Pedagogical Dramas and Transformational Play: Narratively Rich Games for Learning

Although every era is met with the introduction of powerful technologies for entertainment and learning, videogames represent a new contribution binding the two and bearing the potential to create sustained engagement in a curricular drama where the player's knowledgeable actions shape an unfolding fiction within a designed world. Although traditionally, stories involve an author, a performer, and an audience, much of the power of videogames as media for advancing narrative springs from their affordance for the player to occupy more than one role—and sometimes all three—simultaneously. In the narratively rich videogames that we design, players have the opportunity to perform actions, experience consequences, and reflect on the underlying social values that these situations were designed to engage, affording a type of narrative transactivity. Elsewhere we have discussed designing these media as contexts for engaging academic content; here we illuminate the power of videogames to engage children in ideological struggles as they are experienced in game-based adaptations of classic literature. Toward this end, we present our theoretical argument for the power of games as a contemporary story medium, grounding this discussion in the context of two game design projects and their implementations. Implications are discussed in terms of the potential of immersive, interactive media—videogame technology, in short—for achieving wide-ranging educational ends.     

Bibliography

In this article, we explore how those taking part in an interview about sex and risk reflected on their participation and what, if any, impact it had on them. All 22 individuals who were interviewed in an initial study were invited to document their thoughts and feelings about the research process in a short follow-up exercise. The data relating to the 11 people who shared their reflections on the interview were subjected to a thematic analysis. The themes that emerged describe the value participants placed on honest and open interaction within neutral and non-judgmental environments. They also illustrate how being interviewed about prior behaviour can facilitate a sense-making process and might provide some degree of cathartic benefit. The findings help improve our understanding of how individuals reflect on their interview participation, which can in turn help to inform the development of ethically sensitive qualitative data collection.     

Still Striving for Modesty: Land,Spirits, and Rubber Production in Kajang,Indonesia

Questions of atavism have long confounded policy makers and nation builders. This is certainly the case in the vast and diverse Indonesian archipelago. Indigenous adat (customs and traditions) revivalism is a complex politicised process involving multifarious groups searching for rights and recognition. The Konjo-speaking inhabitants of Kajang Dalam are among the Indonesian communities being selectively portrayed as exemplars of premodern society. Kajang Dalam (the ‘inner circle’ of Kajang) is located in Bulukumba district, on the south-east peninsula of South Sulawesi province. Adat in this territory are aligned with the mystical belief system of the spirit cult of the Amma Toa. A variety of external actors have attempted to build a case against the palm oil and rubber plantation estates of PT PP London Sumatra Indonesia Tbk by invoking the name of Kajang Dalam.     

Music and digital media across the lao diaspora

Since the late 1990s a transnational Lao music industry, driven by the explosion of digital media technologies, has emerged across the communities of the Lao diaspora. These migrant Lao communities, which are dispersed across, and within, the United States of America, Australia, France and Canada, are undergoing internal changes as their younger, bi-cultural, generations reach adulthood. Using Lao music and its associated technoculture as a focal point, this article explores some of the ways Lao identity is being reconfigured and reconstructed as young migrant Lao come to terms with their cross-cultural status.     

Broken and Becoming God‐Sized: Contemporary Metal Music and Masculine Individualism

Using a symbolic interactionist framework, this study is a narrative analysis of song lyrics from sixteen of the most popular heavy metal bands since the early 1990s. The data set for this study constituted 603 songs from fifty‐two long play (LP) recordings. Given that the overwhelming majority of metal music listeners are young males, these data were analyzed as texts of contemporary masculine identity. The contents of the data suggest that such identity is expressed in at least two ways. First, representing the “masculine crisis” identity, the data contain narratives of the self's hopeless domination from subjective and objective forces. Second, narratives representing the “traditional” masculine identity describe the cultivation of inner strength and the consequent conquering of perceived foes. Such narratives often predict the domination of a generic “you” and illustrate how the invocation of the “you” projects a future self. Both of these narratives, which depict either the subjugation or domination of the self, are argued to represent an ideology of individualism.     

Gay but not queer: Toward a post-queer study of sexuality

Theory and Society -     

Time and environmental crisis: An exploration with special reference to pollution

The present environmental crisis is gaining prominence on the sociopolitical and scientific agenda. There is widespread consensus about what constitutes the crisis but little agreement about its causes and potential solutions: what is a solution for one person is often considered a source of the problem by another. Focusing on aspects that are normally ignored allows us to sidestep these hardening oppositions and gives us a new access to environmental issues and their analyses. While the spatial dimension has been brought to the fore in a number of disciplines, the temporal equivalent has stayed implicit. Explication of what remains invisible in conventional analyses can shed light on the familiar, agreed upon and disputed.