Game Representation Research Articles

As garatujas teatrais nos gestos dos bebês: um estudo bakhtiniano

O presente artigo apresenta algumas ideias bakhtinianas sobre a constituição da linguagem, com destaque para o gesto, atrelado às experiências comunicativas que os bebês podem experimentar nos espaços educativos, com ênfase para os jogos teatrais. São apresentados dois episódios nos quais os bebês expressam, através dos gestos, algumas das inúmeras possibilidades da linguagem teatral presente no contexto infantil, seja através das descobertas realizadas a partir da movimentação do próprio corpo e os efeitos que este produz em contato com a luz, seja através da manipulação de materiais e/ou brinquedos em uma brincadeira de faz de conta. São momentos lúdicos, de brincadeiras e descobertas que permitem o desenvolvimento das garatujas teatrais, ou seja, as primeiras expressões teatrais dos bebês.

Protein Structural Class Prediction Based on Distance-related Statistical Features from Graphical Representation of Predicted Secondary Structure

Protein structural class prediction is beneficial to protein structure and function analysis. Exploring good feature representation is a key step for this prediction task. Prior works have demonstrated the effectiveness of the secondary structure based feature extraction methods especially for lowsimilarity protein sequences. However, the prediction accuracies still remain limited. To explore the potential of secondary structure information, a novel feature extraction method based on a generalized chaos game representation of predicted secondary structure is proposed. Each protein sequence is converted into a 20-dimensional distance-related statistical feature vector to characterize the distribution of secondary structure elements and segments. The feature vectors are then fed into a support vector machine classifier to predict the protein structural class. Our experiments on three widely used lowsimilarity benchmark datasets (25PDB, 1189 and 640) show that the proposed method achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods. It is anticipated that our method could be extended to other graphical representations of protein sequence and be helpful in future protein research.

Straight Paths Through Queer Walking Simulators: Wandering on Rails and Speedrunning in Gone Home

This article identifies the limitations of queerness in Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) by exploring the ways in which players’ movements through space in video games can be considered queer or “straight.” Drawing from Sara Ahmed, I demonstrate how the potential for queer in-game movement in Gone Home has been straightened both by the game itself and by elements of its player reception. Gone Home is widely seen as exemplifying a current shift toward increased LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) representation in video games. The game is also associated with queerness through its status as a “walking simulator,” a genre with ties to the queer flaneur. Indeed, Gone Home’s gameplay seems to encourage queer wandering, moving not straight but instead meanderingly. Yet, a closer analysis of its interactive elements reveals that Gone Home is far less queer than it may initially appear. The player’s path is rigid and linear, much like in a “rail shooter.” The potential for queer movement in Gone Home has been furthered straightened by speedrunners who play the game along the straightest possible paths. This article argues for player movement as an important site of meaning in video games and calls for an increased engagement with the tensions that surround queerness and video games.

Prediction of Protein Subcellular Localization Based on Fusion of Multi-view Features.

The prediction of protein subcellular localization is critical for inferring protein functions, gene regulations and protein-protein interactions. With the advances of high-throughput sequencing technologies and proteomic methods, the protein sequences of numerous yeasts have become publicly available, which enables us to computationally predict yeast protein subcellular localization. However, widely-used protein sequence representation techniques, such as amino acid composition and the Chou’s pseudo amino acid composition (PseAAC), are difficult in extracting adequate information about the interactions between residues and position distribution of each residue. Therefore, it is still urgent to develop novel sequence representations. In this study, we have presented two novel protein sequence representation techniques including Generalized Chaos Game Representation (GCGR) based on the frequency and distributions of the residues in the protein primary sequence, and novel statistics and information theory (NSI) reflecting local position information of the sequence. In the GCGR + NSI representation, a protein primary sequence is simply represented by a 5-dimensional feature vector, while other popular methods like PseAAC and dipeptide adopt features of more than hundreds of dimensions. In practice, the feature representation is highly efficient in predicting protein subcellular localization. Even without using machine learning-based classifiers, a simple model based on the feature vector can achieve prediction accuracies of 0.8825 and 0.7736 respectively for the CL317 and ZW225 datasets. To further evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed encoding schemes, we introduce a multi-view features-based method to combine the two above-mentioned features with other well-known features including PseAAC and dipeptide composition, and use support vector machine as the classifier to predict protein subcellular localization. This novel model achieves prediction accuracies of 0.927 and 0.871 respectively for the CL317 and ZW225 datasets, better than other existing methods in the jackknife tests. The results suggest that the GCGR and NSI features are useful complements to popular protein sequence representations in predicting yeast protein subcellular localization. Finally, we validate a few newly predicted protein subcellular localizations by evidences from some published articles in authority journals and books.

How to yes-and: Using improvisational games to improv(e) communication, listening, and collaboration techniques in tourism and hospitality education

Improvisational theater games can foster a space where academics become more aware of their speech and behaviors in order to respond to their environment. This study, informed by self-efficacy theory, explores how improvisation workshops potentially help individuals feel confident about their work and improv(e) their collaborative learning environments. Faculty and graduate students participated in an improvisational workshop at an academic conference. Based on attendees’ survey responses and follow-up phone interviews, the improvisation workshop provided tools to help participants become confident teachers, communicators, and leaders. Thus, learning improvisational techniques can foster a paradigm shift in designing and experiencing higher education.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Procedural Rhetoric and the Military-Entertainment Complex: Two Case Studies from the War on Terror

This article explores how the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is represented in video games developed and played during the height of the War on Terror. Drawing on Šisler’s article, ‘Digital Arabs: Representation in video games’ (2008) and Robinson’s articles ‘Videogames, persuasion and the War on Terror: Escaping or embedding the military-entertainment complex? (2012) and ‘Have you won the war on terror? Military videogames and the state of American exceptionalism’ (2015), this article explores two case studies Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 (2004) using Bogost’s (2008, 2010) concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’ to unpack and detail the visual signifiers and gameplay mechanics of these titles in comparison with other work on games set in ‘Axis of Evil’ countries. The article concludes by situating the games within the military-entertainment complex more broadly (here focusing on film), arguing that North Korea is ultimately framed paradoxically in video games, a country that is viewed on the one hand as a threat to world peace and on the other as an absurdist dictatorship.

Traditional games and child-centred development: affirming disabled and female bodies in applied theatre projects in Zimbabwe

Traditional/indigenous children’s games are yet to be appreciated as sites of critical engagement. The limited available literature on traditional children’s games is mainly focused on the deployment of traditional games in the teaching of conventional curriculum subjects. On the other hand, applied theatre projects appear to mainly rely on ‘foreign’ games. Curiously, there seems to be bias towards theatre games from North America, South America and Western Europe. We concede that, to an extent, the deployment of foreign games has revolutionized and radicalized applied theatre practice in Zimbabwe. However, there is hardly any serious scholarship that examines implications of infusing traditional children’s games within gender and disability discourse for child-centred development. This article addresses the extent to which applied theatre practitioners may appropriate traditional children’s games in the quest to deploy theatre as a site of critical engagement against pervasive hegemonies such as masculinity, neo-colonialism and ableism that may impede on human-/child-centred development. Drawing from Africana Womanism and Critical Disability Theory, we argue that although currently few applied theatre practitioners are deploying traditional children’s games, there is scope for appropriating and contextualizing traditional games in subverting imposed ableist and gendered hegemonies. Applied theatre projects can offer space to recover the rich intangible heritage that is embodied in traditional games. Having established that indigenous African children’s games affirm the material body in general, we recognize the potential of applied theatre contexts to act as sites of taping from the wisdom of the past in order to invent the future in which Africa/Zimbabwean children are proud of their bodily realities as centres of human growth and self-construction.

Development of creative abilities in preschool children in theatrical activities

The problem of development of creative abilities at children of the senior preschoolage by means of theatrical activity is considered in this article. The first part presents a theoretical analysis of psychological-pedagogic research: the role of theatre as a means of development of creative abilities; the content of the concepts "creativity", "theatre", "theatrical activities", "theatrical game", etc.; classification of theatrical games. The authors focus on the importance of theatrical activities in the creative development of preschool children and the classification of theatrical games used in preschool educational institutions. Levels of development of creative abilities in children of the senior preschool age are defined on the basis of the developed criteria and indicators. As a result of the training phase of the experiment, there is a significant increase in the interest of children of preschool age in theatrical activities, reading works of art, making attributes for games-dramatisations. In conclusion, it is concluded that theatrical activity not only affects the formation of creative abilities, but also is a universal means of personal development.

Kunstiliste maailmade kehastamine Karl Ristikivi „Hingede öö” näitel [Embodiment of Artistic Worlds on the Basis of Karl Ristikivi’s Novel "Night of Souls"

Artikkel lahtub teatriteaduses populaarsest ja kirjandusteaduses marginaalsest kehastamise ( embodiment, embodied experience ) moistest ning vaatleb kirjandusliku maailma kehastamist kui taju-, tolgendus- ja koosloomeprotsessi kahel tasandil: lavastaja-etendaja ja vastuvotja (lugeja/vaataja/osaleja) vaatepunktist. Naiteteosteks on Karl Ristikivi eesti kirjanduse klassikasse kuuluv romaan „Hingede oo“ (1953) ja Laburintteatriuhenduse G9 samanimeline osavotuteatri lavastus (2018), mida vastuvotjad pidasid romaani kongeniaalseks tolgenduseks. Vordleme romaani ja lavastust ning etenduse vastuvotjate tajukogemusi romaani lahilugemisel sundivate meeleliste kogemustega. Analuus toetub nimetatud teostele ning lavastuse trupi ja 20 vastuvotjaga labi viidud fookusgrupi intervjuudele. Votmesonad: eesti kirjandus, kehastamine, osavotuteater, retseptsioon ----------- The article explores embodiment as a process of perception, interpretation and co-creation of a literary world from the point of view of producer (director/performer) and receiver (reader/spectator/participant). Estonian classic novel Night of Souls by Karl Ristikivi and the participatory theatre project of the same title by Labyrinth Theatre Group G9 serve as the empirical material of the research. The article compares the literary work with the production and the perceptions of the novel and the production. The analysis relies on a close reading of the novel and on interviews with the producers and 20 spectators. Three forms of embodiment were detected. First, embodiment as a sensuous concretisation of a literary work, through which storyteller’s or main character’s bodily experiences are taken on by the reader/spectator, i.e. gradual immersion into a fictional world and identification with a character takes place. The second form is related to the embodiment of a textual/ fictional world on stage. In theatre theory, embodiment usually only depicts a relationship between a performer and his/her role, but in this article the term denotes materialisation of the whole fictional world. Thus staging is a specific process of perception, interpretation and co-creation that transforms a script into a stage production. The third form of embodiment is characteristic for participatory theatre, where spectators have the possibility to perform somebody in a fictional world or theatre game. The reception research of Night of Souls demonstrated that predominantly the spectators embodied themselves, i.e. a performation of individual existence was realised. Since open participatory theatre works enable receivers to fill gaps with their personal mental and psychical material, spectators interpreted the production either as an artistic environment/world, an exciting role play, a psychotherapeutic trip into personal worlds, or a metaphor for life pilgrimage. Embodiment as a research instrument highlights the embeddedness of body and soul in perception and cognition of an environment/the world. The main character of Night of Souls realises that analysis of singular objects is not reliable, especially when caught by a memory or existential space. Embodiment leads both the character and the reader or spectator to a holistic perception and cognition of the (fictional) world. Keywords: Estonian literature, embodiment, interactive theatre, reception

Imágenes de profesores para niños y adolescentes: narrativas expresas en el teatro de mamulengos y en cartas

The main objective of this work is to present the conceptions of children and adolescents about the images of the Formal Education and Social Education teachers through theatrical practices and letter writing. Children and adolescents participate in an extension and research project carried out in the Network for the Fight against Cancer of Women that treats people in medical care in the city of Maringa, state of Parana, Brazil. In this institution different Social Education works are carried out, among them, mamulengos theater classes. The methodology of this work was the study of the narratives of children and adolescents with neoplasms through the analysis of expressions in theatrical games and in the writing of the lyrics. The conclusion of this work was that children and adolescents project different images of teachers in different contexts of teaching and learning, giving a more authoritative position to the formal education teacher, relating this characteristic to the demands, the lack of dialogues with their realities and the distancing, between educator and student. In relation to the Social Education professor, they attributed more liberal and flexible images. His stories showed that they prioritize the formation of bonds, fun and creative proposals for education.

Graphic Representation of Landslides Board Game for Ecological Education

Graphic Representation of Landslides Board Game for Ecological Education

An Improvisation, Mindfulness, and Stress Workshop for Incoming First-Year Students

Avoidant coping strategies interfere with successful college adjustment. Mindfulness is negatively correlated with avoidant coping. The current pilot study investigated the feasibility of an improvisation- and mindfulness-based stress-management workshop during orientation week for first-year students. The workshop was held two consecutive years; 10 incoming students participated in each workshop. Workshop activities included improvisational theater games and discussions regarding stress and coping. Participants completed pre-session and post-session measures of mood, willingness to accept negative experiences, and willingness to take action. Participants showed a significant decrease in negative mood and a significant increase in willingness to take action. Participants perceived the workshop as effective in facilitating a smooth transition and enhancing interpersonal skills. For first-year students interested in stress management and improvisational theater activities, this type of workshop is a feasible option for helping students adjust to their first days of college and learn about effective coping strategies.

CGMDA: An Approach to Predict and Validate MicroRNA-Disease Associations by Utilizing Chaos Game Representation and LightGBM

Recent studies have shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in complex human diseases. Identifying potential miRNA-disease associations is useful for understanding the pathogenesis. However, there are currently only a few methods proposed to predict miRNA-disease association based on sequence information. And these methods can only quantify nonlinear sequence relationships without taking linear sequence information into account. In this work, we designed a computational method for predicting miRNA-disease association based on chaos game representation, called CGMDA, to overcome these problems. CGMDA combines association information with miRNA sequence information, miRNA functional information and disease semantic information to improve prediction accuracy. In particular, we use chaos game representation (CGR) technology for the first time to transform miRNA sequence information into image information and extract its features. In the cross-validation experiment, CGMDA achieved a mean the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.9099 on the HMDD v3.0 data set. To better evaluate the performance of CGMDA, we compared it to different classifiers and related prediction methods. In addition, CGMDA is applied to three human complex diseases. The results showed that of the top 40 disease-related miRNAs predicted, 39 (Breast Neoplasm), 39 (Lymphoma) and 38 (Colon Neoplasm) were validated by experiments in case studies. These experimental results show that CGMDA is a reliable tool and has potential application prospects in assisting early diagnosis and treatment of prognosis.

Fractal approximation of chaos game representations using recurrent iterated function systems

We demonstrate that chaos game representations of Cannabis sativa may be approximated by the chaos game approximation of a recurrent iterated function system attractor. Via numerical experiments, we then study the fractal scaling properties of both objects and apply a wavelet decomposition in order to investigate scale-invariant patterns. We show that the attractor of a recurrent iterated function system scales similarly to the chaos game representation and has a similar wavelet multiresolution analysis profile.

Encoding and Decoding DNA Sequences by Integer Chaos Game Representation.

DNA sequences are fundamental for encoding genetic information. The genetic information may be understood not only from symbolic sequences but also from the hidden signals inside the sequences. The symbolic sequences need to be transformed into numerical sequences so the hidden signals can be revealed by signal processing techniques. All current transformation methods encode DNA sequences into numerical values of the same length. These representations have limitations in the applications of genomic signal compression, encryption, and steganography. We propose a novel integer chaos game representation (inter-CGR or iCGR) of DNA sequences and a lossless encoding method DNA sequences by the iCGR. In the iCGR method, a DNA sequence is represented by the iterated function of the nucleotides and their positions in the sequence. Then the DNA sequence can be uniquely encoded and recovered using three integers from iCGR. One integer is the sequence length and the other two integers represent the accumulated distributions of nucleotides in the sequence. The integer encoding scheme can compress a DNA sequence by 2 bits per nucleotide. The integer representation of DNA sequences provides a prospective tool for sequence analysis and operations.

IPPI-PseAAC(CGR): Identify protein-protein interactions by incorporating chaos game representation into PseAAC

Investigation into the network of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) will provide valuable insights into the inner workings of cells. Accordingly, it is crucially important to develop an automated method or high-throughput tool that can efficiently predict the PPIs. In this study, a new predictor, called “iPPI-PseAAC(CGR)”, was developed by incorporating the information of “chaos game representation” into the PseAAC (Pseudo Amino Acid Composition). The advantage by doing so is that some key sequence-order or sequence-pattern information can be more effectively incorporated during the treatment of the protein pair samples. The operation engine used in this predictor is the random forests algorithm. It has been observed via the cross-validations on the widely used benchmark datasets that the success rates achieved by the proposed predictor are remarkably higher than those by its existing counterparts. For the convenience of the most experimental scientists, a user-friendly web-server for the new predictor has been established at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iPPI-PseAAC(CGR), by which users can easily get their desired results without the need to go through the detailed mathematics.

Identifying anticancer peptides by using a generalized chaos game representation.

We generalize chaos game representation (CGR) to higher dimensional spaces while maintaining its bijection, keeping such method sufficiently representative and mathematically rigorous compare to previous attempts. We first state and prove the asymptotic property of CGR and our generalized chaos game representation (GCGR) method. The prediction follows that the dissimilarity of sequences which possess identical subsequences but distinct positions would be lowered exponentially by the length of the identical subsequence; this effect was taking place unbeknownst to researchers. By shining a spotlight on it now, we show the effect fundamentally supports (G)CGR as a similarity measure or feature extraction technique. We develop two feature extraction techniques: GCGR-Centroid and GCGR-Variance. We use the GCGR-Centroid to analyze the similarity between protein sequences by using the datasets 9 ND5, 24 TF and 50 beta-globin proteins. We obtain consistent results compared with previous studies which proves the significance thereof. Finally, by utilizing support vector machines, we train the anticancer peptide prediction model by using both GCGR-Centroid and GCGR-Variance, and achieve a significantly higher prediction performance by employing the 3 well-studied anticancer peptide datasets.

Representation effects in the centipede game.

We explore the effects on strategic behavior of alternative representations of a centipede game that differ in terms of complexity. In a laboratory experiment, we manipulate the way in which payoffs are presented to subjects in two different ways. In both cases, information is made less accessible relative to the standard representation of the game. Results show that these manipulations shift the distribution of take nodes further away from the equilibrium prediction. The evidence is consistent with the view that failures of game-form recognition and the resulting limits to strategic reasoning are crucial for explaining non-equilibrium behavior in the centipede game.

Competências sociais de usuários de um Centro de Atenção Psicossocial

Este estudo teve como objetivo verificar a influência dos jogos teatrais nas competências sociais de pessoas com diagnósticos de transtornos mentais de um Centro de Atenção Psicossocial (CAPS). Pesquisa qualitativa, utilizando o Fichário de Jogos Teatrais de Viola Spolin; um guia de técnicas teatrais para a realização dos jogos e um roteiro de entrevista aplicado aos participantes do estudo, antes e após os oito encontros, baseado na Escala de Avaliação de Competência Social em Pacientes Psiquiátricos. Os resultados mostraram que os jogos tiveram influência positiva nas competências sociais e sinalizaram terem um grande potencial para serem transformados em oficinas terapêuticas nos CAPS.

JOGOS TEATRAIS COM DROGADICTOS: UMA INVESTIGAÇÃO-AÇÃO NA EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA

Este estudo objetivou investigar e descrever os significados relacionados ao Bem-estar Subjetivo relatados por drogadictos quando expostos a um programa de aulas com jogos teatrais. É uma pesquisa com abordagem qualitativa do tipo investigação-ação. Dezoito jovens internos na Comunidade Terapêutica Fazenda da Esperança, em Alhandra/PB, fizeram parte deste estudo. Para realizar as observações foram aplicados um Roteiro de Observação de aula e o Roteiro de Entrevista Semiestruturada. Os jogos foram gravados em vídeo e os depoimentos das entrevistas em áudio. Foi possível observar e descrever com mais frequência relatos emocionais de bem-estar, liberdade para se expressar, alegria, felicidade e sentir-se vinculado ao grupo. Acredita-se que tais significados são justificados pela junção de estruturas pedagógicas de aula em que os momentos são didaticamente organizados em Sentir, Reagir e Refletir conjuntamente aplicados ao método Viola Spolin de jogos teatrais, com estruturação pela Pedagogia da Corporeidade.