 May 2023

Jack Theodoulou and Jen Scott Curwood

Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how…

Abstract

Purpose

Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how a teacher adapted their pedagogy to incorporate the young adult videogame (YA game) What Remains of Edith Finch into an English Language Arts curriculum.

Design/methodology/approach

This case study examined the experiences of a classroom teacher and students in a Year 10 English class in Australia. Thematic analysis included a wide range of data, including interviews, surveys, observations and artefacts.

Findings

First, students demonstrated a strong understanding of the game as a narrative text, including essential components of narrative such as plot, characterisation, themes, settings and literary techniques. Second, students experienced a consistently high level of engagement and embodiment throughout the study as a consequence of the interactive, collaborative and multimodal nature of YA games. Third, the teacher discovered that he was able to achieve key curriculum outcomes with the videogame through re-imagining pedagogy.

Originality/value

A playful approach allows teachers and students to be curious about the diverse narrative pathways possible within YA games and offers new opportunities to experience embodiment within and through digital texts.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 22 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2020

Abstract

Details

Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-037-0

Article
Publication date: 1 January 1918

The Milk (Amendment) Order, 1917, which came into force on December 31st, provides that milk shall be sold retail only by Imperial measure; that no colouring matter shall be added…

Abstract

The Milk (Amendment) Order, 1917, which came into force on December 31st, provides that milk shall be sold retail only by Imperial measure; that no colouring matter shall be added to milk or cream intended for sale; that no milk to which any water has been added shall knowingly be sold or offered for sale; that no person may use for the purpose of his trade any milk can or milk bottle which bears the name, trade name, trade mark, or trade device of some person other than himself or his employer, except with the consent of such person. The Order contains a new clause, in substitution for Clauses 4 and 6 of the Milk Order, 1917 (which are revoked), providing that where milk is sold wholesale by or on behalf of any person other than the producer the maximum prices chargeable shall, unless otherwise determined, pursuant to the Order, be as follows:—

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 20 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

Abstract

Details

Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-037-0

Article
Publication date: 1 February 1974

Frances Neel Cheney

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are…

Abstract

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Details

Reference Services Review, vol. 2 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0090-7324

Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2020

Ashley Darrow

Pokémon has proven to be one of the most enduring and successful gaming franchises. Over the last two decades, Pokémon has produced dozens of games, multiple animated shows, and…

Abstract

Pokémon has proven to be one of the most enduring and successful gaming franchises. Over the last two decades, Pokémon has produced dozens of games, multiple animated shows, and several movies. In this time, video games have found a new footing when it comes to approaching death. Titles like A Mortician’s Tale (2017) by Laundry Bear Games have opened up digital gaming as a place, where death can be explored with serious thought and a new emotional depth. A dichotomy has emerged between games that take death seriously and ones that lower death to a mere game mechanic. This chapter looks to bridge that growing divide and explore the pop phenomenon that is Pokémon through the same critical lens that has been used to examine games like A Mortician’s Tale. Ultimately, the Pokémon franchise emerges as capable of thoughtful and provocative conversation about death and dying.

Details

Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-037-0

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2020

Matt Coward-Gibbs

January 2016 saw the final release of Numinous Games’ crowdfunded linear adventure game That Dragon, Cancer. An impactful independent title which subverts many of gaming’s…

Abstract

January 2016 saw the final release of Numinous Games’ crowdfunded linear adventure game That Dragon, Cancer. An impactful independent title which subverts many of gaming’s traditional and valued norms. In less than two hours of abstracted adventure, players are transported through a series of vignettes documenting one family’s struggle with cancer, and the battle faced by their terminally ill child, Joel. Digital memorialisation has been documented by scholars since the late 1990s. This has come in the form of sites specifically created for memorialisation, social networking sites repurposed by their users for memorialisation (MySpace and more recently Facebook), and online virtual worlds (Second Life and World of Warcraft). However, within That Dragon, Cancer the productive nature of grief has created and envisioned a gaming experience purpose-built for memorialisation. This chapter begins by documenting memorialisation within virtual environments. From here, the author turns to consider the way in which That Dragon, Cancer provides a purpose-built space for grief, memorialisation and understanding, focussing on key stylistic and mechanic-based decisions undertaken in the games design. Finally, the author considers the way in which That Dragon, Cancer, through the use of crowdfunding in late 2014, transformed from a project memorialising one child to the memorialisation of many across the globe.

Details

Death, Culture & Leisure: Playing Dead
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-037-0

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 2 October 2023

Toru Yamamori

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General…

Abstract

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

Details

Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including a Selection of Papers Presented at the First History of Economics Diversity Caucus Conference
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-982-6

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 28 January 2014

Martin Spring and Luis Araujo

The paper argues that indirect capabilities – the ability to access other organizations' capabilities – are an important and neglected part of firm strategy in procuring complex…

3604

Abstract

Purpose

The paper argues that indirect capabilities – the ability to access other organizations' capabilities – are an important and neglected part of firm strategy in procuring complex performance (PCP) settings, and that this is especially so if these settings are treated as genuinely complex, rather than merely complicated. Elements of indirect capabilities are identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a theoretical paper, drawing on complexity notions and Penrose's analysis of endogenous innovation to drive a disequilibrium-oriented discussion of the capabilities required by firms in a PCP setting.

Findings

Six inter-related elements of indirect capabilities are proposed and discussed: IT infrastructure, boundary management practices, contracting, interface artefacts, valuing others' capabilities and relating direct to indirect capabilities. These are important in PCP settings and in other operations and supply settings characterised by complexity.

Originality/value

This paper reconsiders the way complexity has been treated in the PCP literature and develops an extended discussion of the notion of indirect capabilities. It potentially provides the basis for an operations and supply strategy more attuned to the demands of shifting inter-organizational networks.

Details

International Journal of Operations & Production Management, vol. 34 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3577

Keywords

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