On Waiting for Something to Happen

Waiting for Determinism to Happen

Waiting for Something to Happen: Narratives, Interactivity and Agency and the Video Game Cut-scene

Since the appearance in 1978 of Adventure on the Atari 2600, the cut-scene (alternatively cutscene or cut scene) has been a key component to many video games. Often, the cut-scene gives narrative shape to the game experience, moving the player along through a series of events culminating in the story's end. Cybertheorists such as Hayles, Murray and Frasca have explored the ways in which digital...

A Disaster Waiting to Happen

Suppose we organise a golf tournament in which 100 people play a round. Is the score of the tournament winner a reasonable estimate of his future scores? If the field consists of players of similar abilities, then the winner is likely to be one of the better players, but he will also have to be lucky on the day. The winner's score is likely to be above his personal average, for if he had not be...

On Causing Something to Happen in a Certain Way without Causing It to Happen*

We tend to identify events by when, where, and how they occur, i.e., by the time at which they occur, the spatial location at which they occur, and the manner in which they occur. But, in most cases, we also tend to conceive of the specific time, spatial location, and manner in which they occur as only accidental to them. For instance, we think that an explosion that occurred at noon could have...

Avian influenza--a pandemic waiting to happen?

Cross-species transmission of a highly pathogenic subtype of influenza A virus directly from birds to humans has raised many concerns. The radical methods of immune evasion and the possibility of human-to-human transmission as a result of gene reassortment between the human and avian viral subtypes pose an imminent threat of a global pandemic. The growing reservoir of circulating influenza amon...