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This chapter examines how migrants' neighbourhood experiences influence their housing pathways on the premise that their meaning of home is derived not only from the dwelling itself, but from the perceived physical and social environment of the neighbourhood in which they live. It assesses how Ireland, as a European Economic Area country, has adapted to increased ethnic and cultural diversity. The chapter explores migrants' settlement processes, but takes account of their experiences, both prior to arrival in Ireland and during their initial settlement process, and assesses how these have influenced their capacity to form an attachment to their new communities. It explores how popular discourses that highlight the extent with which individuals engage with their local community, reflect or influence migrants' perception of community. Finally, the chapter examines how discourses surrounding housing and general public policy debates are reflected in migrants' perceptions of deprivation levels in their neighbourhood.
Doom 3 is filled with graphical eye candy,' echoed PC Magazine. 'The use of bump-mapping and lighting effects provides an entirely eerie setting, and one that has never looked better. [But] the retro-styled game play is another story, and one that might leave you longing for much more. The actual plot is built around a far too linear quest that, while true to the original, feels dated.' Moreover, the competing forces in Doom 3 are crucial to understanding the experience of playing it - indeed, of playing any first person shooter - reliving the mingled terrors and pleasures of a traumatic stage in our avatarial relations. Early in Doom 3, the game seems to remark on its own heritage. On a computer terminal at the UAC research lab, players can access an informational clip on base security. The animation shows a cartoon maze from first-person perspective.
This chapter analyses recent transitions within Accra’s peri-urban land market. It explores pressures on peripherally located land in the context of significant affordability issues in wider Accra and the ways in which land originally owned and managed by customary authorities in the main is increasingly the focus and object of a proliferation of new actors in the city’s land market. Speaking to the speculative logic, the chapter distinguishes between primary land providers and delivery channels (including chiefs and family heads controlling customary land), and newer entrants including real estate companies, welfare associations, individuals, land agents and landguards. These ‘secondary’ land providers and intermediaries form part of the complex set of actors at the centre of rapidly rising land prices and stories of land-grabbing. Much of the housing being built is done so individually outside of the formal land and planning mechanisms, and these changes to Accra’s peripheries directly reflect the transitioning and auto-constructed logics of African urban peripheries.
This chapter examines the balance between notions of play and claims to the status of realism, of various kinds, in the squad-based tactical shooter Full Spectrum Warrior. All forms of media communication include modality markers that signify their status; distinctive framing routines and formal devices, for example, that establish through convention whether something is meant to be taken as reality or fantasy. Functional realism is particularly central to game understanding issues because of its perceived potential to translate into the series of terms that begins with 'training', implying as it does the modelling into gameplay of particular modes of activity or behaviour that might be learned by the player. Interpellation is understood as a fundamental mechanism in the maintenance of bourgeois ideology. The form of interpellation offered by games would include the role of the player as player, a playful subject self-consciously aware of the act of playing.
Emily Short's 2002 Savoir-Faire is a quintessential work of interactive fiction, an all-text adventure game that draws on the substantial history of the form but also contributes its share of innovations. Savoir-Faire is clearly the sort of program that asks to be understood as a game (a play experience), as a sort of puzzle or riddle (an experience of solving), and as a textual exchange that has literary qualities (a reading experience). The formal qualities of Savoir-Faire, which include being able to stop and think about what command to type next and being able to undo fatal mistakes, offer adequate space for play. There are lessons that Savoir-Faire has for other sorts of games. But, just as music is especially useful for rhythm games and graphics are useful for games involving spatial reasoning and manipulations, there are also some benefits of language, the medium of input and output for Savoir-Faire.
This chapter considers what it means to a play a game in a series like 'Street Fighter', and what kinds of pleasure are found in that moment of revelation as one executes a 'special move' - the super-powered secret techniques of a chosen player-character. It discusses what it means to be 'good' or 'bad' at this predominantly two-player game, and how this impacts on the shared experience of spectacle, since, as Guy Debord suggests, 'The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images'. By figuring the performing gamer into a critique of spectacle, the chapter foregrounds the spectacular potential of play. The chapter explores the relationship between the spectacular aesthetic and a sense of gratification associated with skilled gameplay, called the 'reward-spectacle'. The reward-spectacle is a textual motif of games design and play.
This chapter establishes from the perspectives of residents living in Ethiopia and South Africa what infrastructure is evident, what is absent and what the significance of this is for residents. It uses this analysis of infrastructure to understand how places on the urban peripheries are produced from an infrastructural perspective, with a particular focus on the material public realm and the online realm. Initially, the chapter explores the interconnections between the varying logics of the periphery to illustrate how particular peripheries foster particular forms of infrastructural realities, recognising that these interconnections are also context-specific and inconsistent. The chapter then considers the significance of micro-infrastructure in urban peripheries and argues that despite investment in some macro-scale interventions, their impact on residents is contested. The widespread unevenness to the nature of infrastructure, including the significant challenges of infrastructural absences or failings and how this is experienced on the ground, forms the focus of the rest of the chapter. Where relevant, the connections between the forms of investment and governance shaping infrastructural interventions or failings are detailed in order to provide some explanation for the unevenness identified across the cases.
The designers of Second Life have built in an open source development model into the world. Players can develop apps (applications) and products inside the game; it is a great introduction to computer science for children and young people. Probably the most unique thing about games in Second Life is that residents retain all the intellectual property rights to their own creations. This means that game developers can charge admission, franchise their idea, become a scriptor for hire and trade Linden dollars on third party sites for real-world dollars. Several resident game developers have already exercised their rights to sell a cross-platform version of their in-world game to a real-world publisher, or rented out their in-world game settings for commercial use. This means that the best game in Second Life is the game of making money.
The social processes, differentiations and experiences of living in African urban peripheries is explored in this chapter through a focus on Ethiopia and South Africa. It examines various facets of difference, including gender, age and tenancy status, as well as explores the experiences of boredom and the dominance of crime and violence. The chapter argues that urban peripheries are highly differentiated and that constructions of boredom are relational. Crime and violence are highly significant, particularly in the South African case study areas. Fundamentally, the chapter examines how urban change shapes social processes, and it evidences that African urban peripheries are highly differentiated spaces.
Chapter 11 focuses mainly on vanguard peripheries in Ethiopia and South Africa and draws on often spontaneous accounts in diaries and interviews of people’s experiences of food and related retail in state-led housing developments. In South Africa the presence or absence of powerful supermarket chains feature prominently in our respondents’ daily lives and imaginaries, including for crucial services and experiences they offer beyond grocery sales, but smaller shops are little encouraged in the residential neighbourhoods, although informal micro-enterprises emerge nevertheless. In Ethiopia, where large private supermarkets do not dominate as in South Africa, shops are encouraged on the ground floors of condominiums along key roads, assisting with mixed-use vibrancy and local purchasing for residents, although they also desire access to bigger markets which require travel elsewhere. In both contexts access to choice, diversity and cheaper goods can often only be accessed elsewhere, or in the vicinity, years after housing has been occupied. In the meantime residents’ narratives make clear that the initial approach to facilitate retail opportunities in vanguard developments can significantly shape everyday lives.