Lives Of Players Research Articles

Loneliness and lack of belonging: The experiences of migrant professional footballers playing in Europe

At particular moments in our life, one may be susceptible to feelings of loneliness. This may be more evident in professions where individuals need to move away from family and friends for work reasons. Sports professionals not only have to make such a move overseas at times, but they are also often placed in a highly competitive and pressurized environment which may bring about several challenges, including loneliness. This qualitative study sought to explore the experiences of loneliness and lack of belonging of ten migrant male and female footballers. Semi-structured interviews were utilised and data was analysed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the players experienced loneliness during their migratory experience mainly because they were away from family and friends. Loneliness was associated with unpleasant feelings, and a lack of belonging and this affected their performance. Players engaged in several coping strategies to deal with their loneliness. This study shows the need for culturally competent support structures and specific integration programmes within club settings as players did not have access to sports psychologists or counsellors within their club. Educating significant others in the player's life on the challenges that players may face may also be a point of consideration.

Psychological analysis of “The sims 3” computer simulation game discourse: opportunity to create models of sustainable behavior

The article presents the results of theoretical analysis of possibilities of the psychological using of computer simulation game «The Sims 3». The novelty of the research lies in the practical summarizing of existing researches. It shows that the development of skills presented in game could provide a methodological material for metacognition learning and understanding the mechanisms of studying. Game also may be useful for social and foreign language skills development. Coping with stress, aggression and negative emotions allows player to realize emotional self-regulation. The game provides an opportunity to simulate situations from the player's life, recreate the past traumatic events and modulate the desired future. The game as a way of escapism can also act as a way of finding inspiration, creativity for real life. A number of studies that observe the manifestation of psychological traits and simulate various situations in the game "The Sims 3» have been noted too. The analysis of game strategies, influence of the factor of limited and unlimited time, reduced social and moral control are important for psychological analysis. A wide range of applications opens up opportunities for considering the game as a unique virtual environment that can be used in psychological and pedagogical practice.

Spindown Polyhedra

Magic: the gathering is a trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast [1]. The aim of most variants of the game is to reduce your opponent's life total from twenty to zero, thus winning the game. As it may take several turns to reduce a player's life total to zero, players need a mechanism to keep track of their current life total. For this purpose, players often use a device called a spindown life counter, shown in Figure 1. A spindown life counter is an icosahedron with a special labelling of the faces, such that − starting with 20 life total − a player can reduce their life total in decrements of one by rolling the icosahedron onto an adjacent face each time. A spindown life counter appears similar to a standard icosahedral die, known in gaming as a d20; however, the labelling of faces is different, as also shown in Figure 1.

Twitter and traumatic brain injury: A content and sentiment analysis of tweets pertaining to sport-related brain injury.

Objectives:Sport-related traumatic brain injuries are a significant public health burden, with hundreds of thousands sustained annually in North America. While sports offer numerous physical and social health benefits, traumatic brain injuries such as concussion can seriously impact a player’s life, athletic career, and sport enjoyment. The culture in many sports encourages winning at all costs, placing athletes at risk for traumatic brain injuries. As social media has become a central part of everyday life, the content of users’ messages often reflects the prevailing culture related to a particular event or health issue.Methods:We hypothesized that Twitter data might be useful for understanding public perceptions and misperceptions of sport-related traumatic brain injuries. We performed a content and sentiment analysis of 7483 Twitter® tweets related to traumatic brain injuries in sports collected during June and July 2013.Results:We identified five major themes. Users tweeted about personal traumatic brain injuries experiences, reported traumatic brain injuries in professional athletes, shared research about sport-related concussions, and discussed policy and safety in injury prevention, such as helmet use. We identified mixed perceptions of and sentiment toward traumatic brain injuries in sports: both an understanding that brain injuries are serious and disregard for activities that might reduce the public burden of traumatic brain injuries were prevalent in our Twitter analysis.Conclusion:While the scientific and medical community considers a concussion a form of traumatic brain injuries, our study demonstrates a misunderstanding of this fact among the public. In our current digital age, social media can provide useful insight into the culture around a health issue, facilitating implementation of prevention and treatment strategies.

Repeated Games Played by Overlapping Generations of Players

The present paper tries to explain cooperative behaviour in an organization run by a sequence of long- but finitely-lived agents. We show that the Folk Theorem holds for infinitely repeated games with overlapping generations of finitely-lived players; any mutually beneficial outcome can approximately be sustained if the player's life span and the overlapping periods are long enough. The result is stronger than the usual Folk Theorems in that it employs no assumption on the stage game, such as the full dimensionality of payoff set or multiplicity of equilibria.